Berlin Diary: XLIV

So, back to the other anti-Semitic time and place...it's September, 1940, and Shirer is living through increased censorship and nightly bombings of Berlin by the RAF.  He also takes a trip to Geneva, has lunch with John Winant, and reviews the various traitors hanging about the Rundfunk. 

Excerpt from Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, by William L. Shirer.  Copyright by the author, 1940,1941.  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, June 20, 1941

Berlin, September 1, 1940

"I was in my bath at midnight last night and did not hear the sirens sound the alarm.  First I knew of the raid was when the guns started to thunder.  I dozed off to sleep, still having the flu with me, but was awakened during the night by the thud and shock of two bomb explosions very near the hotel.

Today the High Command announces officially that the British fliers last night were "hindered" from dropping bombs by the splendid work of the captial's anti-aircraft guns, and that the only bombs dropped therefore fell outside the city limits.  
This is strange because the Tiergarten was roped off today and this evening the press admits that several "bomb craters" were discovered in the park after last night's raid.  I staggered off to the Rundfunk tonight to do an anniversary broadcast.  The military censor, a very decent chap, was puzzled about the conflicting German reports of the bombing.  

"My instructions are you can't contradict the communiques of the High Command, " he said.  

"But the German press contradicts them," I argued.  "I heard the bombs fall in the Tiergarten, and the Berlin papers admit that some did."

He was a good sport and let me read the contradictory reports.  

The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings has been to spread great disillusionment among the people here and sow doubt in their minds.  One said to me today: "I'll never believe another thing they say.  If they've lied about the raids in the rest of Germany as they have about the ones on Berlin, then it must have been pretty bad there."

Actually, the British bombings have not been very deadly.  The British are using too few planes---fifteen or twenty a night---and they have to come too far to carry really effective, heavy loads of bombs.  Main effect is a moral one, and if the British are smart they'll keep them up every night.  Tonight another attack began just before I broadcast, but it was not much of a show.  

A year ago today the great "counter-attack" against Poland began.  In this year German arms have achieved victories never equalled even in the brilliant miltary history of this aggressive, miltaristic nation.  And yet the war is not yet over, or won.  And it was on this aspect that people's minds were concentrated today, if I am any judge.  They long for peace.  And they want it before the winter comes.  

Berlin, September 2, 1940

I learned today that the Germans you see removing time bombs are for the most part prisoners from concentration camps.  If they live through the experience, they are promised release.  As a matter of fact it probably is an easy choice for them.  Even death is a welcome release from the tortures of the Gestapo.  And there's always the chance that the bomb won't go off.  Some of the bombs that fell in the Tiergarten, it's revealed, were time bombs.  

For some time now our censors have not allowed us to use the word "Nazi" on the air.  They say it has a bad sound in America.  One must say "National Socialist" or avoid the term altogether, as I do.  The word "invasion" in reference to what happened in Scandinavia and the west, and what is planned for England, is also taboo.  

Studying the German figures on air losses over Britain, which are manifestly untrue, I find that nearly every day they run 4 to 1 in favour of the Luftwaffe.  This ratio must have a magic attraction to someone in the Air Ministry.  

Berlin, September 4-5 (3 a.m.)

Hitler made a surprise speech here this afternoon, the occasion being the openng of the Winterhilfe---winter relief---campaign.  Like the Volkswagen, the cheap "people's car" on which Gemran workers are paying millions of marks a month in instalments though the factory which is supposed to make them is actually manufacturing only arms, the Winterhilfe is one of the scandals of the Nazi regime, though not one German in a million realizes it.  It is obvious that in a country without unemployment not much "winter relief" is necessary.  Yet the Nazis go on wringing several hundred million marks each winter out of the people for "winter charity" and actually use most of the money for armaments or party funds.  

Hitler's appearance today was kept a secret until the last minute, the Propaganda Ministry rushing off the correspondents from the afternoon press conference to the Sportpalast.  What is Himmler afraid of, since British bombers cannot come over during daylight?  Is he afraid of an "incident" ?

The session was another beautiful example of how Hitler takes advantage of the gullibility of his people.  He told them, for instance, that while the German air force attacked Britain by day, the cowardly RAF comes over only at night.  He did not explain why this is so----that the Germans can get over England by day because it is only twenty-five miles from German bases and they can thus protect their bombers with fighters, whereas Germany is too far from Britain to enable to British to protect their bombers with fighters.

Hitler said with lovely hypocrisy: "I waited three months without answering the British night bombings in the hope they would stop this mischief.  But Herr Churchill saw in this a sign of weakness.  You will understand that we are now answering, night for night.  And when the British air force drops two or three or four thousand kilograms of bombs, then we will in one night drop 150-230-300 or 400,000 kilograms."

At this point he had to stop because of the hysterical applause of the audience, which consisted mostly of German women nurses and social workers.  

"When they declare," continued Hitler, "that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground."  Here the young nurses and social workers were quite beside themselves and applauded phrenetically.  When they had recovered, he said:

"We will stop the handiwork of these air pirates, so help us God."  At this the young German women hopped to their feet and, their breasts heaving, screamed their approval.  

"The hour will come," Hitler went on, "when one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany."  At this juncture the raving maidens kep thtier heads sufficiently to break their wild shouts of joy with a chorus of: "Never!  Never!"  

Though grim and dropping with hate most of the evening, Hitler had his humorous, jaunty moments.  His listeners found it very funny when he said: "In England they're filled with curiosity and keep asking: 'Why doesn't he come?'  Be calm.  Be calm.  He's coming!  He's coming!"  And the man squeezed every ounce of humour and sarcasm out of his voice.  The speech was not broadcast direct, but recorded and rebroadcast two hours after he finished.  

LATER.---The British came over again tonight, arriving punctually at fifteen minutes before midnight, which is their usual time.  The fact that the searchlights rarely pick up a plane has given rise to whispers among the people of Berlin that the British planes are coated with an invisible paint.  Tonight the bombers cruised over the city at intervals for two hours.  The flak guns thundered away like mad, but without effect.  Another bomb dropped in the Tiergarten and killed a policeman.

Berlin, September 5, 1940

Very annoyed still that the German radio officials refuse to let me view the nightly air-raids.  They come each night when I am at the Rundfunk.  Nor can we mention them if they occur during our talk.  Tonight when I arrived for my broadcast I found that the RRG had installed a lip microphone for us to speak in.  In order to make your voice heard you have to hold your lips to it.  But the sounds of the anti-aircraft guns firing outside do not register.  That is why they have installed it.  But they have put it in the same building, so that we no longer have to race through a hail of falling shrapnel to get to a microphone.  

The United States is to turn over fifty destroyers to the British in return for naval and air bases in British possessions off our eastern coast.  The Germans say it is a breach of neutrality, as it is, but they're not going to do anything about it, not even protest.  They're hoping our isolationists and our Lindberghs will keep us out o fthe war and they intend to refrain form doing anything to jeopardize their position.  

Berlin, September 7, 1940

Last night we had the biggest and most effective bombing of the war.  The Germans have brought in several more batteries of flak during the past few days, and last night they put up a terrific barrage, but failed to hit a single plane.

The British were aiming better last night.  When I returned from the Rundfunk shortly after three a.m., the sky over the north-central part of Berlin was lit up by two great fires.  The biggest was in the freight house of the Lehrter railroad station.  Another railraod station at the Schussendorferstrasse also was hit.  A rubber factory, I'm told, was set afire.  

Despite this the High Command said in its communique today: "The enemy again attacked the German capital last night, causing some damage to person and property as a result of his indiscriminate throwing of bombs on non-military targets in the middle of the city.  The German air force, as reprisal, has therefore begun to attack London with strong forces."

Not a hint here---and the German people do not know it---that the Germans have been dropping bombs in the very centre of London for the last two weeks.  My censor warned me today not to go into this matter.  I apparently have some German listeners, who can pick up my talk from the German transmitter that shortwaves it to New York.  Since it's a German transmitter, there is no penalty.  

The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself---he often takes a hand in writing the official army communiques---deliberately penetrates the lie that the Germany has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British first bombing Berlin.  And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they're told nowadays.  Certainly never before in modern times---since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world---have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.  

And so tonight the High Command, which all good Germans believe tells only the gospel truth, issues a special communique saying that as reprisal for the British raids on Berlin, London was attacked with strong forces for the first time today.  As a result of the reprisal attack, it says, "one great cloud of smoke tonight stretches from the middle of London to the mouth of the Thames."

To give American radio listeners an idea of the kind of propaganda (though I couldn't label it as such) which the German people are being subjected to now, I read in my broadcast tonight the following quotation from today's Berlin newspaper, the Börsen Zeitung: "While the attack of the German air force is made on purely military objectives---this fact recognized by both the British press and radio---the RAF knows nothing better to do than continually to attack non-military objectives in Germany.  A perfect example of this was the criminal attack on the middle of Berlin last night.  In this attack only lodging-houses were hit; not a single military objective."

The German people have no inkling---because the Nazi press and radio have carefully suppressed the story---that in August alone more than one thousand English civilians were killed by the Luftwaffe's attacks on British "military objectives."

Another type of lying here: The official statement of last night's bombing of Berlin says that the first two waves of British planes were turned back by the capital's anti-aircraft defences, and that only a few planes of the third wave were able to slip through.  Now, every Berliner knows that from the minute the alarm was sounded last night, British planes were heard overhead.  There were several waves and each time you heard the hum of the motors. Yet I fear the majority will believe the official explanation.  

The Börsen Zeitung even went so far last night as to tell its innocent readers that all military objectives in Germany wwere so well protected by anti-aircraft guns that it was quite impossible for the British planes to bomb them.  Therefore the British went after unprotected civilian houses.  How many Germans will ask then, why, with an admitted concentration of guns in and around Berlin such as no other are in the world has ever seen----why has not a single plane yet been brought down?

And personally I'm getting a little tired of the censorship restrictions on our telling even a modicum of truth about this air war to America.  I shall not stand for it much longer.  

Berlin, September 8, 1940

All Sunday morning papers carry the same headline: "BIG ATTACK ON LONDON AS REPRISAL."

Berlin, September 9, 1940

A typical Nazi trick was played on me today.  Three censors fought with me so long over the script of my two p.m. broadcast, which they charged was unduly ironic about the "reprisal" bombings of London, which it was, that by the time they had finally okayed it, there was no time for me to go on the air.  My five minutes of air time was over.  

There was no objection to this, since the censors have a perfect right to hold up a script they don't like, just as I have the right not to talk if I think they've censored the true sense out of my talk.  But this evening I learn from Paul White in New York, through channels which permit me to receive cables from him without the Germans knowing their contents, that the shortwave director of the German Broadcasting Company cabled him today an explanation of why I did not broadcast at two pm.  The cable read: "Regret Shirer arrived too late today to broadcast."

The British bombers failed to come over last night or the night before. Official explanation to the German people: The British planes tried to get through both nights to Berlin, but were turned back.  Whenever the British choose not to bomb Berlin henceforth, I hear, Goebbels has ordered the people to be told that they tried by were repulsed by the capital's magnificent defences.  

Whenever the British come over Germany now, most of the German radio stations hurriedly go off the air, so as not to serve as radio beacons for the British pilots.  The German radio announced tonight that its broadcasts, already greatly curtailes in the last fortnight on "military grounds" will be further curtailed.  "This is no time," said the announcement, "to explain further the reasons for this."

Berlin, September 10, 1940

A light raid last night, though a few house were demolished.  Commenting on the bombing, the Lokal Anzeiger says: "The fliers of His Britannic Majesty have given a heavy blow to the laws governing an honourable and manly conduct of war."

At the Propaganda Ministry today we were shown one of Britain's "secret weapons," a new sort of incendiary weapon.  It looks like a large calling card---about two inches square---and is made of a celluloid substance.  The celluloid sheets are pasted together and betweem them is a tablet of phosphorus.  The British drop them in a dampened condition.  When they dry, after a few minutes of sun, or ten minutes of dry, daytime air, they ignite and cause a small flame that burns for two or three minutes.  Actually, they were first used by the Irish Republicans, who dropped them in letterboxes to burn the mail in England.  The Germans admit they have set fire to fields of grain and hay as well as a few forests.  Probably the British, who started dropping them in August, hoped to burn up a considerable acreage of grain.  Unfortunately, we had a very wet August and few of them got dry enough to ignite.  

Berlin, September 11, 1940

Last night the severest bombing yet.  And the German papers are beside themselves.  The Börsen Zeitung calls our pilot visitors of last evening "barbarians" and bannerlines: "CRIME OF BRITISH ON BERLIN."  According to the Nazis, only five persons were filled, but for the first time the British dropped a considerable number of fire bombs and there were quite a few small fires.  Three incendiaries fell in the yard of the Adlon, five in the garden of the Embassy next door, and a half-dozen more in the garden of Dr. Goebbels just behind the Embassy.  The office of the Minister of Munitions between the Adlon and the Embassy also was hit.  All the incendiaries were put out before they did any damage.  Actually the British were aiming at the Potsdamer Bahnhof, and they had bad luck.  They took almost a perfect run for it, their first bombs hitting the Reichstag and then falling in a direct line towards the Potsdamer station on the Brandenburger Tor, the Embassy, and in the gardens behind.  But the last one was about three hundred yards short of the station.  

Today the BBC claims that the Potsdamer station was hit, but this is untrue and at least three Germans today who heard the BBC told me they felt a little disillusioned at the British radio's lack of veracity.  The point is that it is bad propaganda for the British to broadcast in German to the people here that a main station has been set on fire when it hasn't been touched.  

I almost met a quick end last night.  Racing home from the Rundfunk after the all-clear at fifty miles an hour in my car, I suddenly skidded into some debris and came to a stop twenty feet from a fresh bomb crater on the East-West Axis about a hundred and fifty yards from the Brandenburger Tor.  In the black-out you could not see it, and the air-wardens had not yet discoveredc it.  A splinter from a bomb that made this crater hurtled two hundred yards through the airto the American Embassy and crashed through the double window of the office of Donald Heath, our First Secretary.  It cut a neat hole in the two windows, continuted directly over Don's desk, and penetrated four inches intothe wall on the far side of the room.  Don was supposed to have had night duty last night and woul dhave been sitting at his desk at the time, but for some reason Charge d'Affaires Kirk had told him to go home and himself had done the night trick.  

Berlin, September 12, 1940

Off to Geneva for a few days so that I can talk some matters over with New York on the telephone without being overheard by the Nazis.  The Germans want Hartich, my assistant, to leave, and I'm against it.  

The rumour is that the big invasion hop against England is planned for the night of September 15, when there will be a full moon and the proper tide in the Channel.  I'll chance this trip anyway.  

Geneva, September 16, 1940

The news coming over the near-by border of France is that the Germans have attempted a landing in Britain, but that it has been repulsed with heavy German losses.  Must take this report with a grain of salt.  

Lunch with John Winant, head of the International Labour Office, who strives valiantly to keep his institution, and what it stands for, from going under after the blow the war has given it.  More than any other American in public life whom I know, he understands the special forces and changes that have been at work in the last decade at home and in Europe, and that are now in new ferment as a result of the war.  We talked about the job to be done after the war if Britain wins and if the mistakes of 1919 are not to be repeated.  He spoke of his own ideas about reconstruction and how war economy could been replaced by a peace economy without the maladjustment, the great unemployment and deflation and depression that followed the last war.  Personally I cannot look that far ahead.  I cannot see beyond Hitler's defeat.  To accomplish that first is such a gigantic task and so overwhelmingtly important that all else seems secondary, though undoubtedly it is a good thing that some are taking the longer view.  

Winant is likable, gaunt, awkward, Lincolnesque sort of man and was a good enough politican and executive to be re-elected Governor of New Hampshire a couple of times.  I think he would make a good president to succeed Roosevelt in 1944 if the latter gets his third term.  

Berlin, September 18, 1940

Somewhere between Frankfurt on the train from Basel last night the porter shouted: "Flieger-Alarm!"  and there was a distant sound of gunfire, but nothing hit us.  We arrived at the Potsdamer Bahnhof right on time and I observed again that the station had not been hit despite the claims of the BBC.  I noticed several slightly wounded soldiers, mostly airmen, getting off a special car which had been attached to our train.  From their bandanges, their wounds looked like burns.  I also noticed the longest Red Cross train I've ever seen.  It stretched from the station for half a mile to beyond the bridge over the Landwehr canal.  Orderlies were swabbing it out, the wounded having been unloaded, probably during the night.  The Germans usually unload their hospital trains after dark so that the populace will not be unduly disturbed by one of hte grimmer sides of glorious war.  I wondered where so many wounded could have come from, as the armies in the west stopped fighting three months ago.  As there were only a few porters I had to wait some time on the platform and picked up a conversation with a railway workman.  He said most of the men taken from the hospital train were suffering from burns.  

Can it be that the tales I heard in Geneva had some truth in them after all?  The stories there were that either in attempted German raids with sizable landing parties on the English coast or in rehearsals with boats and barges off the French coast the Britis had given the Germans a bad pummelling.  The reports reaching Switzerland from France were that many German barges and ships had been destroyed and a considerable number of German troops drowned; also that the British used a new type of wireless-directed torpedo (a Swiss invention, the Swiss said) which spread ignited oil on the water and burned the barges.  Those cases of burns at the station this morning bear looking into.  

Ribbentrop suddenly went off to Rome tonight.  Many guesses as to why.  Mine: to break the news to Mussolini that were will be no attempt at invading Britain this fall.  This will put Il Duce in a hole, as he has already started an offensive on Egypt and advanced a hundred miles over the desert to Sidi-el-Barrani.  But this Italian effort, it seems, was originally planned only to distract attention from the German invasion of Britain.  It begins to look now (though I still think Hitler may try to attack England) as though the war will shift to the Mediterranean this winter, with the Axis powers trying to deliver a knockout blow by capturing Egypt, the Suez Canal, and Palestine.  Napoleon did this once, and the blow did not fell the British Empire.  (Also, Napoleon planned to attack Britain, gathered his ships and barges just where Hitler has gathered his, but never dared to launch the attack.)  But the Axis seizure of Suez might knock out the British Empire now.  The reason Franco's handyman, Serrano Suñer, is here in Berlin is that Hitler wants him either to take Gibraltar himself of let the German army come in from France to do the job.  Much talk here, I find, of Germany and Italy dividing up Africa between themselves, giving Spain a larger slice if Franco plays ball.  

Only one air-raid here since I left, and the five million people of Berlin have caught up on their sleep and are full of breezy confidence again.  They really think the British planes can't get through.  Churchill is making a mistake in not sending more planes over Berlin.  A mere half-dozen bombers per night would do the job---that is, would force the people to their cellars in the middle of the night and rob them of their sleep.  Morale tumbled noticeably in Berlin when the British visited us almost every evening.  I heard many complaints about the drop in efficiency of the armament workers and even government employees because of the loss of sleep and increased nervousness.  The British haven't enough planes to devastate Berlin, but they have enough---five or six for Berlin each night---to ruin the morale of the country's most important centre of population.  Can it be that the British hope to get the Germans to stop their terrible bombing of London by laying off Berlin?  This would be a very silly calculation.

Berlin, September 19, 1940

Having save a little extra gasoline from my ration of thirty-seven gallons a month, I drove out to Siemensstadt with Joe Harsch and Ed Hartrich this afternoon to see if there had been any damage by bombing to the Siemens Electrical Works, one of the most important war industrial plants in germany.  I was also curious to see what mood the workers were in.  We drove slowly around the plant, but could find no trace of any damage.  The thousands of workers filing out after the afternoon shift seemed well fed and quite contented.  Some of them looked downright prosperous and lit up cigars after they came out.  During the fortnight that the British came over practically every night, the strain of working a full ten-hour shift after a night without sleep had begun to affect them, several Germans had told me.  But today they looked disgustingly fit.  

Returning to town somewhat disheartened by our findings, we noticed a large crowd standing on a bridge which spanned a railroad line.  We thought there had been an accident.  But we found the people staring silently as a long Red Cross train unloading wounded.  This is getting interesting.  Only during the fortnight in September when the Poles were being crushed and a month this spring when the west was being annihilated have we seen so many hospital trains in Berlin.  A diplomat told me this morning his Legation had checked two other big hospital trains unloading wounded in the Charlottenburg railroad yards yesterday.  This makes four long trains of wounded in the last two day that I know have arrived here.

Not since the war started has the German press been so idignant against the British as today.  According to it, the British last night bombed the Bodelschwingh hospital for mentally deficient children at Bethel in western Germany, killing nine youngsters, wounding twelve.  

The same newspapers which have no begun to chronicle with glee the "reprisal" attacks on the centre of London and which, to show the success of the "reprisals," published British figures telling of the thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, killed by German bombs, today are filled with righteous indignation against the British for allegedly doing the same thing to Germans.  Some of the headlines tonight: Nachtausgabe: "NIGHT CRIME OF BRITISH AGAINST 21 CHILDREN---THIS BLOODY ACT CRIES FOR REVENGE." Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: "MURDER OF CHILDREN AT BETHEL; REVOLTING CRIME."  B.Z am Mittag: "'ASSASINS' MURDER NO LONGER WAR, HERR WINSTON CHURCHILL!---THE BRITISH ISLAND OF MURDERERS WILL HAVE TO TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES OF ITS MALICIOUS BOMBINGS."

Editorial comment is in a similar vein.  The Börsen Zeitung writes: "They wished, on the orders of Churchill, simply to murder...Albion has shown herself to a be a murder-hungry beast which the German sword will liquidate in the interest of not only the German people but of the whole civilized world...The sadistic threats of the British apostles of hate will end in the smoke of their cities."

This paper in the very same editiorial points out how stores in the west of London as well as a subway station there have been hit by German bombs.  

The Diplo, written and edited by the Foreign Office, says pontifically tonight: "It is a fact that Germany is waging war with clean weapons and in a chivalrous manner."  (And London bombed indiscriminately nearly every night now, the British fighter defence having stopped the Luftwaffe's day-time attacks.)

One must keep in mind that the newspapers here do not reflect public opinion.  This hysterical indignation is artificially created from above.  No doubt the real reason for it is to justify in the minds of the German people what the Luftwaffe is doing to London.  

Censorship of our broadcasts is growing daily more impossible.  I had a royal scrap with one Nazi censor tonight.  He wouldn't let me read the newspaper headlines quoted above.  He said it gave America a "wrong impression."  He said I was too ironic, even in my selection of headlines.  

Berlin, September 20, 1940

Another beautiful example today of Nazi hypocrisy.  I wrote in both my broadcasts today that the German press and radio were making the most of a New York report that the British censor had decided to forbid foreign correspondents in London to mention air-raids when they were on.  The German Propaganda Ministry jumped on this dispatch and through its shortwave and foreign-press services tired to tell th world that henceforth America was going to be deprived of trustworthy news from London.  I pointed out, incidentially, that the Nazis had clamped the same kind of censorship on us some time ago.  My censors woudl not hear of my saying any such thing.  

I ask myself why I stay on here.  For the first eight months of the war our censorship was fairly reasonable---more so than Sevareid and Grandin had to put up with in Paris.  But since the war became grim and serious---since the invasion of Scandinavia---it has become increasingly worse.  For the last few months I've been trying to get by on my wits, such as they are; to indicate a truth or an official lie by the tone and inflexion of my voice, by pause held longer than is natural, by the use of an Americanism which most Germans, who learned their English in England, will not fully grasp, and by drawing from a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or their juxtaposition, all the benefit I can.  But the Nazis are on to me.  For some time now my two chief censors from the Propaganda Ministry have been gentlemen who understand American as well as I, Professor Lessing, who long held a post in an American university, and Herr Krauss, for twenty years a partner in a Wall Street bank.  I cannot fool them very often.  Personally, both are decent, intelligent Germans, as is Captain Erich Kunsti, former Program Director of the Austrian Broadcasting System and now my principal military censor.  But they must do what they're told.  And the Foreign Office and Propaganda Ministry keep recieving reports from the United States---not only from the Embassy at Washington, but from their well-organized intelligence service throughout our country---that I'm getting by with murder (which I'm not) and must be sat upon.  Dr. Kurt Sell, the Nazi man in Washington whose duty, among other things, is to report to Berlin on what we send, has several time reported unfavorably on the nature of my broadcasts.  I haven't the slightest interest in remaining her unless I can continue to give a fairly accurate report.  And each day my broadcasts are forced by censorship to be less accurate.  Tonight I noticed for the first ime what one of the young Germans who do my modulating (call New York on the transmitter until time for me to speak) and follow my script to see that I read it as written and censored was scanning a copy of my broadcast as I spoke, making fully little lines under the syllables as we used to do in school while learning to scan poetry.  He was trying to note down, I take it, which words I emphasized, which I spoke with undue sarcasm, and so on.  I was so fascinated by this discovery that I stopped in the middle of my talk to watch him.  

Berlin, September 21,1940

X came up to my room in the Adlon today, and after we had disconnected my telephone and made sure that one one was listening through the crack of the door to the next room, he told me a weird story.  He says the Gestapo is systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich.  The Nazis calls them "mercy deaths."  He relates that Pastor Bodelischwingh, who runs a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children at Bethel, was ordered arrested a few days ago because he refused to deliver up some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police.  Shortly after this, his hospital is bombed.  By the "British."  Must look into this story.  

Berlin, September 22, 1940

We know that Himmler has hanged, without trial, at least one Pole for having had sexual relations with a German woman.  We know too that at least half a dozen German women have been given long prison sentences for having bestowed favours upon Polish prisoners or farm labourers.  Several Germans have told me of placards prominently displayed in the provincial towns warning Germans not to have anything to do with Polish labourers and to treat them rough.  Last week every household in Berlin recieved a leaflet from the local office of the "Bund of Germans Abroad" warning the people not to fraternize with the Poles now working as labourers or prisoners in Germany.  A few choice extracts from this document:

"German people, never forget that the atrocities of the Poles compelled the Fuhrer to protect our German people by armed force!...The servility of the Poles to their German employers merely hides their cunning; their friendly behavior hides their deceit...Remember, there is no community whatever between Germans and Poles!  Be careful that no relationship shall result because of the common religious faith!....Our farmers may think each Pole who greets them with a 'Jesus Christ be praised!' is a decent fellow and may answer: 'For ever and ever, amen!'

"Germans!  The Pole must never be your comrade!  He is inferior to each German comrade on his farm or in his factory.  Be just, as Germans have always been, but never forget that you are a member of the master race!"

I note that Poles working in Germany now have been forced to wear an arm-band or an emblem sewn on the front of their coast marked with a large "P" in purple on a yellow background.  In German-occupied Poland, Jews wear a smiliar emblem marked with a "J."

LATER.---Ribbentrop is back from Rome, and the press hints that the "final phase" of the war has been decided upon.  Rudolf Kircher, editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, writes from Rome that the military situation is so rosy for the Axis that Ribbentrop and the Duce actually spent most of their time planning the "new order" in Europe and Africa.  This may make the German people feel a little better, but most Germans I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn't come off.  They're still confident the war will be over by Christmas.  But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over before winter, which will be on us within a month.  I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall---or should---receive enough champagne from them to keep me all winter.  Today when I suggested to some of them another little bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny.  Neither would they bet.  

German correspondents in Rome today reported that Italy is displeased with Greece and that the British are violating the neutrality of Greek waters as they once did those of Norway.  This sounds bad.  I suppose Greece will be next.  

Berlin, September 23, 1940

After a week's absence the British bombers came over last night and kept the populace in their cellars for two hours and twenty minutes in the middle of the night.  This was a little shock for most people, for they had been told all week that for several nights the British had been trying to get through but had always been turned back by the anti-aircraft defences.  The local papers again rage against the "British criminals" for having bombed us last night.  The Nachtausgabe bannerlines: "NEW NIGHT ACT OF THE PIRATES."  The same paper editorializes: "Winston Churchill again yesterday gave British airmen the order to drop their bombs on the German civilian population and thus continue their murder of German men, women and children."  The Börsen Zeitung holds that "last night Churchill continuted the series of his criminal blows against the German civilian population.  Frankly, Churchill belongs to that category of criminal who in their stupid brutality are unteachable."

While this line of nonsense is of course dicated to the German press by Goebbels, it does indicate, I think, that the Germans can't take night bombing as the British are taking it.  If London was only more on its toes it would realize this.  RAF stragtegy, I gather, is to concentrate on Germany's war industries and supply-depots.  But while they've no doubt hit some interesting targets, like the Leuna works, where coal is made into oil (they've hit Leuna, but not knocked it out), it is certain that they have not succeded in crippling Germany's war industrial production to any appreciable extent, nor have they blown up many stores.  What they must do is keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping, and wear down their nerves.  Those nerves are already very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization of Total War.

Last night an old German acquaintance dropped in on me.  He's in the Luftwaffe now and for the last three weeks had been a member of the crew of a night bomber which has been working on London.  He had some interesting details.

1.  He was impressed by the size of London.  He said they've been pounding away on it for three weeks and he is amazed that so much of it is left!  He said they were often told before taking off hat they would find their target by a whole square mile of the city on fire.  When they got there they could find no square mile on fire; only a fire here and there.

2.  He relates that they approach London at a height of from 15,000 to 16,000 feet, dive to about 10,000 feet, and release their bombs from this height---too high for accurate night bombing.  They don't dare go below 7,000 feet, he says, on account of the barrage balloons.  He describes the anti-aircraft fire over London as "pretty hot."

3.  German night bomber crews, he says, are tired.  They are being overworked.  The Luftwaffe figured that they would destroy the RAF during daylight operations as they had destroyed the Polish, Dutch, Belgian and French air forces and neglected to train enough men for night work.  Present crews, he divulged, are flying four nights out of seven a week.  Unlike Dr. Goebbels, whose propaganda machine drums it into the people that British airmen are cowards when they're not brutes, my friend says quite frankly that the German pilots have the highest admiration for their British adversaries---for their skill and their bravery.  They're particularly fond of one British fighter-pilot, he relates, who roars into a fight with a cigarette stuck at a smart angle between his lips.  If this man is ever shot down on the German side, the German airmen have sworn to hide him and not to hand him over as prisoner of war.  

4.  He confirms that the British bombers are pounding hell out of the French and Belgian coasts at night.  And ofthen they swoop down in the night and machine-gun the German bomber bases jsut as the German planes are taking off or alighting.  

5.  Göring did fly over London, he asserts.  This news was given the foreign press here, but withheld from the German papers, which made us suspicious of it.  

6.  He relates that the British have built a number of dummy airfields and littered them with wooden planes, but the Germans have most of them spotted by now.  

7.  He confirms that the German bombers usually return from a flight over Britain to different bases.  He says the bombers start from widely scattered fields in France, Belgium and Holland, but always on a strict time-table so as to avoid collisions in the darkness.  The exact course back from London is always prescribed in advance, so that planes entering over the area will not crash into those leaving.  He has an interesting explanation of the big beating the Germans too in a daylight attack on London a week ago Sunday when, according to the British, 185 German planes were shot down, mostly bombers.  He says that the German time schedule went wrong, that the German fighters which were to protect the bombers arrived at a prearranged rendezvous off the English coast, but found no bombers there.  After waiting twenty-five minutes they had to fly home because their gas was getting low.  The bombers eventually arrived, coming over the North Sea, but there was no fighter escort for them, and the British chasers mowed them down.  

9.  He said the German night bombers go over in squadrons of seven.  He also insisted that each Luftwaffe base reports its correct losses and that any doctoring of figures is either done at headquarters or in Berlin.  

He confims that the Luftwaffe so far has failed to gain air supremacy over Britain, though when I was on the Channel five weeks ago, the Germans said this would be a matter of but a fortnight.  

It's a fact that since about a fortnight the Gemrans have given up large-scale day attacks on England and have gone over largely to night bombing.  This in itself is an admission of defeat.  

Berlin, September 24, 1940

The British really went to work on Berlin last night.  They bombed heavily and with excellent aim for exactly four hours.  They hit some important factories in the north of the city, one big gas works, and the railroad yards north of the Stettiner and Lehrter stations.  

But we couldn't tell the story.  The authorities said no damage of military importance was done and the Propaganda Ministry, suddenly very nervous over last night's destruction, warned all of us correspondents that we could only report what the military said.  Goebbels's Ministry even cancelled its usual post-raid conducted tour of the city, giving as an excuse that there was so much to see and so little time to see it in.

The German press and radio have never been made to lie quite so completely about a raid as today.  Even the stolid Berliners, judging by their talk, appear to be stirred at the lies of their own newspapers.  Said the official account: "In spite of violent anti-aircraft fire a few British bombers succeeded in reachign the northern and eastern suburbs of Berlin last night and dropped a number of bombs.  The position of the bombs, far away from all military or industrial objectives, provides fresh evidence of the fact that the British airmen deliberately attack residential quarters.  There was no damage of military importance."

Even the High Command, in whose veracity many Germans still believe, repeated the lie later in its daily war communique.  The hundreds of thousands of commuters from the northern suburbs who had to get off their trains today three times and be conveyed by bus over three stretches of one main railway line where British bombs had blown up the tracks were somewhat surprised by what the read in their papers.  

The British just missed twice blowing up the elevated Stadtbahn railroad running east-west through the centre of Berlin.  In both places the bomb missed the tracks by a few yards, damaging adjacent houses.  This line not only carries the bulk of the suburban electric traffic, but a large number of passenger trains.  It's the most important line within the city limits.  The debris from buildings which were hit held up traffic last night, but today the line was running.  

Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law and Minister of Interior, returned from a visit to the western front just in time to experience his first British bombing attack.  This may have been helpful.  We correspondents kept imagining Suner returning to Madrid, and Franco, who is under tremendous pressure from Berlin and Rome now to hop on the Axis bandwagon, asking him about those British attacks on Berlin, and Suner replying: "What attacks?  I saw no attacks.  I was in Berlin ten days.  The British couldn't get over even once.  The British are finished, generalissimo, and now it is time for Spain to get in on the Axis spoils."

Goebbels and most of the other lumimaries of the Nazi Part were dining Suñer at the Adlon last night when the bombing began.  The banquet was brought to an abrupt close before the dessert had been served and all present made for the Adlon's spacious air-raid cellar next to the barber-shop.  When I returned at four a.m. from the radio, they were just leaving.  

I learn Ciano is coming here Thursday.  A deal is on between Berlin and Rome to finish the war in Africa this winter and divide up the Dark Continent.  But they mus tbe sure of Spain first and are insisting that Franco either take Gibraltar or let the Germans take it.  

Berlin pleased tonight that the French, who have practically turned over Indo-China to the Japs without a blow and daily make new concessions to the Axis without a murmur, today opened fire on de Gaulle and the British, who want to have Dakar.  

Last night's bombing reminds me that the best air-raid shelter in Berlin belongs to Adolf Hitler.  Experts doubt that he could ever be killed in it.  It is deep, protected by iron girders and an enormous amount of reinforced concrete, and is provided with its own ventilating and lighting plant, a private movie and an operating room.  Were British bombs to blow the Chancellery to smithereens, cutting off all apparent escape from the cellar, the Führer and his associates could emerge safely by simply walking through one of hte tunnels that run from his shelter to points several hundred yards away.  Hitler's cellar also is fitted out with spacious sleeping quarters, an important consideration, but one utterly neglected in mist shelters, since the loss of sleep is hurting the German people far more than British bombs.  

If Hitler has the best air-raid cellar in Berlin, the Jews have the worst.  In many cases they have none at all.  Where facilities permit, the Hews have their own special Luftschutzkeller, usually a small basement room next to the main part of the cellar, where the "Aryans" gather.  But in many Berlin cellars there is only one room.  It is for the "Aryans."  The Jews must take refuge on the ground floor, usually in the hall leading from the door of the flat to the elevator or stairs.  This is fairly safe if a bomb hits the roof, since the chances are that it will not penetrate to the ground floor.  But experience so far has shown that it is the most dangerous place to be in the entire building if a bomb lands in the street outside.  Here where the Jews are hovering, the force of the explosion is felt most; here in the entryway where the Jews are, you get most of the bomb splinters.  

Berlin, September 25, 1940

Dr. Boehmer, the Propaganda Ministry foreign-press chief, who is a typical Nazi except that he is intelligent and has traveled widely, especially in America, is peeved from time to time over our "lack of appreciation" of such Nazi favours as giving the correspondents extra food.  If the way to a correspondent's heart is through his stomach, then Dr. Goebbels certainly tries hard.  In the first place he classifes us as "heavy labourers," which means we get double rations of meat, bread and butter.  Every other Thursday, after our press conference, we line up for fortnight's extra food cards.  Moreover, Dr. Goebbels not only permits us, but actually encourages us to import each week, against a liberal payment in dollar exchange, a food packet from Denmark.  This latter is a life-saver.  It enables me to have bacon and eggs at breakfast four or five times a week.  Ordinarily I do not eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, but on the short war rations now available, I find it fortifies one for the entire day.  I also got in enough coffee from Holland before the western campaign to provide me for the next six months.  In a word, we corerspondents are hardly affected by the war-time rationing.  We have plenty to eat.  And the Germans see to it that we do have enough, not because they like us, but because---quite rightly, I suppose----they think we'll be more kindly disposed to them if we operate on full stomachs, we being human beings after all.  

Moreover, the Propaganda Ministry and the Foreign Office, which fight each other over many things, have set up a fierce rivalry to see which one can establish the best dining club for the foreign press.  Ribbentrop's establishment, the Ausland Presse Club, off the Kufurstendamm, is at the moment more sumptuous than Goebbels's Austland Club on the Leipzigerplatz.  But the Doktor, I hear, has just appropriated several million marks to modernize his club and make it more gaudy than Ribbentrop's.  I used to eat a couple of nights a week at the Ausland Club, it being conveniently located for me, and the prospect of a real beefsteak and real coffee proving a great temptation.  Moreover, it was a place to chew the rag with the Nazis and see what was in their minds, if anything.  Since the wanton aggression against Holland and Belgium I have not gone there, being unable any more to stomach Nazi officials with my dinner.  

If we eat well, that is not to say that the German people do.  But reports abroad about the people here starving are greatly exaggerated.  They are not starving.  After a year of the blockade they are getting enough bread, potatoes, and cabbage to keep them going for a long time.  Adults get a pound of meat a week and a quarter of a pound of butter.  Americans could hardly subsist on this diet.  But Germans, whose bodies have become accustomed for a century to large amounts of potatoes, cabbage, and bread, seem to do very well on it.  The meat and fat ration, though considerably under what they are used to, is enough to keep them tolerably fit.  

The shortage of fruit is acute and last winter's severa cold has ruined the German fruit crop.  We saw no oranges or bananas last winter and are not like to see any this winter.  The occupation of Denmark and Holland has helped temporarily to augment the stocks of vegetables and dairy products, but Germany's inability to furnish fodder to these countries will shortly make them liabilities in the matter of food.  There's no doubt that the Germans looted all the available food in Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium and France, though it's true they paid for it---in paper marks which cost them nothing.  Only Mr. Herbert Hoover's representative here doubts that.  

The important thing is that Britain will not win the war, say, in the next two or three years by starving the German people.  And Hitler, who is never sentimental about non-Germans, will see to it that every one of the hundred million people in the occupied lands dies of hunger before one German does.  Of that the world may be sure.  

Berlin, September 26, 1940

We had the longest air-raid of the war last night, from eleven p.m. to four o'clock this morning.  If you had a job to get to at seven or eight a.m., as hundreds of thousands of people had, you got very little sleep.  The British ought to do this every night.  No matter if not much is destroyed.  The damage last night was not great.  But the psychological effect was tremendous.  

No one expected the British so early, and thousands were caught in subways, on the Stadtbahn, in buses and street-cars.  They hastily made for the nearest public shelter and spent most of the night there.  The first result of the early arrival of the British last night---theoretically they can arrive at ten p.m, two hours after dark---is that all the theatres today announce a new opening hour: six p.m., instead of seven thirty or eight p.m.  And the Ministry of Education sends out word that it case of air-raids lasting after midnight, grade schools will remain closed the following morning in order to allow the children to catch up on their sleep.  

It burns me up that I cannot mention a raid that is going on during my broadcast.  Last night the anti-aircraft guns protecting the Rundfunk made such a roar while I was broadcasting that I couldn't hear my own words.  The lip microphone that we are now forced to use at night prevented the sound of the guns from accompanying my words to America, which is a pity.  Noticed last night too that instead of having someone talk to New York from the studio below to keep our transmitter modulated for the five minutes before I began to talk, the RRG substituted loud band music.  This was done to drown out the sound of the guns.  

The B.Z. am Mittag begins its account of last night's attack: "The greatest war-monger of all time, Winston Churchill, dispatched his murderers to Berlin again last night..."

As soon as I had finished my broadcast at one a.m., the Nazi air-wardens forced me into the air-raid cellar.  I tried to read Car Crow's excellent book Four Hundred Million Customers, but the light was poor.  I became awfully bored.  Finally Lord Haw-Haw and his wife suggested we steal out.  We dodged past the guards and found an unfrequented underground tunnel, where we proceeded to dispose of a litre of schnaps, which "Lady" Haw-Haw had brought.  Haw-Haw can drink as straight as any man, and if you can get over your initial revulsion at his being a traitor, you find him an amusing and even intelligent fellow.  When the bottle was finished we felt too free to go back to the cellar.  Haw-Haw found a secret stairway and we went up to his room, opened the blinds, and watched the fireworks.  To the south of the city the guns were hammering away, lighting up the sky.  

Sitting there in the black of the room, I had a long talk with the man, whose real name is William Joyce, but who in Germany goes by the name of Froehlich (which in German means "joyful"), denies that he is a traitor.  He argues that he has renounced his British nationality and became a German citizen, and that he is no more traitor than thousands of British and Americans who renounced their citizenship to become comrades in the Soviet Union, or than those Germans who gave up their nationality after 1848 and fled to the United States.  This doesn't satisfy men, but it does him.  He kept talking about "we" and "us" and I asked him which people he meant.  

"We Germans, of course," he snapped.  

He's a heavily built man of about five feet nine inches with Irish eyes that twinkle and a face scarred not by duelling in a German university but in Fascist brawls on the pavements of English towns.  He speaks a fair German.  I should say he has two complexes which have landed him in his notorious position.  He has a titantic hatred for Jews and an equally titanic one for captialists.  These two hatreds have been the mainsprings of his adult life.  Had it not been for his hysteria about Jews, he might easily have become a successful Communist agitator.  Strange as it may seem, he thinks the Nazi movement is a proletarian one which will free the world from the bonds of the "plutocratic capitalists."  He sees himself primarily as a liberator of the working class.

(Haw-Haw's colleague, Jack Trevor, an English actor, who also does anti-British broadcasts for Dr. Goebbels, has no interest in the proletariat.  His one burning passion is hatred of the Jews.  Last winter it used to be a common sight to see him stand in the snow, with a mighty blizzard blowing, and rave to an SS guard outside the studio door about the urgent necessity of liquidating all Jews everywhere.  The guard, who undoubtedly had no special love for the Jews, but whose only thought was how much longer he must stand guard on an unholy wintry night, would stamp his freezing feet in the snow, turn his head from the biting wind, and muter: "Ja.  Ja.  Ja.  Ja."  probably wondering what freaks Englishmen are.)

Haw-Haw's story, as I've pieced it together from our conversations and from his little booklet, Twilight Over England, just published in Berlin (and which he gave me after I had present him with an English book I had smuggled in entitled The Life and Death of Lord Haw-Haw), is this:

He was born in New York in 1906 of Irish parents who, he says, lost what money they had in Ireland "by reason of their devotion to the British crown."  He studied literature, history and psychology at the University of London and in 1923, the year of Hitler's ill-fated Munich Putsch, joined the British Fascists.  He says he earned his living thereafter as a tutor.  In 1933 he entered Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and became one of its chief speakers and writers.  For three years he was Mosely's propaganda chief.  He claims he left Mosley's movement in 1937 "owing to differences on matters pertaining to organization."  He teamed up with John Beckett, a former Socialist M.P., and started the National Socialis League, but within a few months Beckett left it because he thought Joyce's methods "too extreme."

Of these days Joyce writes: "We lived National Socialism...We were all poor enough to know the horrors of freedom in democracy.  One of our member was driven mad by eighteen months of unemployment and starvation.  I lived for months with real friends who loved England and could not get enough to eat from her."

Twice during the year that preceded the war he was arrested on charges of assault and disturbing the peace.  Then came the war clouds.

"For me," he writes, "the decision was easy to make.  To me it was clear on the morning of August 25 that the greatest struggle in history was doomed to take place.  It might have been a very worthy course to stay in England and incessantly work for peace.  But I had one traditionally acquired or inherted prejudice...England was going to war.  I felt that if, for perfect reasons of conscience, I could not fight for her, I must give her up forever.
 
He did.  On August 25, he and his wife "who had to leave without even being able to say farewell to her parents," set out for Germany to take part in wha the calls the "sacred struggle for the world."

Any mind which sees Hitler's cold-blooded tramping down of the free peoples of Europe as a sacred struggle to free the world speaks for itself.  Haw-Haw's book is a hodge-podge of Nazi nonsense about England, studded with obvious truths about its blacker and meaner side which the whole world knows.  

Haw-Haw's extremely nasal voice was at first considered by Propaganda Ministry officials as wholly unfit for broadcasting.  A Nazi radio engineer who had studied in England first saw its possibilities and he was given a trial.  On the radio this hard-fisted, scar-faced young Fascist rabble-rouse sounds like a decadent old English blue-blood aristocrat of the type familiar on our stage.  Ed Murrow told me last winter that check-ups showed that Haw-Haw commanded at least half of the English radio audience when he was on the air.  But that was when the English were bored by the "phony" war and found the war and Joyce amusing.  I think he himself realizes he has lost most of his hold on the English people.  Of late he has also begun to chafe at the inane things Goebbels makes him say.  

There is a third English traitor to note here.  He is Baillie Stewart, a former captain of the Seaforth Highlanders, who a few years ago was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower for betraying military secrets to a foreign power.  A girl who led him to this was a German siren, and afer his release he followed her here.  He did some broadcasts at first, but his Scottish nature was too unbending for the Nazi officials of the Propaganda Ministry and the German Broadcasting Comany.  He is now off the air and working as a translator in the Foreign Office.  

While on the subject, I might as well not down the three Americans who are doing Nazi propaganda for the German radio.  

Fred Kaltenbach of Waterloo, Iowa, is probably the best of the lot, actually believing in National Socialism with a sincere fanaticism and continually fighting the Nazi Pary hacks when they don't agree with him.  He is not a bad radio speaker.  I avoid all three and have seen Kaltenbach only once.  That was at Compiégne when he was having one of his periodic feuds with the Nazi radio authorities.  They gave orders that he was not to be taken from Paris to Compiégne, but he stole a ride with some army officers and "gate-crashed" the ceremony.  He was continually being arrested by the military and ejected from the grounds, but he came back each time.  Most Nazis find him a bit "too American" for their taste, but Kaltenbach would die for Nazism.  

The second American speaker is one Edward Leopold Delaney, who goes here by the name of E.D. Ward.  He's a disappointed actor who used to have occasional employment with road companies in the United States.  He has a diseased hatred for Jews, but otherwise is a mild fellow and broadcasts the cruder type of Nazi propaganda without questioning.  

The third person is Miss Constance Drexel, who many years ago wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.  The Nazis hire her, so far as I can find out, principally because she's the only woman in town who will sell her American accent to them.  Bizzare: she constantly pesters me for a job.  One American network hired her at the beginning of the war, but dropped her almost at once.  

For their other foreign-language broadcast the Nazis have a strange assortment of hired Balkanites, Dutch, Scandinavian, Spaniards, Arabs and Hindus.  Once in a great while while one of these speakers turns out to be "unreliable."  Such a one was the Yugoslav speaker who began his broadcast the other night: "Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are about to hear from Berlin tonight is a lot of nonsense, a pack of lies, and if you have any sense, you will turn your dials."  He got no further, for there are "checkers" sitting listening at the Propaganda Minsitry at the other end of town.  The last seen of the fellow was when the SS guards carted him off to jail.  

The Norwegian people were brusquely informed last night in a broadcast by the Nazi Commisar in Olso, Gauleiter Terboven, of the hard row that lies ahead of them.  Announced the Gauleiter:  (1) The Norwegian Royal House has no more political importance and will never return to Norway. (2) The same goes for the Nygaardsvold government which emigrated. (3) Therefore any activity in favour of the Royal House or the government which fled is prohibited. (4) In accordance with a decree of Hitler, a commissarial council is named to take over the business of government. (5) The old political parties are dissolved immediately. (6) Any combinations for the purpose of political activity of any kind will not be tolerated.

Thus is Norway, all that is decent and democratic in Norway, destroyed---for the time being.  And Germany shows so plainly how unfit she is to rule over anybody else.  There was a short time, when the Riech first took over Norway---the same is true of Holland---when Germany might have succeeded in willing over the goodwill of the people there, who was it was hopeless to struggle against the overwhelming military power of Hitler.  But the Germans did everything possible to forfeit goodwill, and in a few weeks the sentiment changed.  Now in all the occupied countries the German rulers are bitterly hated.  No decent Norwegian or Dutchmen will have anything to do with them.  

The Gauleiter's broadcast was a fine example of German tactlessnes.  He told the Norwegian people that he had tried in vain to negotiate with the old political parties, but they had held out for power and had not "heeded" his warnings; so he had had to liquidate them.  In conclusion, he told the Norwegians that it had no become clear that the way of the Quisling movement had always been the only possible one for Norway, and that this party would be the only one tolerated by the Germans in the future.  Thus, in effect, he told the Norwegians that a miserable little traitor, detested by ninety-nine and a half per cent of the population, was not only right, but henceforth would have the only say---so far as any Norwegian will have any say, which is little enough---about the future of their country.  

You don't have to be profound to conclude that the rule of brute force now exercised by Germans over the occupied territories can never last very long.  For despite complete military and police power, which the Germans admittedly have, you cannot for ever rule over foreign European peoples who hate and detest you.  The success of Hitler's "new order" in Europe is therefore doomed even before it is set up.  The Nazis, of course, who have never troubled to study European history but are guided bu a primitive Germanic trable urge of conquest with no thought for the possible consequences, think that they are well on their way to installing a European "new order" which will be dominated by German for the greatter good of Germany for all time.  Their long-term plan is not only to keep the subjected European peoples permanently disarmed so that they cannot revolt against their German masters, but to make them so dependent upon Germany economically that they cannot exist without Berlin's benevolent will.  Thus those heavy and highly technical industries whichs still function in the slave lands will be concentrated in Germany.  The slave peoples will produce the raw materials to feed them, and the food to feed the German masters.  They will be largely agricultural and mining communities---much of the Balkan lands fulfil that role for western Europe today.  And they will be utterly dependent upon Germany.  

The subjected peoples of Europe will be saved, of course, if Britain holds out and ultimately wins this war.  But even if Germany should win the war it will lost its struggle to organize Europe.  The German, I am profoundly convinced after mingling with him now for many years, is incapable of organizing Europe.  His lack of balance, his bullying sadism when he on top, his constitutional inability to grasp even faintly what is in the minds and hearts of other peoples, his instinctive feeling that relations betweent wo peoples can only be on the basis of master and slave and never on the basis of let-live equality---these characteristics of the German make him and his nation unfit for the leadership in Europe they have always sought and make it certain that, however he may try, he will in the long run fail.  

Ciano arrives here tomorrow from Rome.  Most people think it is for he announcement that Spain is entering the war on the side of the Axis. Suñer is here for the ceremony, if it comes off.

Berlin, September 27, 1940

Hitler and Mussolini have pulled another surprise.  

At one p.m. today in the Chancellery, Japan, Germany, and Italy have signed a military alliance directed against the United States.  I was caught way off base thinking Ciano had come to pipe Spain into the war.  Suner wasn't even present at the theatrical performance the fascists of Europe and Asia staged today.  

I came to my sense this morning when I noticed the schoolchildren who had been marched to the Wilhelmstrasse to cheer---waving Japanese flags.  As I had a broadcast at two p.m. and the correspondents were convoked at the Chancellery for "an important annoucement" at one p.m., I asked Hartrich to cover the actual ceremoney.  At the Rundfunk I followed it by radio.

Core of the pact is Article III.  It reads: "Germany, Italy and Japan undertake to assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three contracting partties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict."

There are two great parties not yet involved in either of those wars: Russia and the United States.  But Article III does not refer to Russia; Article V refers to Russia.  Article V says: "Germany, Italy and Japan affirm the aforesaid terms do not in any way affect the political status which exists at present between each of the three contracting parties and Soviet Russia."

The Soviet Union is out.  That leaves the U.S.A. in.  There was no attempt to disguise this obvious fact in Nazi circles tonight, though, as expected, my censors tried to stop me from saying so and I had to use all my wits in getting the thing across in my broadcasts.  Though it would have been more honest and accurate to say bluntly that Nazi circles did not disguise the fact that the alliance was directed against the United States, I had to water it down to this beautiful opening sentence: "There is no attempt in informed circles here tonight to disguise the fact that the military alliance signed in Berlin today...has one great country in mind.  That country is the United States."  Then to clinch the argument I had to resort to a nebulous analysis of the text of the treaty and the German interpretation thereof, which the censor, after some sour remarks, finally passed.

Now, why did Hitler, instigator of this alliance, hurriedly rig it up just at this time?  My theory is this: Ribbentrop journeyed suddenly to Rome a fortnight ago to break the news to Mussolini that the expected land invasion of Britain, which Hitler in a speech only a few days previously at the Sportpalast had promised the German people would certainly take place soon, could not be carried out as planned.  Mussolini had already started an invasion of Egypt to coincide with the attack on Britain and to divide the Empire's forces, but not to do much more than that this fall.  We know that Ribbentrop stayed longer in Rome than he planned.  The Duce, no doubt, was disturbed at Hitler's abandoning the all-out attack on Britain which he was confident would end the war---and Italy had only entered the war when she did because she thought it was almost over.  What was the Axis to do?  The obvious thing seemed to devote the winter to attacking the heart of the British Empire in Egypt, conquer the country, take the Suez Canal, then grab Palestine, continue down the Euphrates and take the Persian oil region, or at least its export base at the head of the Persian Gulf.  German could supply thousands of airplanes and tanks and some complete Panzer divisions which had been assembled for the attack on Britain.  If necessary, Yugoslavia and Greece could be occupied (Italy to get Dalmatia permanently), and southern Greece could be used as a starting-place for German planes against Egypt and the British Mediterranean fleet.

To ensure the complete and timely succes of the campaign, Spain must be brought in and make to take Gibraltar immediately, thus destroying Britain's position in the western Mediterranean.  Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother-in-law, Minister of Interior and leader of the Falangists, was in Berlin.  He personally seemed favourable.  Only Franco, that ingrate, hesitated.  The British, Franco apparently thought, were not yet beaten and...

There was that other factor, the United States.

Until recently, that factor had not been taken much into account in Berlin.  Last fall Göring had scoffed to us the possibility of American aid to the Allies playing a role in this war.  All through the summer, as the German army smashed through the west, Berlin was confident that the war would be over by fall, and that therefore American aid, which could only become really effective next spring, was of no concern to Germany.  That view seems to have been sincerely held here until very recently.  In the last two or three weeks something has gone wrong with the plans to invade Britain.  They may or may not be off, but probably are.  At any rate it dawned on Berlin a few days ago that Britain might not be defeated after all this fall, might still be fighting next spring, and that then American aid to Britain, especially in planes, would begin to make itself felt rather seriously.  Something must be done after all about the United States.  What?  Something to scare her and to set the American isolationists loose again with a new cry about the danger of war.  

In Japan a few weeks ago a new government under Prince Konoye came to power proclaiming a "new life" and a "new order" in eastern Asia.  The Prince was a man the Germans could deal with.  Herr Stahmer, a confidential man of Ribbentrop's who used to be employed in working on the British appeasers, was dispatched to look over the ground.  There follows now a military alliance designed to threaten America and keep her out of the war.  If I am any judge of American character, no one at home with the exception of the Wheelers, Nyes, and Lindberghs will be the least bit frightened by this.  The effect will be just the opposite from what Hitler and Ribbentrop, who never fail to misjudge Anglo-Saxon character, expect.  

Then too, this tripartite pact is a thing the Axis powers and especially Germany can ballyhoo to the skies, thus taking people's minds off the fact that the promised invasion of England isn't coming off and that the war---which every German confidently expected since midsummer would be over in a month or two---isn't going to end before winter comes, after all.

The ballyhoo today has already been terrific, pushing all other news completely off the front page.  The German people are told that the pact is of world-shaking importance and will shortly bring final "world peace."  The ceremony of the signing, as described by Hartrich, who was present, was carried through with typcial Axis talent for the theatrical.  In the first place, the surprise of the event itself.  Then the showy setting.  When Ribbentrop, Ciano and Japanese Ambassador M. Kurusu, a bewildered little man, entered the gala hall of the Chancellery, Klieg lights blazed away as the scene was recorded for all history.  Brightly coloured uniforms all over the place.  The entire staffs of the Italian and Japanese embassies present. (No other diplomats attended.  The Russian Ambassador was invited, but replied he would be out of town this noon.)  The three men sit themselves at a gilded table.  Ribbentrop rises and motions one of his slaves, Dr. Schmidt, to read the text of the pact.  Then they sign whole the cameras grind away.  Then comes the climactic moment, or so the Nazis think.  Three loud knocks on the giant door are heard.  There is a tense hush in the great hall.  The Japanese hold their breath.  The door sings slowly open, and in strides Hitler.  Ribbentrop bobs up and formally notifies him that the pact has been signed.  The Great Khan nods approvingly, but does not deign to speak.  Hitler majestically takes a seat in the middle of the table, while the two foreign ministers and the Japanese Ambassador scramble for chairs.  When they have got adjusted, they pop up, one after another, and deliver prepared addresses which the radio broadcasts around the world.

To add: Article I of the pact states that Japan recognizes the leadership of Germany and Italy in the creation of a new order in Europe.  Article II says: "Germany and Italy recognize the leadership of Japan in the creation of a new order in the greater Asiatic territory."  

Neither of the two sides can lend the slightes economic or military help to the other so long as they are separated by the British navy.  What Japan gets out of it is not clear, since if we shoudl go to war with her neither Germany nor Italy could harm us until they had conquered the British navy.  And shoudl we get involved in war with Berlin and Rome, Japan is bound to declare war on us, though her own interests might dictate not doing so.  However, she could no doubt find an excuse for forgetting the treaty in that case.  

One thing is clear:  Hitler would not have promulgated the tripartite pact if he thought the war was coming to an end before winter.  There would have been no need of it.  

Berlin, September 30, 1940

A two-hour alarm last night, but we heard nothing.  Apparently the British were attacking Brandenburg, to the west of the capital.  Though damage from British bombing is still negligible, the authorities, I learn, have ordered the evacuation of all children under fourteen from Berlin.  Agricultural Minister Darre today claimed that food supplies for the winter have now been secured.  He estimates the potato crop at sixty million tons.  The grain crop is two million tons less than last year, but will be sufficient.  Rations for meat, fats, and bread will remain the same throughout the winter."