Berlin Diary (101 page)

⁶
Only on the night of August 31, nine hours before the war started, did we learn that the reply contained a demand that Poland send a representative invested with plenipotentiary powers on Wednesday, August 30—that is, within twenty-four hours. Henderson remarked to Hitler: “That sounds like an ultimatum,” but the Great Man denied it. Throughout this period the correspondents were kept largely in the dark about the negotiations, with the Wilhelmstrasse tipping us (falsely) to take “an optimistic line.”

⁷
Even this was not true. Henderson revealed later that Ribbentrop—in a most insolent mood—read the sixteen points to him so rapidly that he could not grasp them. When he asked for a copy of them, the German Foreign Minister refused!

⁸
Actually Bonnet boasted after the Franco-German armistice that he had refused the plea of Halifax for a simultaneous declaration of war. He played for peace at any price until the very end.

⁹
Reichs Rundfunk Gesellschaft
—the German State Broadcasting Company.

¹⁰
Many months later I learned from an unimpeachable source that Fritsch did seek death and that three letters he wrote shortly before the action proved it. It is said in German army circles that his wound, though serious, would in all probability not have caused his death had he not refused the pleas of his adjutant to let himself be carried to the rear. He would not listen to it. He bled to death.

¹¹
About 3.3 by 1.5 yards.

¹²
Later the British Admiralty confirmed his version of both the
Royal Sceptre
episode and the saucy message to Mr. Churchill, including the fact that Schultze had not been captured.

¹³
For months we were to ask at nearly every Nazi press conference when the trial of Elser would take place. At first we were told he would be tried before the Supreme Court at Leipzig as were the “perpetrators” of the Reichstag fire, which seemed appropriate enough, since both events cast suspicion on the Nazis themselves. After a few weeks our daily question: “When will Elser be tried?” provoked scarcely restrained laughter from the correspondents and increasing embarrassment for Dr. Boehmer, foreign press chief of the Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Schmidt, press chief of the Foreign Office, and the latter’s deputy, Baron von Stumm. Finally we were given to understand that the question wasn’t funny any more, and after some months, having squeezed all we could out of our joke, we dropped it. So far as is known, Elser was never tried. Whether he was executed also is not known.

¹⁴
His moving Christmas broadcast from the Finnish front was to Inspire Robert Sherwood’s play
There Shall Be No Night
.

¹⁵
To which Stalin replied: “The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm”!

¹⁶
The official German decree read: “All Jews from fourteen to sixty years of age are subject to forced labour. The length of forced labour is two years, but it will be prolonged if its educational purpose is not considered fulfilled. Jews called up for forced labour must report promptly, and must bring food for two days and their bedding. Skilled Jewish workers must report with their tools. Those who don’t are subject to sentences running to ten years in the penitentiary.”

¹⁷
See pages 228–9 and 261.

¹⁸
Within or without wedlock. On October 28, 1939 Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police and leader of the S.S., decreed: “Beyond the borders of perhaps necessary bourgeois laws, customs, and views, it will now be the great task,
even outside the marriage bond
, for German women and girls of good blood, not in frivolity but in deep moral earnestness, to become mothers of the children of soldiers going off to war…. On the men and women whose place remains at home by order of the state, these times likewise impose more than ever the sacred obligation to become again fathers and mothers of children.” (Italics mine.) Himmler promised that the S.S. would take over the guardianship of all legitimate and illegitimate children of Aryan blood whose fathers met death at the front.

¹⁹
This was a lie, as later entries will show.

²⁰
The destroyer, we would learn later, was the
Glow-worm
, the only craft in the whole British navy to encounter any of the scores of German war vessels and transports which stole up the Norwegian coast
before
April 9. It sighted the German 10,000-ton cruiser
Admiral Hipper
off the Norwegian coast on April 8, but was blown to bits before it could get away. Had just a small British naval force, such as later went into Narvik, been within striking distance of the Norwegian coast on April 8, Hitler’s Norwegian venture would have failed. One can only conclude that the British navy was caught napping.

²¹
German for anti-aircraft gun.

²²
There was no sniping in 1940.

²³
A fair example of Göring’s exaggerations. When I visited the beach of Dunkirk two and a half months later, I found the wrecks of only two freighters, two destroyers, and one torpedo boat.

²⁴
Later named by Marshal Pétain French Ambassador in Washington.

²⁵
Within less than four months he was killed in a British bomber returning from a raid on the Italian lines in Albania.

²⁶
It is only fair to state that the officials of the German State Broadcasting Company, who treated me with the greatest courtesy throughout the war, never objected to my listening to what the enemy had to say on the BBC. They usually put a radio set at my disposal for this purpose. Foreign correspondents were exempted from the decree prohibiting listening to foreign radio stations as long as they did not pass on what they heard to Germans. Radio provided the only means we in Berlin had of learning what was going on in the outside world. Sale of foreign newspapers except those from Italy or the occupied cities was forbidden. Occasionally a few American newspapers and periodicals got through in the mails, but they were from two to six months old by the time they arrived.

²⁷
Most of them were turned back at the Spanish frontier.

²⁸
See entry for September 21.

²⁹
On December 6, 1940 the Vatican condemned the “mercy killings.” Responding to the question whether it is illicit for authorities to order the killing of those who, although they have committed no crime worthy of death, nevertheless are considered no longer useful to society or the state because of physical or mental deficiencies, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office held that “such killings are contrary to both natural and divine law.” It is doubtful if the mass of German Catholics, even if they learned of this statement from Rome, which is improbable, understood what it referred to. Only a minority in Germany know of the “mercy deaths.”

³⁰
Amann is also president of the Reich Press Chamber, in which capacity he rules the newspapers of Germany. Through the Eher Verlag and subsidiary holding companies, Amann has also gained financial control of most of the large newspapers in the country.

³¹
He publicly admitted it in a speech on December 10, 1940. Contrasting the totalitarian and democratic worlds, he said: “We can never be reconciled with this world…. One of these worlds must break asunder…. These are two worlds, and I believe one of these worlds must crack up.”