Berlin Diary (39 page)

My military censor was really quite decent today. He let me broadcast this: “If Warsaw does not surrender, it means that one of Europe’s largest cities will be blown up by the German army and a good share of the human beings living there with it. Certainly history knows no parallel…. The Germans say it is the Poles in Warsaw who are violating international law by making their civilians help defend the capital. But, as I say, I just can’t follow the things that are happening in this war.”

Off to the “front” tomorrow, if we can find one.

Z
OPPOT, NEAR
D
ANZIG,
September
18

Drove all day long from Berlin through Pomerania and the Corridor to here. The roads full of motorized columns of German troops
returning
from Poland. In the woods in the Corridor the sickening sweet smell of dead horses and the sweeter smell of dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against hundreds of German tanks and was annihilated. On the pier of this summer resort where just five weeks ago John [Gunther] and I sat far into the peaceful night arguing whether the guns would go off or not in Europe, we watched tonight the battle raging around Gdynia. Far off across the sea you could see the sky light up when the big guns went off.

Dr. Boehmer, press chief of the Propaganda Ministry in charge of this trip, insisted that I share a double room in the hotel here with Phillip Johnson, an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin’s
Social Justice
. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our room here he has been posing as anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude. I have given him no more than a few bored grunts.

D
ANZIG
,
September
19–20,
two thirty a.m
.

Sit here in the local radio station shivering and waiting to broadcast at four a.m. I talked at midnight, but Berlin on the phone said they did not think CBS picked me up. We shall try once again at four.

Today I have had a glimpse of an actual battle, one of the last of the Polish war, which is as good as over. It was going on two miles north of Gdynia on a ridge that stretched for seven miles inland from the sea. There was something about it that was very tragic and at the same time grotesque.

We stood on a hill called the Sternberg in the midst of the city of Gdynia under a huge—irony!—cross. It was a German observation post. Officers stood about, peering through field-glasses. Across the city over the roofs of the modern buildings of this model new town that was the hope of Poland we watched the battle going on two miles to the north. We had been awakened this morning in our beds in a hotel at Zoppot by it. At six a.m. the windows in my room shook. The German battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
, anchored in Danzig, was firing shells from its eleven-inch guns over our heads. And now, we could see, the Germans had the Poles surrounded on three sides, and the sea, from which German
destroyers were peppering them, cut them off on the fourth. The Germans were using everything in the way of weapons, big guns, small guns, tanks, and airplanes. The Poles had nothing but machine-guns, rifles, and two anti-aircraft pieces which they were trying desperately to use as artillery against German machine-gun posts and German tanks. You could hear the deep roar of the German artillery and the rat-tat-tat of the machine-guns on both sides. The Poles—we gathered from the sound of their fire, because you could see very little, even through glasses—not only were defending themselves from trenches and behind clumps of bushes but were using every building they held as machine-gun nests. They had turned two large buildings, one an officers’ school, the other the Gdynia radio station, into fortresses and were firing machine-guns from several of the windows. After a half-hour a German shell struck the roof of the school and set it on fire. Then German infantry, supported—or through the glasses it looked as though they were
led
—by tanks, charged up the hill and surrounded the building. But they did not take it. The Poles kept machine-gunning them from the basement windows of the burning building. Desperate and brave the Poles were. A German seaplane hovered over the ridge, spotting for the artillery. Later a bombing plane joined it and they dived low, machine-gunning the Polish lines. Finally a squadron of Nazi bombers appeared.

It was a hopeless position for the Poles. And yet they fought on. The German officers with us kept praising their courage. Directly below us in Gdynia’s streets, women and children stood about, sullen and silent, watching the unequal battle. Before some of the buildings long lines of Poles stood waiting for food. Before
mounting the hill I had noted the terrible bitterness in their faces, especially in those of the women.

We watched the battle until noon. In that time the Germans must have advanced about a quarter of a mile. Their infantry, their tanks, their artillery, their signal corps, all seemed to work as a precise machine. There was not the slightest sign of strain or excitement in the German officers at our observation post. Very businesslike they were, reminding me of the coaches of a championship football team who sit on the sidelines and calmly and confidently watch the machine they’ve created perform as they knew all the time it would.

As we prepared to go, Joe [Barnes] turned to me. “Tragic and grotesque,” he said. It was, all right. The unequal battle, the dazed civilians in the streets below—tragic indeed. And grotesque the spectacle of us, with little danger to ourselves, standing there watching the killing as though it were a football game and we nicely placed in the grand-stand. Grotesque, too, to have a grand-stand seat from which to watch the women in the streets below, for whom all the thunder of the guns that we were hearing was a bitter personal tragedy.

As we left I asked an officer about the Polish artillery.

“They haven’t any,” he said. “If they had just one ‘75,’ they could have blown us all to bits. It’s only two miles over there, and this would have been a natural target.”

We drove to the Westerplatte, a small island between Danzig and the sea which had been used by the Poles as a supply depot. For five days a small Polish garrison had held out on the island against the eleven-inch guns of the
Schleswig-Holstein
firing at point-blank range and Stukas dropping five-hundred-pound bombs. Even the Germans recognized its bravery, and when the Poles
finally surrendered, their commander was allowed to keep his sword. Today the Westerplatte looked like the wasteland around Verdun. Interesting: the bombs tossed by the Stukas were more deadly and more accurate than the shells from the old battleship. A round Polish bunker not over forty feet in diameter had received two direct hits from five-hundred-pound bombs. The ten-foot thickness of concrete and steel had been torn to pieces like tissue paper. Near by we saw the graves of what was left of the Poles who had been inside.

In the afternoon we drove to the Danzig Guild Hall, a Gothic building of great beauty, to hear Hitler make his first speech since his Reichstag address of September 1 started off the war. I had a seat on the aisle, and as he strode past me to the rostrum I thought he looked more imperious than I had ever seen him. Also he was about as angry during his speech as I’ve ever seen him. When he spoke of Britain his face flamed up in hysterical rage. Afterwards a Nazi acquaintance confided to me that the “old man” was in a terrible rage because he had counted on making today’s speech in Warsaw, that he had waited three or four days outside the Polish capital, burning to enter it like a conquering Caesar and make his speech of victory, and that when the Poles inside refused to surrender and each day continued their stubborn resistance, his patience had cracked and he rushed to Danzig to make his speech. He had to talk! We had expected Hitler to offer peace to the West and announce what the future of Poland would be. He did neither, merely remarking that Poland would never be re-created on the Versailles model and that he had no war aims against Britain and France, but would fight them if they continued the war. When Hitler brushed past me going down the aisle, he was followed by
Himmler, Brückner, Keitel, and several others, all in dusty field-grey. Most of them were unshaven and I must say they looked like a pack of Chicago gangsters. Himmler, who is responsible for Hitler’s protection, kept shoving people back in the aisle, muttering at them. The army, I hear, would like to get rid of him, but fear to do so. The black-out was called off here tonight. It was good to see the lights again.

B
ERLIN
,
September
20

Hitler lent us one of his thirty-two-passenger planes to bring us back from Danzig. Tonight the press talks openly of peace. Says the
Frankfurter Zeitung
: “Why should England and France waste their blood against our Westwall? Since the Polish state has ceased to exist, the treaties of alliance with it have no more sense.” All the Germans I’ve talked to today are dead sure we shall have peace within a month. They are in high spirits. When I said to some of them today that the best time to have wanted peace was three weeks ago, before Hitler attacked Poland, and that maybe the British and French wouldn’t make peace now, they looked at me as if I were crazy. Peace now, I feel, would only be an armistice during which Hitler would further undermine the spirit of resistance in the democracies and strengthen his own armed forces until the day when he felt sure he could overrun the west of Europe.

The battle which is nearly over west of Warsaw and which will probably go down in history as the Battle of Kutno is a second Tannenberg. I asked a General Staff officer about that today. He gave me some figures. At Tannenberg the Russians lost 92,000 prisoners and 28,000 dead. Yesterday at Kutno alone the Germans
took 105,000 Polish prisoners; the day before, 50,000. The High Command, usually sparse with its adjectives, calls Kutno “one of the most destructive battles of all time.” After my brief look at the front it is plain, though, what has happened to the Poles. They have had no defence against the devastating attacks of the German bombers and the German tanks. They pitted a fairly good army by World War standards against a 1939 mechanized and motorized force which simply
drove
around them and through them. The German air force in the meantime destroyed their communications. The Polish High Command, it is true, seems to have had no idea of what it was up against. Why it kept its best army around Posen even to begin with, not to mention
after
the Germans had got
behind
Warsaw, mystifies even us amateur strategists. Had the Poles withdrawn behind the Vistula the first week of the war, they might have held out until winter, when the mud and the snow would have stopped the Germans.

Two bomb explosions in Berlin last Sunday night, one in front of the Air Ministry, the other in the entry-way of secret-police headquarters in the Alexanderplatz. No mention of them, of course, in the press or on the radio. The perpetrators got away in the black-out.

If the war goes on, it is still a question in my mind whether the mass of the people won’t swing behind the regime. The people, who are very patriotic, and are being fed a terrific barrage of propaganda about England alone being responsible for the war, may get the general idea that they have to “defend the Fatherland.” I have still to find a German, even among those who don’t like the regime, who sees anything wrong in the German destruction of Poland. All the moral attitudes of the outside world regarding the aggression against Poland find little echo among the people here. People
of all classes, women as well as men, have gathered in front of the windows in Berlin for a fortnight and approvingly gazed at the maps in which little red pins showed the victorious advance of the German troops in Poland
. As long as the Germans are successful and do not have to pull in their belts too much, this will not be an unpopular war.