Berlin Diary (46 page)

Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, today decreed that the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw henceforth must be shut off from the rest of the capital by barricades and placed under sharp police control. He says the Jews are “carriers of diseases and germs.” An American friend back from Warsaw tonight tells me the Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews. They are being herded into eastern Poland and forced to live in unheated shacks and robbed of any opportunity of earning bread and butter. Several thousand Jews from the Reich have also been sent to eastern Poland to die, he says.

B
ERLIN
,
November
20

The Nazis forced poor Prince August Wilhelm, fourth son of the Kaiser, to appear before our press conference at the Propaganda Ministry this evening and deny that Hitler had done anything to any
member of the Hohenzollern family, as rumour had had it of late. “Auwi,” as he’s popularly called, is the only Hohenzollern who was once an active Nazi. He was in fact a storm trooper in the S.A. and was introduced to us today by Dr. Boehmer as “
Obergruppenführer
Prince August Wilhelm.” Nervous and a bit ashamed of his role, he told us what he had been told to say, ending his remarks with a resounding “
Heil Hitler!
” A curious end, I mused, for the Hohenzollerns, that resourceful Prussian family which produced Frederick the Great and Frederick’s father and Wilhelm II and raised first Prussia and then Germany to a world power.

B
ERLIN
,
November
21

Gestapo chief Himmler claimed today that he has found the man who planted the bomb that so narrowly missed blowing Hitler to bits at Munich
a fortnight ago. His name is given as Georg Elser, thirty-six, and behind him, says Himmler, was the British Intelligence Service and Otto Strasser, a former Nazi leader and now a bitter enemy of Hitler, who lives in France. Himmler’s account of how Elser did it sounds fishy indeed. As one German put it to me today after reading the account: “Now I’m sure Himmler planted that bomb.”
¹³

Himmler also announced today, as if to confuse the public, that the alleged leader of the British Intelligence Service for Western Europe, a certain Mr. Best, and his accomplice, a certain Captain Stevens, had been nabbed by the Gestapo on November 9 at the German-Dutch frontier. This clears up the kidnapping case we heard about from Amsterdam. The Dutch say it took place on Dutch soil.

A writer in the
Völkische Beobachter
will say tomorrow that after seeing Elser “you almost forget you are in the presence of a satanic monster. His eyes are intelligent and the face rather soft.”

What Himmler and his gang are up to, obviously, is to convince the gullible German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides. The censor today cut out all reference in my script to the Reichstag fire.

B
ERLIN
,
November
23

Thanksgiving today. At the home of Chargé d’Affaires Alexander Kirk a hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table. At dinner I had another turkey at the Oechsners’, dragging Dorothy [Oechsner
] over to the studio at midnight with me for a little interview on the air as to how she did it in war-time rationed Germany. She explained nicely how she got the whipped cream for the pumpkin pie by use of a new-fangled machine which extracts cream from butter.

After December 1, horses, cows, and pigs not residing on regular farms are to get food cards too.

B
ERLIN
,
November
26

Bill White
, son of William Allen, has been here and this week helped me make a study of night life in war-time which CBS wants me to air tonight. We found it booming. Off to Geneva tomorrow for a few days.

G
ENEVA
,
December
1

The Soviet Union has invaded Finland! Yesterday Red air-force bombers attacked Helsinki, killing seventy-five civilians, wounding several hundred. The great champion of the working class, the mighty preacher against “Fascist aggression,” the righteous stander-up for the “scrupulous and punctilious observance of treaties” (to quote Molotov as of a month ago), has fallen upon the most decent and workable little democracy in Europe in violation of half a dozen “solemn” treaties. The whole moral foundation which the Soviets have built up for themselves in international relations in the last ten years has collapsed like a house of cards, which the skeptics and anti-Communists always claimed it was. Stalin reveals himself of the same stamp as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japs. Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as “imperialist” as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.

I have raged for thirty hours; could not sleep last night, though I got little chance to. Since yesterday noon I have been continually on the telephone to Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Bern, Amsterdam, and London, organizing communications from Finland for our broadcasts, determined to get them through not only for our own sakes, but so the Finnish case may get a hearing at home. It has been hard sledding, one defeat
after another, but we’re getting our broadcasts through. To begin with, Maxie tied up the Geneva transmitter, our only neutral outlet, for NBC. He also got to the Finns and Swedes first and somehow put over the idea that the talks of the Finnish President, Kallio, and the Foreign Minister, Erkko, were to be exclusive for NBC. A telephone call to the authorities in Helsinki cleared that up so far as the Finns were concerned, but I had great trouble convincing the Swedes in Stockholm, on whom I must depend for relaying everything from Finland, that the talks were not exclusive for NBC but were for us too. Searched all yesterday afternoon for a transmitter. The RRG in Berlin would give me neither a transmitter nor transit telephone lines through Germany. They have orders not to offend Russia. Called Amsterdam and tried to get the Dutch to lend me a transmitter but they were too frightened for their neutrality, which of course neither Russia nor Germany will respect one day if it is profitable not to. Finally Ed [Murrow] solved all our difficulties, though we will not tell the Germans nor the Swedes nor even the Finns. He got the BBC to pick up the Swedish medium-wave transmitter, which in turn was taking the Helsinki broadcast by telephone line from Finland, and rebroadcasting it. The BBC then piped their pick-up to Rugby, where it was short-waved to our studios in New York. The ordinary way to have done a broadcast from Helsinki would have been to bring it by telephone line from Helsinki through Sweden and Germany to Switzerland and then short-wave it to New York through the Geneva transmitter. But Germany’s refusal to give us transit telephone facilities and Maxie’s tying up the local transmitter balked that. New York says our transmission from Helsinki was infinitely better than the opposition’s;
theirs apparently was done by having Geneva pick up the Stockholm medium-waver, but since London has better facilities for receiving than has Geneva, our hook-up was bound to be superior.

This afternoon I arranged with the Helsinki correspondent of the
Christian Science Monitor
to do the first eyewitness account of the Helsinki bombing—a scoop. And Harald Diettrich, head of Germany’s shortwave organization and a cool and fine technician (he has almost an artist’s appreciation of the technical job American broadcasters are doing to get their European pick-ups, and though a fanatical Nazi who bears watching, he is the one man in Germany I work smoothly and successfully with), told me on the phone he would do his best to get Goebbels to allow us transit telephone facilities if I guarantee my speakers are all Americans.

Running a temperature from the flu, but shall keep going on these Finnish broadcasts. Tess pitched in wonderfully, spending several hours shouting into the phone in several languages, including the Scandinavian, which (Danish) she speaks perfectly, dispatching and receiving telegrams, which must be done exclusively over the phone, and generally helping. My telephone bill yesterday and today, including numerous urgent calls to Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and New York, has run over a thousand dollars and my cable and telegraph bill must come to almost half that. But Paul White
and Klauber say: “Get the broadcasts.”