Berlin Diary (54 page)

I think in the end Norway and Sweden will pay for their refusal to allow Allied troops across their territories to help Finland. To be sure, they were not in a pleasant spot. Baron von Stumm of the F.O. confirmed to me today that Hitler had informed both Oslo and Stockholm that had Allied troops set foot in Scandinavia, Germany immediately would have invaded the
north to cut them off. The trouble with the Scandinavians is that a hundred years of peace have made them soft, peace-at-any-pricers. And they have not had the courage to look into the future. By the time they make up their minds to take sides, it will be too late, as it was with Poland. Sandler, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, alone seems to have seen the situation correctly, and he has been forced to resign.

Finland now is at the mercy of Russia. On any fake pretext the Soviets can henceforth overrun the country, since the Finns must now give up their fortifications, as the Czechs had to do after Munich. (Czecho lasted five and a half months after that.) Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.

With peace in Finland, the talk here is once more of the German offensive. X, a German, keeps telling me it will be frightful; poison gas, bacteria, etc. Like all Germans, though he should know better, he thinks it will be so terrible that it will bring a quick victory for Germany. It never occurs to him that the enemy too has poison gas and bacteria.

A record: A letter from Carl Brandt posted in New York October 7 last year arrived day before yesterday, March 11. It had been opened by both the British and German censors.

B
ERLIN
,
March
14

In London last night, one Mohamed Singh Azad shot and killed Sir Michael O’Dwyer. Not Gandhi, but most of the other Indians I know, will feel
this is divine retribution. O’Dwyer was once Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and bore a share of responsibility in the 1919 Amritsar massacre, in which General Dyer shot fifteen hundred Indians in cold blood. When I was at Amritsar eleven years after, in 1930, the bitterness still stuck in the people there. Goebbels makes the most of the assassination.
Nachtausgabe
headline tonight:
“THE DEED OF AN INDIAN FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM—SHOTS AGAINST THE OPPRESSOR.”
This from Germans who are carrying out mass murders in Bohemia and Poland.

I
TEMS:
Two more Germans beheaded today for “damaging the people’s interests.” A third sentenced to death; same charge…. The Germans boast that prices here have not risen. Today in the Adlon I paid a dollar for a dish of boiled carrots…. Göring today decrees that the people must give up their copper, bronze, brass, tin, lead, and nickel. How can Germany
fight a long war lacking these? In 1938 Germany imported from abroad nearly a million tons of copper, 200,000 tons of lead, 18,000 tons of tin, and 4,000 tons of nickel.

B
ERLIN
,
March
15

A year ago last night Hitler got Hacha, then President of what was left of Czechoslovakia after Munich and the Nazi-engineered “secession” of Slovakia, into his Chancellery and after threatening until four a.m. that he would destroy Prague and its million people with the Luftwaffe, forced the poor old man to “ask” for German “protection.” (Strange how few Germans know
yet
of what took place that night.) Today Hitler forces Hacha to send him a “congratulatory”
telegram, praising him for having destroyed Czechoslovakia and wishing him victory in this war. Hitler’s cynicism is of rich quality, but millions of Germans believe that today’s exchange of telegrams is perfectly sincere. Hitler replies that he is “deeply moved” by Hacha’s wire and adds: “Germany has no intention of threatening the national existence of the Czechs.” When he has already destroyed it! Neurath, a typical example of the German aristocrats who sacrificed their souls (they had no minds) to Hitler, sends him a slavish telegram thanking him for his “historic deed” and pledging the “unbreakable loyalty of Bohemia and Moravia.” In an interview with the German press Neurath says the Czechs are content with their lot, all except “a few intellectuals and those elements of disturbance which were put down in a manner the sharpness of which was not misunderstood.” He refers to the mass shooting of Czech students last fall.

My good friend Z, a captain in the navy on duty with the High Command, has not appeared in uniform all week. Today he told me why. “I have no more white shirts. I have not been able to have my laundry done for eight weeks. I have no soap to wash my shirts myself, being in the same position as the laundry. I have only colored shirts left. So I wear civilian clothes.” A nice state for the navy to be in.

B
ERLIN
,
March
17

Much excitement on this Palm Sunday in official quarters over a war communiqué claiming that the Luftwaffe hit and damaged three British battleships in Scapa Flow last night. More important to me was that for the first time the Germans admitted that during the raid their planes also bombed British air
bases at Stromness and Kirkwall. In this half-hearted war this is the first time that one side has purposely dropped bombs on the
land
of the other. It heralds, I suppose, the spring opening of the war in earnest. Editor Kircher of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
attempts to answer a question this morning that has bothered neutral military minds for a long time. Why haven’t the Germans used their acknowledged air superiority over the Allies? Why are they waiting while the Allies, with American help, catch up? Kircher’s answer is that the Allies have not been catching up, that Germany’s relative superiority has been greatly increased in the last seven months.

Spring at last threatens to arrive. Millions of Germans are beginning to thaw out after the worst winter they can remember. For some reason there was no hot water in most apartments today, though it was Sunday. Several friends lined up in my room for a bath.

B
ERLIN
,
March
18

For two and a half hours this morning while a snowstorm raged, Hitler and Mussolini conferred at the Brenner. We opine Hitler wanted to make sure of the Duce before embarking on his spring plans, whatever they are. The Wilhelmstrasse plant tonight was that Hitler had won over Musso to the idea of joining a tripartite bloc with Germany and Soviet Russia which will establish a new order in Europe. Maybe so.

B
ERLIN
,
March
19

John Chapman, whom I have not seen since high-school days in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, called. He is foreign editor of
Business Week
, and has just come up
from the Balkans and Italy. He had some good dope. He doubts that Italy will go into the war. So do I. Italy
can
be blockaded. John said he noticed a lessening of the drive in Fascism. People are more relaxed. Il Duce does not push them so hard. He’s aging, growing fat, and spends much time with his youthful blonde mistress, by whom—John was told in Rome—he has just had a child. John said he saw Pétain in Madrid. The old man said: “I pray that the Germans try to break through the Maginot Line. It can be broken through—at a cost. But let them infiltrate through. I’d like to be in command of the Allied army then.”

I called on Major X of the X Embassy this afternoon. He sees three possibilities open to Germany now:

1. Germany can make peace. He thinks Hitler wants peace. And that he could afford to offer a peace which would sound pretty fair and might be acceptable to all but the English, and which would still consolidate most of his gains. Such a peace, he argued, would be equivalent to a great German victory.
   

2. Germany can continue as at present, keeping Scandinavia and Italy neutral and co-operative economically, and developing southeastern Europe and especially Russia. This would take time, at least three years, but once developed, it would make the Allied blockade comparatively ineffective. The major pointed out that no nation which lost control of the seas had ever in all history won a major war. But he thinks it might be accomplished this time if Germany keeps her northern, southern, and southeastern doors open and develops Russia sufficiently. He regards the Russian tie-up as Hitler’s master stroke, but says it was forced upon him by the German General Staff, which simply told him that war with the West was impossible if Russia
   joined the Allies, or even remained strictly neutral, but unfriendly to Germany.
   

3. Germany can try to force the issue on the western front. This he regards as improbable. The German General Staff, he says, has a great respect for the Maginot Line and the French army. He admits the Maginot Line might be pierced—at great cost—but that this would not necessarily win the war.