Berlin Diary (83 page)

B
ERLIN
,
August
24

The Germans now admit serious sabotage in Holland. General Christiansen, the German military commander there, warns that if it continues, fines will be assessed against Dutch communities and hostages taken. The nature of the sabotage may be judged by the general’s admonition to the Dutch about “failing to report the landing of enemy flyers on Dutch soil.” He adds: “People in Holland who give shelter to enemy soldiers will be severely punished, even by death.” This seems to confirm some private reports I’ve had that the British are landing agents by parachute at night.

The Germans deny they’re taking food from the occupied countries, but I see in a Dutch paper an official statement by the German authorities to the effect that between May 15 and July 31, 150,000,000 pounds of foodstuffs and fresh vegetables have been sent from Holland to the Reich.

New clothing cards here this week. They give 150 points instead of 100, as last year, but it’s a typical Nazi swindle. You get more total points, but you also have to give more points for each item of clothing. For something you could formerly buy for 60 points, this year you must pay 80 points, and so on. An overcoat takes 120 of the 150 points. One point actually entitles you to sixteen grams’ worth of clothing material, the card to about five pounds a year.

The Foreign Office has turned down America’s request for safe conduct for American ships to evacuate children under sixteen from the war zones.

B
ERLIN
,
August
26

We had our first big air-raid of the war last night. The sirens sounded at twelve twenty a.m. and the all-clear came at three twenty-three a.m. For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. The concentration of anti-aircraft fire was the greatest I’ve ever witnessed. It provided a magnificent, a terrible sight. And it was strangely ineffective. Not a plane was brought down; not one was even picked up by the searchlights, which flashed back and forth frantically across the skies throughout the night.

The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could happen. When this war began, Göring assured them it couldn’t. He boasted that no enemy planes could ever break through the outer and inner rings of the capital’s anti-aircraft defence. The Berliners are a naïve and simple people. They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it. Göring made matters worse by informing the population only three days ago that they need not go to their cellars when the sirens sounded, but only when they heard the
flak
going off near by. The implication was that it would never go off. That made people sure that the British bombers, though they might penetrate to the suburbs, would never be able to get over the city proper. And then last night the guns all over the city suddenly began pounding and you could hear the British motors humming directly overhead, and from all reports there was a pell-mell,
frightened rush to the cellars by the five million people who live in this town.

I was at the
Rundfunk
writing my broadcast when the sirens sounded, and almost immediately the bark of the
flak
began. Oddly enough, a few minutes before, I had had an argument with the censor from the Propaganda Ministry as to whether it was possible to bomb Berlin. London had just been bombed. It was natural, I said, that the British should try to retaliate. He laughed. It was impossible, he said. There were too many anti-aircraft guns around Berlin.

I found it hard to concentrate on my script. The gunfire near the
Rundfunk
was particularly heavy and the window of my room rattled each time a battery fired or a bomb exploded. To add to the confusion, the air-wardens, in their fire-fighting overalls, kept racing through the building ordering everyone to the shelters. The wardens at the German radio are mostly porters and office boys and it was soon evident that they were making the most of their temporary authority. Most of the Germans on duty, however, appeared to lose little time in getting to the cellar.

I was scheduled to speak at one A.M. As I’ve explained before in these notes, to get to the studio to broadcast we have to leave the building where we write our scripts and have them censored, and dash some two hundred yards through a blacked-out vacant lot to the sheds where the microphones are. As I stepped out of the building at five minutes to one, the light guns protecting the radio station began to fire away wildly. At this moment I heard a softer but much more ominous sound. It was like hail falling on a tin roof. You could hear it dropping through the trees and on the roofs of the sheds. It was shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. For the first time in my life I wished I had a steel helmet. There
had always been something repellent to me about a German helmet, something symbolic of brute Germanic force. At the front I had refused to put one on. Now I rather thought I could overcome my prejudice. I hesitated in the shelter of the doorway. In two or three minutes now my broadcast would begin. I made a dash for it, running blindly, frightenedly down the path, stumbling down the wooden stairway where the terrace was. Sigrid had lent me her flashlight. I switched it on. A guard in the doorway yelled to put it out. As he shouted, I crashed into the corner of a shed and sprawled into the sand. The sound of the shrapnel falling all around egged me on. One last dash and I made the studio door.

“You’re crazy,” snapped the S.S. guard who had taken shelter from the splinters in the doorway. “Where’s your pass?”

“I’ve got a broadcast in just one minute,” I panted.

“I don’t care. Where’s your pass?”

I finally found it. In the studio cell the engineer requested me to speak very close to the microphone. He did not say why, but the reason was obvious. The closer to the mike I spoke, the less “outside” noise would be picked up. But I wanted the guns to be heard in America. The censors had allowed me to pronounce only one sentence about the raid, merely stating that one was on.

Actually when I spoke there seemed to be a most unfortunate lull in the firing. Only in the distance, through the studio doors, could I hear a faint rumble. Apparently the guns were more audible in America than in my studio, because a few minutes later I picked up the rest of our program by shortwave to hear Elmer Davis remark in New York that the sound of guns or bombs during my broadcast was most realistic. This pleased me greatly, but I noticed deep frowns on the faces of the German officials who also caught Mr. Davis’s comment.

Sigrid, who spoke for Mutual a half-hour later, pluckily braved the shrapnel which seemed to be falling even thicker than before, though several of us tried to dissuade her from going to the studio. As it was, in trying to dodge one hail of splinters, she stumbled and fell, receiving an ugly gash in the leg. She went on with her broadcast, though in great pain. But luck was not with her. The same transmitter which had functioned perfectly for CBS and NBC only a few minutes before suddenly broke down and her talk did not get through to America.

Until almost dawn we watched the spectacle from a balcony. There was a low ceiling of clouds, and the German searchlight batteries tried vainly to pick up the British bombers. The beams of light would flash on for a few seconds, search the skies wildly, and then go off. The British were cruising as they wished over the heart of the city and flying quite low, judging by the sound of their motors. The German
flak
was firing wildly, completely by sound. It was easy, from the firing, to follow a plane across the city as one battery after another picked up the sound of the motors and fired blindly into the sky. Most of the noise came from the north, where the armament factories are.

Today the bombing is the one topic of conversation among Berliners. It’s especially amusing therefore to see that Goebbels has permitted the local newspapers to publish only a six-line communiqué about it, to the effect that enemy planes flew over the capital, dropped a few incendiary bombs on two suburbs, and damaged one wooden hut in a garden. There is not a line about the explosive bombs which we all plainly heard. Nor is there a word about the three streets in Berlin which have been roped off all day today to prevent the curious from seeing what a bomb can do to a house. It will be interesting
to watch the reaction of the Berliners to the efforts of the authorities to hush up the extent of the raid. It’s the first time they’ve been able to compare what actually happened with what Dr. Goebbels reported. The British also dropped a few leaflets last night, telling the populace that “the war which Hitler started will go on, and it will last as long as Hitler does.” That’s good propaganda, but unfortunately few people were able to find the leaflets, there being only a handful dropped.

B
ERLIN
,
August
29

The British came over in force again last night and for the first time killed Germans in the capital of the Reich. The official account is ten persons killed and twenty-nine wounded in Berlin. At the Kottbuserstrasse out towards Tempelhof (which the British probably were aiming at) and not far from the Görlitzer railroad station (which they might have been aiming at) two hundred-pound bombs landed in the street, tore off the leg of an air-raid warden standing at the entrance to his house, and killed four men and two women, who, unwisely, were watching the fireworks from a doorway.

I think the populace of Berlin is more affected by the fact that the British planes have been able to penetrate to the centre of Berlin without trouble than they are by the first casualties. For the first time the war has been brought home to them. If the British keep this up, it will have a tremendous effect upon the morale of the people here.

Goebbels today suddenly changed his tactics. His orders after the first big bombing were to play the story down in the press. Today he orders the newspapers to cry out at the “brutality” of the British fliers in attacking the defenceless women and children of Berlin.
One must keep in mind that the people here have not yet been told of the murderous bombings of London by the Luftwaffe. The invariable headline today about last night’s raid is:
“COWARDLY BRITISH ATTACK.”
And the little
Doktor
makes the papers drum into the people that German planes attack only military objectives in Britain, whereas the “British pirates” attack “on the personal orders of Churchill” only non-military objectives. No doubt the German people will fall for this lie too. One paper achieves a nice degree of hysteria: it says the RAF has been ordered “to massacre the population of Berlin.”

It’s obvious from what we’ve seen here the last few nights—and Göring must have known it—that there is no defence against the night bombers. Neither on Sunday nor last night did the anti-aircraft defences of Berlin, which are probably the best in the world, even spot a single British plane in the beam of a searchlight, let alone bring one down. The official communiqué, hesitating to tell the local people that any planes were brought down last night over the city when thousands of them probably saw that none were, announced today that one bomber was shot down on its way
to
Berlin and another after it
left
Berlin.

I had my own troubles at the radio last night. First, the censors announced that we could no longer mention a raid while it was on. (In London Ed Murrow not only mentions it, but describes it.) Secondly, I got into somewhat of a row with the German radio officials. As soon as I had finished my broadcast, they ordered me to the cellar. I tried to explain that I had come here as a war correspondent and that in ordering me to the cellar they were preventing me from exercising my profession. We exchanged some rather sharp words. Lord Haw-Haw, I notice, is the only other person around here except
the very plucky girl secretaries who does not rush to the shelter after the siren sounds. I have avoided him for a year, but have been thinking lately it might be wise to get acquainted with the traitor. In the air-raids he has shown guts.