Berlin Diary (85 page)

B
ERLIN
,
September
7

Last night we had the biggest and most effective bombing of the war. The Germans have brought in several more batteries of
flak
during the past few days, and last night they put up a terrific barrage, but failed to hit a single plane.

The British were aiming better last night. When I returned from the
Rundfunk
shortly after three a.m., the sky over the north-central part of Berlin
was lit up by two great fires. The biggest was in the freight house of the Lehrter railroad station. Another railroad station at the Schussendorfstrasse also was hit. A rubber factory, I’m told, was set afire.

Despite this the High Command said in its communiqué today: “The enemy again attacked the German capital last night, causing some damage to persons and property as a result of his indiscriminate throwing of bombs on non-military targets in the middle of the city. The German air force, as reprisal, has therefore begun to attack London with strong forces.”

Not a hint here—and the German people do not know it—that the Germans have been dropping bombs in the very centre of London for the last two weeks. My censors warned me today not to go into this matter. I apparently have some German listeners, who can
pick up my talk from the German transmitter that shortwaves it to New York. Since it’s a German transmitter, there is no penalty.

The statement of the High Command, obviously forced upon it by Hitler himself—he often takes a hand in writing the official army communiqués—deliberately perpetrates the lie that Germany
has only decided to bomb London as a result of the British
first
bombing Berlin. And the German people will fall for this, as they fall for almost everything they’re told nowadays. Certainly never before in modern times—since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world—have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.

And so tonight the High Command, which all good Germans believe tells only the gospel truth, issued a special communiqué saying that as reprisal for the British raids on Berlin, London was attacked with strong forces for the
first
time today. As a result of this reprisal attack, it says, “one great cloud of smoke tonight stretches from the middle of London to the mouth of the Thames.”

To give American radio listeners an idea of the kind of propaganda (though I couldn’t label it as such) which the German people are being subjected to now, I read in my broadcast tonight the following quotation from today’s Berlin newspaper, the
Börsen Zeitung
: “While the attack of the German air force is made on purely military objectives—this fact is recognized by both the British press and radio—the RAF knows nothing better to do than continually to attack non-military objectives in Germany. A perfect example of this was the criminal attack on the middle of Berlin last
night. In this attack only lodging-houses were hit; not a single military objective.”

The German people have no inkling—because the Nazi press and radio have carefully suppressed the story—that in August alone more than one thousand English civilians were killed by the Luftwaffe’s attacks on British “military objectives.”

Another type of lying here: The official statement of last night’s bombing of Berlin says that the first two waves of British planes were turned back by the capital’s defences, and that only a few planes of the third wave were able to slip through. Now, every Berliner knows that from the minute the alarm was sounded last night, British planes were heard overhead. There were several waves and each time you heard the hum of the motors. Yet I fear the majority will believe the official explanation.

The
Börsen Zeitung
even went so far last night as to tell its innocent readers that all military objectives in Germany were so well protected by anti-aircraft guns that it was quite impossible for the British planes to bomb them. Therefore the British went after unprotected civilian houses. How many Germans will ask then, why, with an admitted concentration of guns in and around Berlin such as no other area in the world has ever seen—why has not a single plane yet been brought down?

And personally I’m getting a little tired of the censorship restrictions on our telling even a modicum of truth about this air war to America. I shall not stand for it much longer.

B
ERLIN
,
September
8

All Sunday morning papers carry the same headline:
“BIG ATTACK ON LONDON AS REPRISAL.”

B
ERLIN
,
September
9

A typical Nazi trick was played on me today. The three censors fought with me so long over the script of my two p.m. broadcast, which they charged was unduly ironic about the “reprisal” bombings of London, which it was, that by the time they had finally okayed it, there was no time for me to go on the air. My five minutes of air time was over.

There was no objection to this, since the censors have a perfect right to hold up a script they don’t like, just as I have the right not to talk if I think they’ve censored the true sense out of my talk. But this evening I learn from Paul White in New York, through channels which permit me to receive cables from him without the Germans knowing their contents, that the shortwave director of the German Broadcasting Company cabled him today an explanation of why I did not broadcast at two p.m. The cable read: “Regret Shirer arrived too late today to broadcast.”

The British bombers failed to come over last night or the night before. Official explanation to the German people: The British planes tried to get through both nights to Berlin, but were turned back. Whenever the British choose not to bomb Berlin henceforth, I hear, Goebbels has ordered the people to be told that they tried to but were repulsed by the capital’s magnificent defences.

Whenever the British come over Germany
now, most
of the German radio stations hurriedly go off the air so as not to serve as radio beacons for the British pilots. The German radio announced tonight that its broadcasts, already greatly curtailed in the last fortnight on “military grounds,” will be further curtailed. “This is no time,” said the announcement, “to explain further the reasons for this.”

B
ERLIN
,
September
10

A light raid last night, though a few houses were demolished. Commenting on the bombing, the
Lokal Anzeiger
says: “The fliers of His Britannic Majesty have given a heavy blow to the laws governing an honourable and manly conduct of war.”

At the Propaganda Ministry today we were shown one of Britain’s “secret weapons,” a new sort of incendiary weapon. It looks like a large calling card—about two inches square—and is made of a celluloid substance. Two celluloid sheets are pasted together and between them is a tablet of phosphorus. The British drop them in a dampened condition. When they dry, after a few minutes of sun, or ten minutes of dry, daytime air, they ignite and cause a small flame that burns for two or three minutes. Actually, they were first used by the Irish Republicans, who dropped them in letterboxes to burn the mail in England
. The Germans admit they have set fire to fields of grain and hay as well as a few forests. Probably the British, who started dropping them in August, hoped to burn up a considerable acreage of grain. Unfortunately, we had a very wet August and few of them got dry enough to ignite.

B
ERLIN
,
September
11

Last night the severest bombing yet. And the German papers are beside themselves. The
Börsen Zeitung
calls our pilot visitors of last evening “barbarians” and bannerlines:
“CRIME OF BRITISH ON BERLIN.”
According to the Nazis, only five persons were killed, but for the first time the British dropped a considerable number of fire bombs and there were quite a few small fires. Three incendiaries fell in the yard of the Adlon, five in the garden of the Embassy next door, and a half-dozen more in the garden of Dr. Goebbels just behind the Embassy. The office of the Minister of Munitions between the Adlon and the Embassy also was hit. All the incendiaries were put out before they did any damage. Actually the British were aiming at the Potsdamer Bahnhof, and they had bad luck. They took almost a perfect run for it, their first bombs hitting the Reichstag and then falling in a direct line towards the Potsdamer station on the Brandenburger Tor, the Embassy, and in the gardens behind. But the last one was about three hundred yards short of the station.

Today the BBC claims that the Potsdamer station was hit, but this is untrue and at least three Germans today who heard the BBC told me they felt a little disillusioned at the British radio’s lack of veracity. The point is that it is bad propaganda for the British to broadcast in German to the people here that a main station has been set on fire when it hasn’t been touched.

I almost met a quick end last night. Racing home from the
Rundfunk
after the all-clear at fifty miles an hour in my car, I suddenly skidded into some debris and came to a stop twenty feet from a fresh bomb crater on the East-West Axis about a hundred and fifty yards
from the Brandenburger Tor. In the black-out you could not see it, and the air-wardens had not yet discovered it. A splinter from the bomb that made this crater hurtled two hundred yards through the air to the American Embassy and crashed through the double window of the office of Donald Heath, our First Secretary. It cut a neat hole in the two windows, continued directly over Don’s desk, and penetrated four inches into the wall on the far side of the room. Don was supposed to have had night duty last night and would have been sitting at his desk at the time, but for some reason Chargé d’Affaires Kirk had told him to go home and himself had done the night trick.