Report from the Lair of the Beast. Nazi Germany Through the Eyes of an American Journalist
I’ve written this article almost nine years ago in Ukrainian. When I first learned about the Berlin Diary by William Shirer, I was astonished by many historical parallels with our time. Today is the 120th anniversary of William Shirer’s birth, so I translated the article for a Western audience. I strongly recommend you read this book and hope that the Western politicians will finally start learning history lessons.
In 1941, the book Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941 appeared in American bookshops and quickly became a bestseller. These were the diary entries of William Shirer, an American journalist, who lived in Germany for several years before World War II and witnessed the rise of Nazism, which soon turned Europe into a war zone.
From Paris to Berlin
The first entry in the diary was made not in Berlin, but in the fishing village of Lloret de Mar on the Spanish coast. Here, the author rested with his wife Teresa, restoring his badly damaged health. In the early 1930s, he worked as a journalist in India and Afghanistan, where he suffered from malaria and dysentery, and in the spring of 1932, he nearly lost his eyesight while skiing in the Alps. So the couple rented a house in Spain to relax “beautifully independent of the rest of the world, of events, of men, bosses, publishers, editors, relatives, and friends”. But this could not go on forever. On January 11, 1934, Shirer started his diary with an entry: “Our money is gone”. Fortunately, he didn’t have to look for a job for long: he received an offer from the Paris office of The New York Herald and accepted it without hesitation.
On February 6, 1934, William Shirer was already watching the riots in Paris when the far right tried to seize the Parliament building. The first entry in his diary could well have been the last, as the journalist was in the heart of the events and nearly caught a bullet from the riot police when they dispersed the crowd. The resignation of French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who explained that he could not ensure order and security with measures that would lead to further bloodshed, came as a surprise. “Imagine Stalin or Mussolini or Hitler hesitating to employ troops against a mob trying to overthrow their regimes!” the journalist wrote in his diary with sarcasm.
Fortunately, the tension in France had subsided. But things were getting hotter outside France. On June 30, recalling the purges of the SA (one of the Nazi military formations) organized by Hitler, Shirer wrote: “Wish I could get a post in Berlin. It’s a story I’d like to cover”. He couldn’t imagine that his dream would soon become a reality!
On August 9, Shirer was invited to Berlin to work as a correspondent for Universal News, a news service owned by the famous media mogul William Hearst. The venturesome journalist couldn’t help but accept, and a few weeks later, he and his wife were getting off the train at the Berlin train station.
The first to meet the foreign guests were… Gestapo agents. Luckily, there was no arrest or interrogation. One of them asked to see his passport. “He scanned it for several minutes, finally looked at me suspiciously, and said: ‘So… You are not Herr So and- So, then. You are Herr Shirer.’ ‘None other,’ I replied, ‘as you can see by the passport.’ He gave me one more suspicious glance, winked at his fellow click, saluted stiffly, and made off”.
On September 4, Shirer traveled to Nuremberg, where the Nazi Party rally was taking place. The medieval streets of the city were full of swastika flags and people in brown and black uniforms. It was here that Shirer first saw Hitler drive by his hotel in a car and “could not quite comprehend what hidden springs he undoubtedly unloosed in the hysterical mob which was greeting him so wildly”. In the evening, the journalist found himself among an ecstatic crowd of 10,000: people, eager to see the Fuhrer, asked him to go out onto the balcony of his hotel room. When he finally appeared Shirer was shocked by how his audience responded: “They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement”.
The party rally lasted until September 10. During these days, many events took place in Nuremberg, which allowed William to understand the human instincts Hitler was tapping into. This included the mystical atmosphere of the spectacles, speculation on the desire for revenge for the defeat in the last war, and the restoration of the power of the state. Fanatical young men from the imperial labor service marched in front of him and thousands of Germans. They shouted Nazi slogans and the audience went wild with their perfect marching step. The next day, 200,000 party officials gathered at Zeppelin Meadow and unfurled 21,000 flags in the spotlight. “‘We are strong and will get stronger,’ Hitler shouted at them through the microphone, his words echoing across the hushed field from the loud-speakers. And there, in the flood-lit night, jammed together like sardines, in one mass formation, the little men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and minds — with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems -until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd” Shirer wrote being astonished. But the spectacle on the closing day of the congress stirred the public even more. The army staged a drill on the Zeppelin Meadow. The madness of 300,000 spectators who heard the shots and smelled the gunpowder was hard to describe. “They acted today like children playing with tin soldiers,” the author wrote ironically.
One day, Shirer was caught in the crosshairs of the Nazi propaganda machine. On January 23, 1936, he woke up to a phone call from the Ministry of Propaganda. One of the government officials scolded him for an article about the oppression of Jews in Garmisch and hung up. But that was not the end of the matter: all day long the journalist was vilified on the radio and in the newspapers, accused of disrupting the Winter Olympics that were to take place in the town in a few days. Someone in the top brass was very hurt by a series of articles about the preparations for the Olympics because Schirer wrote that the Nazis had removed all signs like “Jews are not welcome” and that government officials had filled all the best hotels and left inconvenient pensions for the press. His German colleagues in the newsroom looked at him as a future victim of the Gestapo, and instead of calming down and distracting himself with something else, he became more and more irritated and eventually left the newsroom and went straight to the Ministry of Propaganda. He had a long argument with the government official who woke him up in the morning, demanding an apology in the press and on the radio. Having spoken, the journalist composed himself a bit, as he began to realize that no one could “had the power or the decency ever to correct a piece of Nazi propaganda once it had been launched, regardless of how big the lie”. After arguing with the official for a while, he gave up and went home.
1937 was a year of great change for Shearer. The news service where he worked went bankrupt, and he had to move to work for CBS Radio, becoming its foreign correspondent in Europe. In September, Shearer and his wife moved to Vienna, where the company was to be headquartered. In his diary, he sadly summarizes the results of his three years in Germany: “Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad”. Nevertheless, the journalist was glad that he was going to a neutral country and would be able to take a break from Nazi propaganda. But the next year showed that he would have a hard time in Austria as well…
The Austrian Referendum
The Nazis began preparations for the infamous Anschluss, and tensions in the country grew. In February 1938, the news of Hitler’s ultimatum spread throughout Austria. Under the threat of a German invasion, the authorities agreed to allow the Nazis into the government and to allow their party to operate. This was the beginning of the end for the state.
In an attempt to somehow restrain the Nazis, Chancellor Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite (referendum) in support of Austrian independence. But on March 11, Hitler issued an ultimatum: if the plebiscite were held, the German army would invade. The chancellor reversed his decision, but the invasion took place anyway. On March 12, Austria was occupied.
In a different situation, Shirer would have thought about his personal life and rejoiced, because he had recently become a father, and his daughter was born to the couple. But the events of the evening of March 11 did not allow him to rejoice. On his way back from the hospital from his wife’s visit, the journalist found himself in a crowd of Nazis who were running down the street in a frenzy of ecstasy, rejoicing at the cancellation of the plebiscite. Their fanatical views reminded him of the party congresses in Nuremberg. Later, on his way to the radio station where he was to be broadcast, Shirer again encountered Nazi supporters: “Crowds moving about all the way. Singing now. Singing Nazi songs. A few policemen standing around good-naturedly. What’s that on their arm? A red-black-white Swastika armband! So they’ve gone over too! I worked my way up Karntnerstrasse towards the Graben. Young toughs were heaving paving blocks into the windows of the Jewish shops. The crowd roared with delight”. In the morning, swastika flags flew all over Vienna, and the next day the new chancellor, Seiß-Inquart, signed the law on Austria’s entry into the Third Reich.
On April 10 of the same year, Shirer had the opportunity to observe a plebiscite organized by Hitler in support of the Anschluss. At one of the polling stations, located in the former imperial palace, he saw the conditions in which the voting took place: “I went inside one of the booths. Pasted on the wall in front of you was a sample ballot showing you how to mark yours with a Yes. There was also a wide slit in the corner of the booth which gave the election committee sitting a few feet away a pretty good view of how you voted!” It is not surprising that having seen such “transparency” of the electoral process, Shirer did not hesitate to announce the results of the vote (99% “yes”) on the evening broadcast immediately after the polls closed, having heard the first information from one of the Nazi government officials.
On the Road to War
The flywheel of German aggression continued to spin. The Nazis now turned their attention to Czechoslovakia, which included the predominantly German-populated Sudetenland region. The Ministry of Propaganda was intensively brainwashing the population, preparing them to accept the new “Anschluss.” On September 19, while in Berlin, Shearer wrote down his impressions of the local press in his diary: “Here are some of the headlines: WOMEN AND CHILDREN MOWED DOWN BY CZECH ARMOURED CARS, or BLOODY REGIME — NEW CZECH MURDERS OF GERMANS”. A week later, he watched a motorized division drive through the city toward the Czechoslovakian border. People were just returning from work and, according to the propagandists’ calculations, should have been greeting their soldiers. But only a handful of citizens stood on the sidewalk in complete silence, while everyone else hid in the subway. “It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen”. Shirer wrote in his diary.
But with each passing day, the war was inevitably approaching Europe. New concessions to Hitler by the Western powers only whetted his appetite. After the final invasion of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, the German leadership issued an ultimatum to the Poles in the summer, demanding that they give up the so-called Danzig Corridor, a part of the Baltic coast between East Prussia and the rest of Germany. Propaganda “guns” were also pointed in the Polish direction: newspapers were filled with headlines such as “Poland is violating peace in Europe.” This nonsense was eagerly believed in Germany (does this remind you of anything?). In early August 1939, when the world war was weeks away, Shearer had the opportunity to speak with a Wehrmacht captain who, sincerely indignant, asked why the Poles were provoking the Germans: “Haven’t we the right to a German city like Danzig?” The journalist could not help but ask in response: “Have you a right to a Czech city like Prague?” The captain responded with silence and a vacant stare that Shirer had seen on the faces of Germans more than once.
On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, starting World War II. Berliners responded to this news in a quite calm way: “The people in the street were apathetic when I drove to the Rundfunk for my first broadcast at eight-fifteen a.m. Across from the Adlon, the morning shift of workers was busy on the new I. G. Farben building just as if nothing had happened. None of the men bought the Extras which the newsboys were shouting”. War was already in the air, so its official announcement was no surprise.
Home
Every day, Shirer’s work became more difficult. He still managed to visit the battlefields, but it became almost impossible to inform his listeners about events in Germany and abroad. Before the broadcast, the texts of the messages were scrutinized by censors who removed every “suspicious” word. A year later, Shirer was already asking himself what he was doing here. “You cannot call the Nazis ‘Nazis’ or an invasion an ‘invasion.’ You are reduced to re-broadcasting the official communiques, which are lies, and which any automaton can do”. It got to the point where some censors themselves asked him why he was still there. Finally, in October 1940, the journalist decided to go home. First, he helped his wife and daughter, who had long lived in neutral Switzerland, to get out, and then he left himself.
On December 13, 1940, while aboard the ship Excambion in the port of Lisbon, William Shirer made his last entry in his diary, watching the lights on the coast: “For how long? Beyond Lisbon over almost all of Europe the lights were out. This little fringe on the southwest corner of the Continent kept them burning. Civilization, such as it was, had not yet been stamped out here by a Nazi boot. But next week? Next month? The month after? Would not Hitler’s hordes take this too and extinguish the last lights?”
Today we already know the answer to this question, as well as the fact that nobody wants to learn history lessons…
