Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

10 “On Our Island”

On April 20, 1939, AP bureau chief Lochner dutifully set out to observe the lavish celebration of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. “I sat for four hours in the reviewing stand watching the biggest military display in German history,” he wrote his daughter and son back in Chicago on April 26. “You can imagine how a pacifist like myself falls for that stuff!” Among the troops on parade was Wolfgang Wosseng, who had worked as an “office boy” for Lochner and was then called up as a Potsdam grenadier. While everyone else was wildly cheering, Lochner couldn’t help thinking that Wosseng could be forced to shoot at similar young men in different uniforms very soon. “If that parade is a sample, I tell you the next war will be more terrible than anything the world has known,” he continued in his letter. “The war of 1914 will have been child’s play compared to this.”

Unlike Wiegand, Lochner was far from convinced that Hitler would stop with the easy conquests, avoiding the fatal step that would trigger a new conflagration. “I fear the Germans make one big mistake: they completely underestimate the potential forces arrayed against them,” he explained to his children. Warning that it is always dangerous to underestimate one’s opponents, he added: “Queer that the top leaders in Germany should repeat that mistake of 1914–1918! Remember how they used to scoff at the possibility that America could ship troops across the ocean? Now they drill into the German people that England is decrepit and won’t fight; that France is torn with domestic strife; that the U.S.A. is a big bag of wind, etc., etc. A great pity!”

But Hitler and his entourage weren’t the only ones to indulge in wishful thinking. The reports by Truman Smith and others in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin about the rapidly growing strength of the German military were often greeted with skepticism in Washington, and the authors viewed as alarmists. Still, there was a realization that war was a growing possibility. By early summer, Moffat, the State Department’s Chief of the Division of European Affairs, put the chances of a new conflict at 50-50.

For American correspondents and officials, the key question was how well prepared were the countries Germany was most likely to attack—first of all, Poland. Knickerbocker, the former Berlin correspondent who was still traveling around Europe, recalled that everyone wanted to know whether the Poles could hold out long enough for the French to mobilize an offensive and come to their rescue. “Optimistic Poles said they could hold out for three years; pessimistic Poles said one year,” he wrote. “The French thought the Poles could hold out for six months.”

On August 18, Moffat noted in his diary: “The Polish ambassador called. He had little to offer other than to reiterate the belief of his Government that German strength was overrated… He said that the German army was not the army of 1914. The officers had insufficient training and had not been allowed to remain long enough with the same units of troops. The best generals had been liquidated, and the remaining generals were merely ‘Party hacks.’ !! The German people did not want to fight, and it would be suicidal to start a war when conditions were already so bad that people were being rationed as to foodstuffs.”

Moffat concluded, “The whole conversation represented a point of view of unreasonable optimism and still more unreasoning underrating of one’s opponent, that, if typical of Polish mentality in general, causes me to feel considerable foreboding.”

As he continued to cover the unfolding drama in Europe for CBS, Shirer was beyond foreboding. He was deeply pessimistic. Even his good friend John Gunther, the former Chicago Daily News reporter who had launched what would prove to be a highly successful career as an author with his 1936 bestseller Inside Europe, was more reserved in his judgments after the sellout of Czechoslovakia. In the introduction to the new edition of the book that was published near the end of 1938, he noted “the death of the Czechoslovak nation in its present form,” but declared, “There is a chance—just a chance but a chance—that the Munich Agreement may bring a European settlement.” As late as July 28, 1939, when Shirer met Gunther in Geneva, the CBS man wrote in his diary, “John fairly optimistic about peace.”

Returning to Berlin in early August, Shirer found his darkening mood turning into open anger. On the train from Basel, he observed that the passengers “looked clean and decent, the kind that made us like Germans, as people, before the Nazis.” In a discussion with someone he identified as Captain D—“a World War officer of proved patriotism”—Shirer recorded that the German, who had earlier professed to be against a new war, “became violent today at the very mention of the Poles and the British,” taking his cue from Hitler’s attacks on both. His diary entry on August 9 chronicles their heated exchange:

March 15, 1939, was the date when German troops had marched into Prague and Hitler declared, “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!”

Shirer could see that the same fate awaited Poland. The next day, he marveled: “How completely isolated a world the German people live in.” German newspapers were trumpeting headlines like “Poland? Look Out!” and “Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig—Unbelievable Agitation of the Polish Archmadness.”

“For perverse perversion of truth, this is good,” Shirer noted. “You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.”

Convinced that Hitler and the Germans were about to plunge the continent into a new war, he used his diary as a way to release his frustration, not sparing anyone. “Struck by the ugliness of German women on the streets and cafés,” he wrote. “As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to.”

From Berlin, Shirer went to Danzig, finding the city “completely Nazified,” but he quickly concluded the real issue was not the status of that purportedly “Free City.” In a broadcast from the neighboring Polish port city of Gdynia on August 13, he talked about the relative calm in Danzig, despite all the speculation that “this powder-keg of Europe” was about to ignite a new war. He concluded that Hitler might not be pushing for a confrontation over the status of that city as quickly as generally believed. But Danzig, he warned, “is only a symbol—for both sides. The issue, of course, for the Poles, is the future of Poland as an independent nation with a secure outlet to the sea. For the Germans it’s the future of East Prussia cut off from the motherland, the future of the whole German stake in the East. And for most of the rest of Europe the issue is that of German domination on the continent.”

Taking the train from Gdynia to Warsaw right after making that broadcast, Shirer chatted with two Polish radio engineers who expressed confidence about their country’s ability to resist Hitler. “We’re ready. We will fight,” they told him. “We were born under German rule in this neighborhood and we’d rather be dead than go through it again.” In the Polish capital, he was further impressed by how “calm and confident” the inhabitants seemed, despite the relentless propaganda onslaughts from Berlin. His worry, though, was that the Poles were “too romantic, too confident” and they were ignoring the signals that the Soviet Union might also have designs on them.

By the time he left Warsaw to return to Berlin a week later, Shirer had formed a judgment about how the Poles would react to any attempted takeover of their country. “I think the Poles will fight,” he concluded. “I know I said that, wrongly, about the Czechs a year ago. But I say it again about the Poles.”

On August 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact in a Kremlin ceremony, with Stalin looking on. Two days earlier, Anthony Biddle, the American ambassador to Poland, had asked for permission from Washington to begin evacuating the families of his staffers. The news of Ribbentrop’s imminent mission to Moscow was already out, and, as Moffat wrote in his diary that day, it came as a “bombshell.” The senior State Department official concluded: “There is no doubt that Germany has pulled off one of the greatest diplomatic coups for many years… It looks to me as though Germany had promised Russia no objection to the latter taking over Estonia and Latvia and, in effect, agreeing to some form of new partition of Poland.” In his own mind, Moffat had already upped the odds of war breaking out to 60–40 in midsummer, and now he raised them further to 75–25.

In Berlin, many of the American correspondents were as usual keeping late hours at their favorite restaurant, Die Taverne, on the night of August 23–24, when they heard the official news about the pact. “It goes much further than anyone dreamed,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “It’s a virtual alliance and Stalin, the supposed arch-enemy of Nazism and aggression, by its terms invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland.”

Several German editors who had been writing virulently anti-Soviet articles up till then came into the restaurant and ordered champagne, Shirer observed, and they were suddenly presenting themselves “as old friends of the Soviets!” The seemingly hardened American reporter was stunned by the enormity of the agreement between the two totalitarian systems. While Shirer knew what it meant, he clearly didn’t understand the Soviet leader as well as he did Hitler. “That Stalin would play such crude power politics and also play into the hands of the Nazis overwhelms the rest of us,” he wrote.

Shirer and an American colleague he only identified as Joe sat down with the German editors and promptly got into a heated argument. “They are gloating, boasting, sputtering that Britain won’t dare to fight now, denying everything that they have been told to say these last six years by their Nazi lords [about the Soviet Union],” Shirer recorded. The two Americans pushed back, reminding them of how they had written about the Bolsheviks until then. “The argument gets nasty,” Shirer concluded. “Joe is nervous, depressed. So am I. Pretty soon we get nauseated. Something will happen if we don’t get out.” The Americans made their excuses and left, walking through the Tiergarten to cool off in the night air.

As news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact sank in, Britain and France reaffirmed their commitments to Poland. In the wake of the takeover of Czechoslovakia in March, both countries had pledged to defend Poland, and on August 25, British and Polish officials formally signed the Anglo-Polish military alliance in London. But Hitler was still counting on outmaneuvering Britain, as he continued to exchange messages with Prime Minister Chamberlain’s government in London and meet with its ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson. Shirer was convinced that war was coming, but he pointed out: “The people in the streets are still confident Hitler will pull it off again without war.”

The State Department urged Americans not to travel to Europe unless absolutely necessary. American diplomats in Berlin could monitor the war preparations firsthand, making them even less likely to see a chance for avoiding a conflict than their bosses back in Washington. Jacob Beam recalled: “From about the middle of August, searchlights pierced the Berlin skies, pin-pointing planes at what seemed to be very great heights. Troop convoys crossed the city escorted by roaring motorcycle brigades manned by goggled riders looking like men from Mars.” On August 26, he added, the government issued a new long list of items to be rationed, including food, shoes and soap. Those who owned automobiles were instructed to turn in any backup batteries they had.

As Hitler and his entourage saw it, Germany was now fully prepared to strike.

Recalling the final days of August 1939 seventy years later, Angus Thuermer still felt somewhat sheepish about how he handled his assignment at the time. Lochner, his bureau chief, had instructed the junior AP reporter to travel to Gleiwitz, along the Polish border, since he knew “something was going to happen.” That proved to be quite an understatement.

One evening, Thuermer took a taxi outside of town and promptly found himself in the midst of a Wehrmacht regiment marching along the border. Realizing that he had better leave before he got into trouble, Thuermer ordered the taxi to take him back to Gleiwitz. A couple of evenings later—August 31, to be exact—he was awakened by sounds outside his hotel. He looked out of his seventh-floor window and saw German troops in a field car followed by countless others marching. Then a band suddenly appeared. That convinced him it was only an exercise. “You don’t take a band to go to war,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time. So he went back to sleep. The next morning, September 1, he looked out the window again and saw trucks bringing back wounded German soldiers from Poland. The German invasion of Poland was under way.

Alarmed that he had slept through the first night of the conflagration that would become World War II, Thuermer rushed to find the press officer of a German Army unit that had moved into his hotel. Introducing himself, he explained that he was eager to accompany German troops into Poland, since it was normal practice for AP reporters to do so. They had been allowed to accompany German troops into Austria and the Sudetenland, he pointed out. “Yes, Herr Thuermer, but this time it is different,” the German press officer replied. “You go back to Berlin and to the Propaganda Ministry and they will tell you what is happening.”

The German officer was right, of course: This time was different. This was really war.

Back in Berlin, some American diplomats had received almost as clear signals on the eve of the German invasion. Walking to work on August 31, William Russell, a twenty-four-year-old clerk in the embassy’s consular section, had already seen the morning headlines in the German papers: “Last Warnings” and “Unendurable Outrages” and “Murderous Poles.” He jumped as a siren shrieked nearby, evidently a test of the air raid warning system, and he observed the traffic jam in Potsdamer Platz caused by army trucks full of soldiers, along with motorcycles and cannon transporters. He could also see aircraft circling above Berlin. “The excitement of a city preparing for war pounded in my veins,” he recalled.

Just as Russell was approaching the embassy, a small man with a shaved head, holding a gray hat in his trembling hand, touched his arm. “I must talk to you,” he said in a whisper.

The man quickly confirmed that Russell, whom he had seen in the immigration section, indeed worked there. Hans Neuman was a Jew who hadn’t been able to push his way through the crowd to the door of the embassy that morning, and he was frantic. Russell instructed him to keep walking as he explained more. Neuman said he had been released a week earlier from Dachau, and now he was desperate for an American visa. “The Gestapo ordered me out of the country ten days ago,” he pleaded. “I’ve got to get out today, or never.”

Russell asked him if he was telling the truth, since a lot of applicants were willing to say anything that would get them a visa. “My God, look at my head if you don’t believe me,” Neuman replied. The American noted the red gashes under the bit of hair that had grown back since his head was recently shaved—the telltale sign of a prisoner.

And Neuman offered a concrete reason why he had to get out that day. “War is going to start tonight. I have friends who know,” he told Russell. “If I don’t get across the border, I’ll lose my last chance to escape. God knows what they’ll…”

Although the young American had heard many similar pleas, he believed Neuman and promised to help him. Entering the embassy, Russell was confronted by “a madhouse” overflowing with others clamoring for a prized American visa to get out. He found Neuman’s paperwork and appealed to Vice-Consul Paul Coates to let him jump the long queue, but Coates chastised him for allowing his personal sympathy for Neuman to sway him. “It’s not fair to all the others,” he said.

Russell wouldn’t give up. “I know it’s not fair,” he replied. “Nothing’s fair, if you want to be strictly truthful. It’s not fair of the German police to order this man to get out of his homeland when he has violated no law and has no place to go to. It isn’t fair to push a man around until he’s half crazy. I’m not concerned about fairness.”

Russell overheard a woman nearby imploring another colleague to do something for her husband, who was imprisoned in Dachau. “I’m sorry,” the American told her. “There are thousands of applicants registered before your husband. He has at least eight years to wait.”

“But you will just have to do something,” the woman pleaded. “He will die there. If war comes, they will never let him out of that place.”

The consular official shook his head, signaling an end to their conversation. As she gathered her paperwork and left, the woman broke into tears. American quota laws hadn’t changed to accommodate the mostly Jewish applicants who, according to Russell, “were to be found in every nook and cranny” of every American consulate in Germany.

Still, Russell worked all day to get Neuman his visa. Seeing his determination, another consular officer finally relented near closing time, finding him a quota number to assign to Neuman. He even suggested that Russell drive him to the airport to make sure he was allowed to get on a plane to Rotterdam, since it was too late at that point for him to get a Dutch visa. At Tempelhof Airport, two storm troopers, dressed in black uniforms, and two other officials examined Neuman’s passport. They also asked Russell what he was doing there. The American explained that he was from the embassy and wanted to make sure that Neuman got on the plane to Rotterdam, since he had an American visa and was due to sail from the Dutch port to the United States.

“Herr Neuman has a visa to the United States,” one of the storm troopers said sarcastically, pointing out that he didn’t have a Dutch visa. “Well, isn’t that nice?”

But then one of the other officials intervened. “Let him go,” he said. “We’d have one Jew less. Let the Dutch worry about what to do with him.”

A customs officer took a final look at Neuman’s passport and stamped it. “See that you don’t come back to Germany,” he told him. “If you do, you’ll be sent back to a certain place.”

Neuman’s story would prove to be one of the few with a happy ending on that last day before the war broke out. Later, he sent Russell a postcard confirming that he had sailed from Rotterdam.

Another story with a happy ending involved Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador to Germany. His British counterpart, Sir Nevile Henderson, had called Lipski to inform him about his stormy meeting with Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, which had left little doubt that the Germans were about to attack Poland. That conversation had taken place at 2 A.M. on August 31. Around noon the same day, Jacob Beam spotted Lipski sitting in his car at a Shell station, waiting for his tank to be filled. After the war, Beam met Lipski and told him he had seen him then. Lipski explained that he had stayed with his car, fearing that the Germans might seize it. Early that evening, only a few hours before the Germans invaded, Lipski escaped back to his homeland.

If many American diplomats and journalists in Berlin had a better sense of the enormity of the storm that Hitler was unleashing than others looking from afar, most of them still hadn’t recognized how quickly Hitler’s forces would be able to overwhelm Poland and later most of continental Europe.

In his address to the Reichstag on September 1, Hitler wore an army jacket. “I have once more put on that coat which was most sacred and dear to me,” he declared. “I will not take it off again until victory is secured, or I shall not survive the outcome.” Hitler claimed he had made “endless attempts” to keep the peace, but that Polish troops had attacked German territory, leaving him no choice but to act. Beam, who was in the Reichstag to hear him, found the speech impressive, aimed at convincing Britain and France not to enter the fray. He called his language “less belligerent and intimidating” than in earlier speeches.

Shirer, who listened to the speech from the radio studio since he had to immediately transmit its contents, had a different impression. He detected “a curious strain, as though Hitler himself were dazed at the fix he had gotten himself into and felt a little desperate about it.” Hitler explained that Goering would be his successor if anything happened to him, and that Hess would be next in line. Shirer agreed with a colleague that the speech sounded like the dictator’s swan song.

At 7 P.M. while Shirer was still at the radio station, the air raid sirens sounded and the German employees took their gas masks down to the bomb shelter. The American didn’t have a mask and no one offered him one, but he was instructed to follow. He did, but then in the darkness slipped away, returning to a studio where a candle was burning so he could jot down his notes. “No planes came over,” he recorded later that night in his diary. Expecting Britain and France to make good on their promises to defend Poland right away, he added: “But with the English and French in, it may be different tomorrow. I shall then be in the by no means pleasant predicament of hoping they bomb the hell out of this town without getting me.” In fact, the British and French didn’t declare war on Germany until September 3.

That first evening of the war Shirer found it “curious” that the restaurants, cafés and beer halls were still full of people. And writing in his diary at two-thirty in the morning, he added: “Curious that not a single Polish bomber got through tonight. But will it be the same with the British and the French?” The next day, he noted further: “No air-raid tonight. Where are the Poles?”

In his radio broadcast on September 2, Shirer reported that Berliners, who were nervous during the first night of the blackout, were beginning to sense that life didn’t have to change much. “After, say, about 1 A.M. this morning, when it became fairly evident that if the Poles were going to send over any planes they would have come by that time, most people went to sleep. Taxis, creeping along with little slits of light to identify them, did a big business all through the night.”

After Hitler’s declaration of war, Russell, the young embassy clerk, recalled in a similar vein: “One expected something terrific to happen immediately. Nothing did.” But like Shirer and other Americans in Berlin, Russell noticed that the mood was quite different from the jubilation that had accompanied the outbreak of the previous war. “The people I have met seem calm and sad and resigned. They stand around in little groups in front of our Embassy building, staring at us through the windows. I think this is nothing like the beginning of the World War in 1914.” Russell added: “Today, I think they have been led into something which may turn out to be too big for them.”

How correct he would prove to be, but only much later. The string of initial German victories in Poland, the Americans in Berlin reported, produced increasing confidence among the German people and the military in the wisdom of Hitler’s actions. On September 6, Shirer noted in his diary, “It begins to look like a rout for the Poles.” In the following days, he added that the U.S. military attachés were stunned by the speed of the German advance, and many correspondents were depressed. Britain and France were formally at war, but “not a shot yet—so the Germans say—on the western front!” On September 13, Russell despaired in his diary: “The war is raging in Poland. What can England and France be thinking of? we ask each other. Why don’t they attack Germany now, so she will have to fight on two fronts?”

When the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east on September 17, the Americans in Berlin knew that country’s fate was sealed. For the correspondents, another sign was the sudden willingness of the German authorities to allow them to go to the front. Arriving in Sopot on the Baltic coast, Shirer wrote in his diary on September 18: “Drove all day long from Berlin through Pomerania and the Corridor to here. The roads full of motorized columns of German troops returning from Poland. In the woods in the Corridor the sickening sweet smell of dead horses and the sweeter smell of dead men. Here, the Germans say, a whole division of Polish cavalry charged against hundreds of German tanks and was annihilated.”

Reaching Gdynia the next day, Shirer witnessed the Germans mercilessly bombarding one of the last Polish units still resisting them in that area—from the sea, and from three sides on land. The German battleship Schleswig-Holstein was anchored in Danzig’s harbor, firing shells at the Polish position, while the artillery was opening up from positions surrounding it. Tanks and airplanes were also attacking the Poles, who desperately fought back with nothing more than rifles, machine guns and two antiaircraft guns. “It was a hopeless position for the Poles. And yet they fought on,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “The German officers with us kept praising their courage.”

Joseph Grigg, a Berlin correspondent for United Press, was among the first group of foreign newsmen to reach Warsaw, arriving on October 5. They were brought there to see Hitler come to the Polish capital for his victory parade. Grigg was struck by the sight of the heavily bombed city after holding out for one month against the German onslaught. “Such devastation would be difficult to imagine. The whole center of the city had been laid in ruins,” he recalled. “The Polish population looked bewildered and stunned.” He concluded that the Poles never had a chance against the German invaders, who had knocked out most of the Polish Air Force on the first day of the invasion. “The advance of the German mechanized forces across the flat plains of Poland was unleashed with a precision and swing never before seen in history.”

Later, Grigg met General Alexander Loehr, the former chief of the Austrian Federal Air Force who had become the commander of Hitler’s Air Fleet Southeast, which was responsible for the air campaign against Poland. The correspondent asked him how he could justify this “blitzkrieg without warning.” Loehr calmly explained that this was really a more humane type of warfare. “It is our new philosophy of war,” he declared. “It is the most merciful type of warfare. It surprises your enemy, paralyzes him at one blow and shortens a war by weeks, maybe months. In the long run it saves casualties on both sides.”

The AP’s Lochner had witnessed what this “humane” type of warfare had consisted of. He was permitted to cross the border from Gleiwitz during the fighting in Poland, and in the small town of Graszyn saw that all the buildings along the main road had been razed—not simply hit by bombs and shells as in other places. The army colonel who was his guide explained that this was done in retaliation for sniping by Polish civilians.

Lochner also heard a story from an informant in the German Army who described how his detachment had occupied another small Polish town, bringing along their wounded. The local pharmacist and his wife, who were Jews, “worked like Trojans to help us dress the wounds,” the informant told Lochner. “We all respected the couple.” The grateful soldiers assured the couple they would be protected by the German Army. Then the detachment was ordered to move on. “Even before we had time to depart, the SS were there,” he added. “A few minutes later the Jewish couple was found by one of our men with their throats slashed. The SS had killed them.”

The message Hitler delivered to the foreign correspondents who were brought to Warsaw on October 5 was one of pure menace. His face pallid but acting like “a triumphant conqueror,” Grigg reported, Hitler briefly met the reporters at Warsaw’s airport before boarding his flight back to Berlin. “Gentlemen, you have seen the ruins of Warsaw,” he told them. “Let that be a warning to those statesmen in London and Paris who still think of continuing this war.”

By this point, according to Russell in Berlin, many Germans had become convinced by the lack of a military response from Britain and France “that Germany is invincible.” But the young American also met Germans who had come to the opposite conclusion. “I hope they [the British and the French] hurry up and break through the Westwall,” one of them told him, referring to Germany’s defensive line built opposite France’s Maginot Line. “When our army is defeated, that will be the end of Hitler. If we lose we will not be free; but then we are not free now.”

Although Russell claimed that this was far from an isolated voice, Hitler’s latest victory—combined with Nazi terror and propaganda—ensured that most Germans, as the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz put it, were increasingly willing to obey their leader’s demand to “follow me blindly.” The veteran Berlin correspondent added, “And the masses did believe.” She cited the example of her maid, who appeared one morning shortly after the invasion of Poland, her eyes red from crying. Her husband had been assigned as a stretcher-bearer at a hospital near Berlin, and he had described to her in vivid detail how the Poles had supposedly burned off the skin of Germans on their side of the border right before Hitler’s armies attacked, turning their limbs into charred stumps.

Schultz asked her if her husband had seen any such cases, and the maid acted offended that she would doubt her. But later she admitted that her husband had only viewed slides presented by Nazi propagandists. Still, the maid’s conviction grew that her American employer wasn’t properly sympathetic to Nazi Germany. “It wasn’t long before my maid was one more servant in the Gestapo system keeping tabs on the activities of the correspondents,” Schultz reported. “Our mail, our telephone conversations, our visitors, were all regularly reported to the police.”

The Propaganda Ministry had invited Schultz and other correspondents to a preview of the first newsreels of the war. As scenes of German troops rounding up anguished Polish prisoners flashed on the screen, Schultz recalled, there were “squeals and shouts of delight from leading German officials.” Once the newsreels were in the theaters, Schultz went to see how the public reacted. Images of Polish Jews in caftans or rags who were visibly terrified by their captors triggered “loud guffaws and shrieks of laughter,” she wrote.

After the first reports of mass murders in Poland filtered back to Germany, Schultz was at a reception full of Nazi officials. “I don’t see why you Anglo-Saxons get so excited about what happens to a few Poles,” a high-ranking SS officer told her. “Your reaction shows you and your countrymen do not have the scientific approach to the problem.”

Schultz asked what the scientific approach was. Three men, including Roland Freisler, the Justice Ministry official who would later become the notorious president of the People’s Court, offered an impromptu lecture on racial theory. The Slavs were only white on “an inferior level,” they explained, and they outnumbered the pure white Germans; their birth rate was much higher as well, which would mean a doubling of their populations by 1960. “We indulge in no sentimentality,” Freisler continued. “We shall not allow any of our neighbors to have a higher birth rate than ours, and we shall take measures to prevent it.” Slavs and Jews would only be permitted to survive “if they work for us,” he added. “If they don’t they can starve.”

Schultz observed that if one of her “leg men” had brought her such a story, she probably would have been disbelieving. But she heard this in person, and Freisler clearly “didn’t realize, or care, how horrifying his remarks appeared to an American.”

Joseph Harsch, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was in Rome in October 1939 when he received a terse cable from his foreign editor in Boston: “Now go to Berlin.” It was still remarkably easy to do so. Harsch went to the German Embassy to apply for a visa and received it three days later, and the concierge at his hotel picked up a ticket for the sleeper to Berlin. He boarded the train in the evening and arrived there the next morning. He had reached the capital of the country that had plunged the continent into a new war, but the only “abnormality,” as Harsch sardonically recalled, was that when he got off the train at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof there were no porters to help him with his luggage. He got around that problem by leaving his belongings at the station, then checking into the nearby Continental Hotel and sending a hotel porter back to pick them up.

Joining Shirer and other American colleagues, he soon switched over to the more elegant Adlon Hotel, getting a room in the back wing overlooking the garden of Joseph Goebbels, whose Propaganda Ministry was a block away. Harsch often saw his children playing there. Everything about Harsch’s arrival seemed deceptively easy. The spying that Schultz and other veterans noticed wasn’t all that apparent to a newcomer like him, but he was quick to see that the Germans were intent on making him feel comfortable. He was issued a ration card of a “heavy worker,” and he was free to import extra food—eggs, bacon, butter, cheese—from Denmark. “As an American correspondent at a time when German policy was keyed to keeping the United States out of the war as long as possible, I settled into a privileged life,” he wrote.

Harsch wore a small American flag pin on his lapel, which he felt avoided any misunderstandings about who he was when he talked with Germans. He was pleased to see that most people still spoke freely to American reporters, and he could travel almost anywhere he wanted and file stories. Official Germans didn’t seem particularly secretive either, even when it came to subjects like concentration camps for political prisoners and Jews. Looking back at that period in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, Harsch observed: “The label concentration camp had not then acquired the sinister connotation it has today… There was nothing sufficiently unusual about the internment camps in Germany to attract the special attention of American correspondents in Berlin in 1939 and 1940.”

Harsch encountered difficulties with the authorities only when he began doing occasional radio broadcasts for CBS, subbing for Shirer when he was out of town. The rules for broadcasters were far tougher than anything print journalists faced. As Harsch noted, all scripts had to be approved by a group of censors, with one representative each from the Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry and the Military High Command. A censor also carefully monitored the reading of the approved scripts on air and could cut the correspondent off instantly if he deviated from it.

Oddly, there was often less of a sense of danger than when other American correspondents, like Edgar Mowrer, had reported on the Nazis coming to power. Richard Hottelet, a recent Brooklyn College graduate who was an aggressive United Press reporter in Berlin, didn’t hesitate to board a train full of Polish Jews who were being expelled from Germany. While he found the conditions in the third-class cars “pretty awful, pretty depressing,” they were still mild compared to the cattle car deportations that would soon follow. And Hottelet wasn’t worried about his personal safety as he pursued such stories. “I was an American, I was working for an American organization, I didn’t feel threatened,” he declared. “I knew the situation was odd but not menacing.” In fact, Hottelet would later experience the inside of a German prison, but he still vividly recalled that sense of invulnerability during an interview seventy years later.

The conflict Hitler had unleashed quickly lapsed into its “phony war” stage, with the Germans biding their time for their spring 1940 new offensives and the French sitting quietly behind their Maginot Line. On October 10, 1939, Shirer traveled to Geneva, and as his train ran along the Rhine, he could see French and German soldiers building up fortifications on their respective sides. “The troops seemed to be observing an armistice,” he wrote in his diary. “They went about their business in full sight and range of each other… Queer kind of war.”

The Royal Air Force attacked German naval targets, only to suffer serious losses and inflict little damage. On October 2, the RAF made its first night raid on Berlin, dropping only propaganda leaflets “in the vain hope that people reading them would be incited to revolt,” consular clerk Russell scoffed. “They might as well have saved their gasoline.” During this early stage of the conflict, there was no air war to speak of, and the blackout in Berlin felt more like a precaution than a necessity. Britain and France rejected Hitler’s “peace proposals” after his victory over Poland, and the British naval blockade meant that rationing was tightened further. But many Germans still held out “the hope of an early victory and peace,” as Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, wrote. Whatever sacrifices they had to make were justified, he added, by the regime’s slogan: “It is better to live safely than to live well.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Polish campaign, Americans in Berlin could see one indication of the early cost of the war: the death notices that appeared in local newspapers. “One Breslau daily, especially, is just filled every day with casualty notices—old, established names where the young man, the hope of the family, fell,” the AP’s Lochner wrote to his children in Chicago on October 8. “Right among our own friends and in one case even relatives…” He added that social life was disappearing “because everyone lives on bread cards, meat cards, fat cards, etc., hence has no accumulated reserves with which to entertain guests.”

Lochner noted that people were reluctant to go to unfamiliar places in the evening because of the blackout, and accidents were frequent. As the nights grew longer, the young diplomat Russell observed that this was at least to one group’s advantage. “In the darkness, certain girls made easy pickups,” he pointed out. While prostitution was technically illegal in Nazi Germany, the blackouts made it a lot easier. “Even the old girls, the wrinkled ones, stood on corners with their ugly features safely hidden in the darkness and shone their flashlights on their legs in invitation.”

George Kennan, a Russian specialist who had volunteered to go to Berlin to help chargé d’affaires Alexander Kirk with his administrative duties, arrived in the German capital shortly after the war began. One of his strongest memories of that period was of returning home after work in the evenings: “the groping in pitch blackness from column to column of the Brandenburg gate, feeling my way by hand after this fashion to the bus stop… the wonder as to how the driver ever found his way over the vast expanse of unmarked, often snow-covered asphalt… the eerie walk home at the other end, again with much groping and feeling for curbstones.”

Despite all those daily inconveniences, it was still relatively easy to overlook the fact that the war was on since the fighting was taking place elsewhere. On a visit to Hamburg about a month into the war, Kennan was making his way back to his lodgings one evening when a woman emerged from a street corner and said cheerfully: “Shan’t we go somewhere?” Kennan indicated he wasn’t interested in her services but he’d buy her a drink—and pay her what she normally charged for more than that. At her favorite bar, she told him her story: that she had a daytime job packing parcels, where the pay was bad but it was her way of avoiding the roundups of street girls who were sent to labor camps; that she was engaged to an army flyer who was on duty in Poland, “a complete egoist” who treated her badly; and that she made her real money on the streets at night—of course, unbeknownst to him.

There was nothing all that extraordinary in her story, and nothing all that unusual that Kennan would find it intriguing to talk to a fairly sophisticated streetwalker. He may have been destined for a distinguished career as a diplomat and scholar, but he was still a young man at the time. The most memorable part of his encounter, though, was what was left unsaid. “It was only after I got home it occurred to me that neither of us had mentioned the war,” he wrote.

Among top Nazi leaders, the mood was one of growing confidence that events were moving their way. At the Soviet Embassy’s November 7 reception to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a group of American correspondents chatted with Goering as he stood at the buffet drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. Shirer, who was part of this group, had thought the Luftwaffe commander might be upset with America’s increasingly open support for Britain and growing talk of supplying that country with large numbers of airplanes.

But Goering was in an expansive, jovial mood. “If we could only make planes at your rate of production we should be very weak,” he declared. “I mean that seriously. Your planes are good, but you don’t make enough of them fast enough.” He added that “one day you’ll see who has been building the best and the most planes.”

When the Americans asked why German planes had only attacked British warships, he replied that they were important targets and “give us good practice.”

“Are you going to begin bombing enemy ports?” the Americans persisted.

“We’re humane,” Goering responded. Shirer and the others couldn’t help laughing. “You shouldn’t laugh,” he admonished them. “I’m serious. I am humane.”

In less official settings, Americans in Berlin were surprised to discover occasional flashes of genuine wartime humor. Harsch, the newcomer from the Christian Science Monitor, heard one story that was making the rounds of a working-class neighborhood. According to the joke, a disguised Hitler goes to a beer hall and asks the proprietor what people really think of Der Führer. The proprietor leans forward and whispers to him: “I couldn’t afford to have any of my customers hear me say it, but I, personally, don’t think he’s so bad.”

As the American reporters and diplomats learned, many Germans were also listening to foreign radio stations, despite the fact that this was strictly forbidden. Russell estimated that 60 to 70 percent did so in secret, and he noticed that the stores sold out all their old-fashioned radio headphones during the first week of the war. While his estimate was probably high, he encountered enough Germans who signaled their reservations about Hitler and the war, however obliquely, that he was hesitant to make sweeping judgments about the national mood.

“If the United States goes into this war, there is one thing I do not want to forget,” he wrote. “There are millions of people in Germany who do not agree with the policies of their leaders. And there are other millions, simple people, who believe exactly what their leaders tell them—especially when they tell them the same thing day after day. I do not want to go blind with hatred and forget that.” Kennan echoed those sentiments. “It was hard to associate oneself with much of the American press and of Washington officialdom in picturing the German people as a mass of inhuman monsters, solidly behind Hitler and consumed with a demonic enthusiasm for the ruin and enslavement of the rest of Europe,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Even Shirer, who was far less forgiving, was encouraged by the occasional encounter with a German who represented the kind of free thinking that had until recently flourished in that country. In January 1940, he met with a woman in Berlin to give her some provisions he had brought for her from her relatives abroad. He described her as “the most intelligent German female I have met in ages.” She bemoaned her countrymen’s slavish obedience to authority, and their willingness to follow its Nazi leaders, who represented the barbarian impulses that always lurked below the surface. She saw those rulers as intent on destroying Western civilization and its values, despite the contribution of so many Germans to the development of that civilization.

It was a recipe for self-destruction, she explained to Shirer, the result of an unwillingness or inability of her countrymen to think and act for themselves. “A German will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law though it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”

The American diplomats and correspondents continued to live, as the consular clerk Russell put it, “isolated on our island in the middle of Berlin.” He attributed the gas rationing for embassy employees less to wartime shortages than to the desire of the Nazis to limit the mobility of the Americans in their midst. The authorities also tapped their phones and didn’t mind that the Americans realized it, since this was meant to make them cautious in contacts with Germans.

Rationing for the general population kept getting stricter, with everything from toilet paper to shoelaces disappearing, and stores began putting up small signs proclaiming GOODS DISPLAYED IN THE WINDOWS ARE NOT FOR SALE. But most Americans lived in a parallel universe. On Thanksgiving Day 1939, when the war was into its third month, Kirk, the embassy’s senior diplomat, invited a contingent of his countrymen in Berlin for the customary afternoon meal. “A hundred or so hungry Americans charged into several turkeys assembled on the buffet table,” Shirer noted in his diary.

The CBS correspondent then went on to a dinner at the home of Dorothy and Fred Oechsner, the United Press manager in Berlin, where Shirer tucked into another turkey. He was so thrilled by the whipped cream on the pumpkin pie that he talked Dorothy into going to the broadcast studio at midnight to explain to listeners back home how she had used “a new-fangled machine” to extract the cream from butter.

Despite their unique circumstances, the Americans did get around, and the diplomats in particular were constantly contacted by those seeking their help. As Christmas approached, Russell reported, “embarrassingly large baskets of food, wine, champagne and delicacies of all sorts in Berlin were delivered to our residences.” Those who still had the means to put together those kinds of packages never included a card identifying themselves, but usually in a short time they would send a letter to the recipient asking for help. At the end of the letter, the supplicant would inquire whether the Christmas present had arrived safely—and then would sign with his or her full name and address. Other visa applicants offered bribes of money to the Americans right in the consulate, although trying to do so secretly and using “veiled language.”

In January 1940, as a bitter cold winter set in, the Americans flooded the tennis court in the back of the embassy, turning it into an ice-skating rink. But for all their amenities, including shipments of warm winter clothes from Denmark, they were in close enough contact with life around them to dismiss reports back home about the desperate conditions of most Germans and the possibility that this could bring down the Nazi regime.

To be sure, the privations of the war were making themselves felt, and Kennan was struck by the “unmistakable inner detachment of the people from the pretentious purposes of the regime.” But he also remarked on “the way life went on, as best it could, under the growing difficulties of wartime discipline.” Russell reported a similar lack of enthusiasm for the war, adding: “But here Germany was, right before my eyes, working and living and going strong.” In other words, the speculation back in the United States that the Germans were prepared to rise up in revolt was nothing more than wishful thinking.

As the embassy staffers arranged the paperwork for numerous Americans who had surfaced to make arrangements to return home in those first months of the war, their island felt lonelier than before. And they weren’t completely immune to the deteriorating living conditions. By January, hot water was usually no longer available in their apartments, prompting the embassy to put in two tin bathtubs on the building’s upper floor, one for women and one for men.

Late in January, Russell was invited to lunch at the apartment of Consul Richard Stratton, where he met Jane Dyer, whose brother was also working at the embassy. She was up for a visit from Rome, where she was studying music, but her real home was Alabama. “I never expected to be so far away from home in my life,” she proclaimed in a husky voice with a thick southern accent that instantly charmed Russell, who had grown up in neighboring Mississippi. After lunch, they played records, and Russell danced with her. All of which made for a lovely afternoon. Toward the end of it, Dyer asked: “Is Germany really at war? I mean, I haven’t seen anything to remind me of war. Everything is the same as it always was.”

It was Stratton who replied. “You don’t feel anything yet. Just like those children playing out in the street. They don’t feel the war either—yet. But the time will come when war will come home to all of us—to Americans, Russians, Africans, children and unborn babies. I think so, anyway.”

The party was over, and Dyer and Russell pondered his words in silence.