Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

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.