Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

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.”