Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

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.