Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

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.”