Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Excited by his access, Lochner marveled how German air power had “revolutionized” the way wars were fought. Luftwaffe scouter planes first assessed the strength of enemy forces, he explained to his readers, then unleashed their “terrorizing” Stukas and bombers, which “dash madly down upon enemy.” Once the planes had done their damage, the infantry followed up with “death disdaining courage,” leaving the enemy in complete confusion.

As for the human toll, Lochner was inclined to take much of what he saw at face value. While he informed his readers that he saw “human drama of misery, terrifying first glimpse of horrors wrought by modernist warfare, and strange contrasts of German kindness and German inexorability,” he emphasized the former. There were “dejected civilians” on the road, he reported, but German soldiers “seemed anxiousest [ sic ] to be nice to children, to deal courteously with grownups.” The average German soldier, he continued, “is bitter, unyielding, determined even terrible fighter but he also has [a] vast sentimental strain in him.”

If Lochner appeared to be unduly credulous about what he was seeing in the presence of his German minders, Shirer—who entered Belgium at the same time—was more cautious. In his radio broadcast, he reported that Belgians he encountered in Brussels, the capital that emerged unscathed, said that “the behavior of German troops had been correct.” But he stressed that the Belgians he saw on the roads looked “dazed and bitter and sad.” And the housing blocks in the university city of Louvain, where British troops had set up a headquarters, were “a terrible sight to behold” after the battles there. As he waded through the debris in the streets of Saint-Trond, another Belgian town, he jotted quick notes: “houses smashed… shambles… bitter Belgium civilians… women sobbing… their menfolk?… where?… here houses destroyed at random… Stukas careless?… on purpose?”

In his diary, Shirer also noted that he and his colleagues had expected the inhabitants of Louvain to tell them about German responsibility for the destruction. “But eyeing the German officers with us, they grow sly, act shy, and tell us nothing,” he wrote. A German nun recounted how she huddled with fifty-six children in the cellar of a convent after the bombs started falling without warning on May 10. She emphasized that Belgium had not been at war and not done anything to provoke such an attack. Then, she noticed the German officers watching her speak to the Americans.

“You’re German, aren’t you?” one of them asked her.

She confirmed her nationality and hastened to add in a frightened voice: “Of course, as a German, I was glad when it was all over and the German troops arrived.”

Lochner never alluded to the intimidating effect of the German officers who served as their escorts and how this may have colored what he heard. He and two other reporters—Guido Enderis of the New York Times and Pierre Huss of the International News Service—were given special treatment by Karl Boehmer, a German army officer assigned to the Propaganda Ministry. During their tours of newly conquered territory, Boehmer often took them in his own car, which was inevitably first to arrive in most places, while other American reporters followed in cars that were ordered to observe an official speed limit of about 25 miles per hour. The latter reporters complained that the privileged threesome was too chummy with Boehmer and the Nazis in general, although the three responded that they were simply doing their jobs. “Some of the correspondents accused Lochner and Huss of being pro-Nazi because they gained more privileges in trips and tips than some of the other men,” wrote Henry Flannery of CBS, who arrived in Berlin that fall to prepare to succeed Shirer, “but I had no reason to feel that this was true.”

When it came to describing Hitler’s aims, Lochner didn’t hesitate to be blunt. After driving through Muenster, the town where the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, he reported that the German leader planned, “when he has forced England, France on knees,” to make their representatives submit to his dictates there. “In other words, Hitler isn’t content now with wiping out last vestiges Versailles Treaty,” he transmitted to New York. “His mind goes back to 1648 when Holy Roman Empire of German nation was broken up into principalities and powerless miniature states.” His intent was “to rectify that mistake.”

General Walther von Reichenau, the commander of the 6th Army, which had rapidly subdued Belgium and would continue to another victory in France, exuded confidence when he met with Lochner and the other correspondents following his forces. “Every German soldier knows why he is fighting,” he declared. “It’s to be or not to be for Germany. I have talked to many French, English prisoners in their own language. They don’t know what it is all about. Our men have supreme confidence in our military leadership. Others don’t in theirs. There can be no doubt about the outcome.”

Since the U.S. Embassy in Berlin had taken over the interests of France and Britain once the war broke out, its diplomats were able, under the terms of the Hague Convention, to inspect camps with prisoners from those countries. Some British flyers had been shot down even before the German military machine turned west, and the Germans had also seized some early French prisoners in raids across the border. Of course, the number of prisoners grew rapidly as soon as the fighting started in earnest. All of which meant that Americans from the Berlin embassy were able to take their own measure of the morale of the captured pilots and soldiers.

“A most discouraging difference between the French and the British became manifest,” Jacob Beam wrote. “The French officers for instance cared very little for their men, and a spirit of defeatism was universal… Among the British on the other hand, discipline and high morale prevailed.”

By June 14, the German Army had entered Paris, and, on June 22, a French delegation signed the armistice in the same railway carriage in Compiègne that had been used for the signing of the armistice of 1918. The spirit of defeatism was such that, as Shirer recorded in his diary after returning from newly occupied Paris, with few exceptions “France did not fight. If she did, there is little evidence of it.” Although Hitler had decided to hold the ceremony in Compiègne, not Muenster as Lochner had predicted, the AP reporter had been right that he was intent on demonstrating that Germany was settling its historical scores.

As other Americans living in Germany could attest from personal observation, no vision was too grandiose for Hitler at that moment of his successive military victories. Pierre Huss was one of a small group of Berlin correspondents who were invited to Les Invalides in Paris when Hitler paid a visit to Napoleon’s tomb soon after the French surrender. As the reporters watched, the Nazi leader was lost in his thoughts. “He folded his arms and murmured something we could not hear; his lips moved, as if he were talking to himself, and once or twice he shook his head,” Huss recalled.

Hitler snapped back into focus as he leaned forward on the balustrade to stare down at Napoleon’s tomb. “Napoleon, mein lieber , they have made a bad mistake,” he said in a suddenly audible voice. Huss confessed, “It startled me, standing there across from a live war lord and above a dead emperor.” The correspondent also couldn’t figure out what Hitler meant.

The German ruler pointed down and repeated that this was “a big mistake,” explaining to everyone around him: “They have put him down into a hole. People must look down at a coffin far below them… They should look up at Napoleon, feeling small by the very size of the monument or sarcophagus above their heads.” Then, exhibiting the kind of understanding of basic psychology that had helped him orchestrate his rallies for maximum impact, he added: “You do not impress people if you walk in a street and they are on top of a building. They must look at something above them; you must be the stage and the center of attraction above the level of all eyes.”