Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

In fact, Hitler’s decision to abandon the invasion of England had prompted the Nazi leader to pursue his other dream: a swift victory over the Soviet Union. This was supposed to isolate Britain further and convince it that, in the end, a German victory was inevitable. The Chicago Tribune ’s Schultz recalled a conversation with Karl Boehmer of the Propaganda Ministry about this time. He didn’t mention a possible invasion of Russia but suggested the Germans would engineer a takeover from within. “Just imagine what we can do with Russia’s resources,” he declared. “She squanders them as badly as America does hers.” Schultz claimed she then asked if his country planned to control America’s resources as well, and that he replied, “Why, yes.”

That may have been a bit of showboating on Boehmer’s part. In reality, Hitler hadn’t yet abandoned hope of keeping the United States out of the war, despite Roosevelt’s growing support for Britain. On December 7, 1940, the president declared that “the best immediate defense of the United States is the success of Great Britain.” In a fireside chat on December 29, he denounced Nazi plans “to dominate the rest of the world” and famously pledged that his country would be “the great arsenal of democracy.” All of which set the stage for the Lend-Lease Act that was signed into law on March 11, 1941, allowing for the shipment of massive amounts of military equipment and other supplies to Britain. But Hitler still clung to the belief that his planned invasion of the Soviet Union would convince the Americans that they had to abandon Europe, including their British friends, to German might.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet dictator had refused to believe all the warnings not just from his spies but also from Britain and the United States. As a result, German forces initially scored easy victories against the unprepared Red Army troops and pushed deep into Soviet territory, making it look like Hitler’s calculations would be proven right again. In the August 4, 1941, issue of Life magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, America’s most authoritative military writer, argued that the outcome of the war depended on what would happen on the Eastern Front. A successful German campaign would result in the completion of “the conquest of Europe,” he declared, dooming Britain as well. He discussed the possibility that Hitler’s armies could be defeated or at least worn down by a long, costly campaign. “But on the basis of all past experience—on our limited knowledge of the Red Army, on the operations of the first month—the world can anticipate in Russia another quick and decisive German victory,” he concluded.

For the Americans who lived and worked in Germany, however, Hitler’s optimistic predictions looked more and more unrealistic. The further his armies marched, the more strains they noticed on the home front. Life was changing in Hitlerland—for the Americans, but also for the Germans. And it wasn’t for the better.

During the Battle of Britain in August and September 1940, RAF bombers rarely made it to Berlin, but their initial forays were enough to shake the confidence of the inhabitants of the German capital who had been assured that it was invulnerable. On September 10, Berlin endured what Shirer described as “the severest bombing yet,” as firebombs hit the Ministry of Munitions right between the Adlon Hotel and the U.S. Embassy. Although the incendiaries were put out before they did much damage, they were scattered in various places, including the yard of the Adlon and the garden of the embassy. That evening after he had completed his broadcast, Shirer was rushing back to the Adlon in the dark when his car hit some debris, skidded and came to a stop about 20 feet from a fresh bomb crater. “I almost met a quick end last night,” he wrote in his diary the next day.

Shirer recorded that Donald Heath had an even closer call at the embassy. A splinter from the same bomb that made the crater had flown through Heath’s office double window 200 yards away, passing directly over his desk and embedding itself in the wall on the opposite side. Heath had been scheduled for night duty, but chargé d’affaires Kirk had relieved him.

The German press trumpeted headlines vowing revenge for such bombings, which it claimed were targeting children, hospitals and other civilian targets. While London was living under the genuine terror of the Blitz, Berliners could be excused for believing that their country was suffering almost as much. “Night Crime of British Against 21 German Children—This Bloody Crime Cries Out for Revenge,” one newspaper proclaimed. Another warned, “‘Assassins’ Murder Is No Longer War, Herr Winston Churchill!—The British Island of Murderers Will Have to Take the Consequences of Its Malicious Bombings.”

For some time after the Battle of Britain, the Americans in Berlin felt almost eerily detached from the actual fighting. “Except for the outbursts from the Nazi orators… and except for the reports of feverish diplomatic activity and rumours of troop movements, we in Berlin hardly knew a war was on during the early part of 1941,” Flannery recalled. In that period, Americans still noticed relatively few wounded soldiers on the streets of Berlin. “But after the Russian campaign began, I saw them in every block along the principal streets—young men with their arms in slings, with an arm gone, walking with crutches or canes, or without one of their legs,” Flannery added.

When the CBS reporter approached a newsstand one day, he overheard the newsdealer ask a woman if she was all right. In a hollow voice, she replied: “No, I just had bad news, and must phone my husband at work. You know we lost a son in Poland, and another in France. Now I have word that Johann is gone, too, our last son. He has been killed in Russia.”

Even during Germany’s early victories in the Soviet Union, the newspapers left no doubt that the cost was high. Flannery estimated that almost half of German families had suffered a loss—and he saw that people were increasingly depressed. As the RAF bombings intensified, this, too, contributed to the drop in morale. Flannery, who was doing full-time duty in Berlin since Shirer’s departure in November 1940, was leaving his dentist one day when the woman elevator operator began complaining about the war’s hardships. “ Mein Gott, mein Gott, ” she told him, “ warum ? Why? It’s all caused by a mere handful of men.”

Flannery found himself within a block of falling bombs on more than one occasion. On a night when Colonel Lovell was watching a raid from the roof of an embassy house near the zoo, the bombs hit so close that the attaché threw himself flat. “I thought I was gone,” he said.

Sigrid Schultz observed another more subtle side of the war that was taking its toll as well. On the train from Berlin to Basel, she shared a compartment with a Luftwaffe colonel who freely discussed how the war was changing family relationships. “I love my wife and my children,” he said, “but when we soldiers get home, all our families can talk about is how many potatoes they get and what kinds of sandwiches other people have in their air-raid shelters.” The implicit message: Germany’s fighting men were impatient with what they often saw as the petty concerns of their families back home.

Earlier, Schultz had talked with a woman who appeared to have none of the material worries of so many of the other civilians; she exuded self-confidence. “I do war work. I am a plastic surgeon,” she said. “I ought to be prosperous; I’m working hard enough beautifying bustlines.”

When Schultz asked her what this had to do with the war, she replied: “Why, when the German men come home from France and the Balkans, they criticize the figures of their wives. All the Nazis have money, you know, so I operate.”