Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

For most Germans who were losing hope of a quick victory, there were far more serious worries—keeping themselves adequately fed and clothed, especially during the winter. And for Jews, there was genuine terror, which had begun long before the war and the bombings, as the remaining Americans knew well.

Angus Thuermer, the young AP correspondent, had first rented a room in a fourth-floor Berlin apartment; one floor below, there was a Jewish family. He recalled that a woman had come out of the third-floor apartment one day and tried to throw herself down the stairwell, but she was stopped from committing suicide. A day later, Thuermer saw that the apartment’s door had its lock removed and a Gestapo seal placed over the empty hole. But another day or so later, he found the door open. Walking in, he saw an “Aryan” family looking around. On the dresser, they spotted several cans of food. “Oh, look at that: see what fancy food they were eating,” one of the Germans said.

Some of the Americans still lived with a lingering sense of guilt decades later about how they failed to respond to appeals for help from Jews. Thuermer recalled a knock on his door very late one night. When the American opened it, he saw a thin man wearing a coat with a yellow star on it; around his neck, he wore the Medal of Honor from the previous war. “I wonder if I could pay you marks here in Germany and you pay me in an account in dollars,” he said. Thuermer tried to explain that, although he was working for the AP and no longer a student, he was still getting a preferential exchange rate provided to foreign students in violation of the rules. This meant he was “a little crooked” already and felt he couldn’t take another risk. His visitor left disappointed.

One night in October 1941, Howard K. Smith, who had just quit the United Press and jumped to CBS to replace Flannery, received a similar knock on the door at around 2 A.M. His visitor was Fritz Heppler, a Jew of about the same age as the young American reporter; they had met during an air raid about a year earlier. Heppler told him that the Gestapo was conducting raids of Jewish apartments all over town, ostensibly looking for hoarded foodstuffs. They had raided his apartment, too, but not finding anything, they released him. Heppler had been defiant the previous time he met Smith, but now his fear was palpable. “It’s come,” he said, alluding to the roundups of Jews, who were then deported to the east. “I knew it would come, as soon as they started losing.” He pleaded for Smith to help him get out of the country. The reporter offered him a cigarette and said he would see if he could help him get an American visa, but claimed that he was exaggerating the danger. Then he shoved him out the door.

“My callousness on this occasion can hardly be justified,” Smith wrote later, recalling that he forgot about Heppler the next day and didn’t even attempt to bring his case to the embassy’s attention. “Not that it would have helped him; but it would have helped soothe my own conscience,” he added. Smith never saw Heppler again.

At the American Embassy, Kennan and other diplomats often felt overworked and besieged. Since the German government had ordered the closure of ten U.S. consulates in other cities in 1940, everyone came to the Berlin embassy for help. “The increasingly desperate situation of the German Jews, and Jews from the German-occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the United States, added to the burden,” he wrote. He bitterly noted that he and his colleagues had been put in an impossible position. “These pressures tended often to be generated in powerful congressional circles at home and to be passed on, unmitigated, to us by the Department of State anxious to get itself out of the firing line and too timid to point out to the Congressmen what could and could not (sometimes in light of the laws they themselves had created) be done to aid such people.”

When Alexander Kirk left Berlin in October 1940, Kennan’s personal workload increased further. Leland Morris replaced Kirk as chargé d’affaires, but was a far weaker figure. As a result, Kennan was often the de facto man in charge. Jacob Beam, by then the longest-serving embassy staffer despite his young age, would write later: “Time proved him [Kennan] to be a better historian than executive.” Still, Kennan and the rest of the embassy staff deserved credit for continuing to keep their country’s outpost in Berlin functioning as best they could. Aside from taking on the interests of Britain and France, the embassy assumed responsibility for successive countries that came under Nazi rule. This meant more and more work; it also meant that the American diplomats were feeling more and more alone.

The American journalists felt lonelier as well. Some of the best known of their colleagues had already pulled out. Shirer departed in December 1940, and Harsch and Schultz left in January 1941. Unlike many of their countrymen back home who still were hoping the United States could stay out of the war, those correspondents were convinced that it would prove impossible to stay on the sidelines. Harsch was planning on writing a book in the hopes of enlightening his countrymen, and, to do so, he needed to return. “I felt that perhaps the time had come to get home and write down all the things I had not felt free to say when writing from Berlin itself,” he recalled.

The print journalists didn’t labor under the same heavy censorship as their radio colleagues, but there were always unspoken rules. Foremost among them, as Pierre Huss put it, was that “you must never, either by act or word of mouth or in a dispatch, say or suggest anything which might be a slur or a reflection on the office and the person of the Fuehrer.” Although the International News Service correspondent also pointed out that he and his American colleagues were “the hottest game of the Nazis” right up till mid-1941, since the Germans still hoped to keep the United States out of the war, he complained that afterward the de facto censorship meant that reporters were expected to rely mainly on official information—and disinformation. “Everything else was taboo,” he wrote.

Harsch traced the more hostile attitude toward the American correspondents further back—in particular to Roosevelt’s victory in the November 1940 elections over Wendell Willkie. Although Willkie was a liberal Republican who would later support Roosevelt and do battle with the isolationists, he sent mixed signals during the campaign on what course he would steer if he were elected. His sister Charlotte was married to Commander Paul Pihl, the U.S. naval attaché for air in Berlin, and they would hold frequent Sunday salons attended by officials from the Foreign Ministry and the Luftwaffe. “Many times I heard her say that if her brother were to win the 1940 election he would keep the United States out of the war,” Harsch wrote.

As American support for the British war effort was ramped up in early 1941, the pressures on the foreign correspondents increased as well. Ostensibly, they were given special treatment. Two press clubs were set up to attend to their needs, with plenty of wining and dining included, but the clubs’ primary purpose was to disseminate propaganda and keep tabs on what the reporters were doing. The Gestapo “knew everything about each of us,” Howard K. Smith wrote. “They maintained agents in the two press clubs, vile little fellows who tried to appear chummy.” They also kept agents at other popular hangouts, such as the Adlon Hotel and Die Taverne.

All of which made Smith and others completely disbelieve the official reason why seven Gestapo agents showed up at Richard Hottelet’s door at 7 A.M. on Saturday, March 15, 1941. Taken to the Alexanderplatz Prison, Hottelet, Smith’s colleague in the United Press’s Berlin bureau, was told he had been arrested “on suspicion of espionage.” As Smith curtly put it, “Had he been a spy, the Gestapo would have known it.”