Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Of course, the neighborhood—in both the narrow and broader sense—was endangered by much more than swirling ashes. Kennan clearly understood that much better than Hitler did.

The remaining American journalists in Berlin—only fifteen, less than a third of their earlier number—realized that their assignments were likely to be ending as well. On the night that the diplomats were burning their documents, word spread among the correspondents that the FBI had arrested German newsmen in the United States. They knew no details of those arrests, which were carried out as part of a sweep against “enemy aliens,” but they had little doubt what would happen next. Louis Lochner of the AP met with a German Foreign Ministry official early on Wednesday, December 10, who assured him any reprisals “will be done in the noblest manner.” If any confirmation was needed, this was it: the reprisals were coming.

Along with his young reporter Angus Thuermer, Lochner went next to the daily news conference, conducted by Paul Schmidt, the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s press department. By then, most of the press corps knew what was happening. “Many a European correspondent with whom I had worked shoulder to shoulder for years, came to say goodbye and to express the hope that America would bring freedom to a sorely tried European continent,” Lochner recalled. Schmidt arrived and announced the arrest of the German newsmen in the United States. “I must therefore ask the American correspondents here present to leave the conference and proceed forthwith to their homes,” he added.

Everyone knew this meant house arrest until the next orders, and the Americans began walking out. As they did so, the others—“from Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Argentina, even Japan, and from virtually all the subjugated countries of Europe,” as Lochner wrote—lined up to shake their hands. Schmidt stood at the door and shook each correspondent’s hand as well.

As they exited, Lochner turned to Thuermer and told him to drive quickly back to the office so that he could file a final story and say goodbye to the German staffers, defying the order to return straight to their homes. Lochner sent a brief dispatch about their impending house arrest, and Thuermer was at the telex machine when he received an informal query from the Berne bureau about what was really happening. BYE-BYE. WE JUGWARDING NOW, he replied in what he thought was lighthearted cable shorthand. Over breakfast in Chicago the next morning, his father read the AP story quoting his son as saying that he and the other Americans were heading to jail.

Returning to their homes, the American reporters packed up their belongings, fully expecting a knock on the door from the Gestapo. But the afternoon and evening dragged on and no one came. Friends kept dropping by to visit Lochner and his German wife, Hilde, and they fielded constant phone calls as well. Finally, when the last visitor was gone, the couple decided to prepare for bed since nothing more appeared to be happening. But just before 1 a.m., the doorbell rang. Hilde opened the door, and two men stepped in asking for Lochner.

“Here I am,” Lochner called out from the corridor, which was dimly lit because of blackout regulations. The men pointed their flashlights at him and showed their Gestapo badges, ordering him to come with them. Lochner picked up his packed bag. “But how did you know that we were coming?” one of the men asked. Lochner shot back: “Why do you think I’m a newsman?”

Thuermer was even more determined to show he wasn’t surprised when the same two officers knocked sharply on his door and announced: “ Geheime Staatspolizei! Come with us.” Already in his pajamas, the young American responded: “Where have you been?” When that made the two visitors pause, he added: “I got so fed up I got undressed, got in these pajamas, and was about to go to bed.” Thuermer pulled out a pack of Chesterfields, offering it to the grateful officers, who abruptly abandoned their air of brisk efficiency and sat down to smoke them as he changed into regular clothes. Everyone was taking their time. But then one of the officers casually mentioned that they had someone waiting in the car downstairs and it was very cold outside. “It was my chief,” Thuermer recalled, half-amused and still half-alarmed by the memory of keeping Lochner in that uncomfortable position. “I was freezing his buns off.”

Lochner and Thuermer were taken to the third floor of the Alexanderplatz police station, which was the Gestapo’s section. After they entered through a door with steel bars and a huge lock, they were put into a large room that was adorned with stern portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler. They then waited as more American reporters were brought in, until they numbered fifteen in all. Ed Shanke, another AP correspondent, arrived feeling particularly stiff after his long wait in a small car. Carefully spreading out a newspaper on a table, he stretched out his legs and put them on it. A guard immediately jumped up. “We still have Kultur in Germany,” he snapped. “Take down your feet. You can do that when you get to America, but such manners aren’t tolerated in a civilized country like ours. Here we are still human.”

The guards didn’t seem to know what to do with their captives. In fact, the journalists learned later that the Gestapo hadn’t received the instructions from the Foreign Ministry to wait until the following day—Thursday, December 11—to round them up. “The Gestapo had decided to grab us in the middle of the night, as they were wont to grab Jews, republicans, and nonconformist clergymen,” Lochner wrote later. “So here we were, fifteen marooned and forgotten newsmen.” But any doubts that the Americans were in a very different situation than the Nazis’ other prisoners were erased the next day when they started complaining they were hungry. The Gestapo hadn’t made any arrangements to feed them, but a guard offered to get them food if they would pay for it. The result was a meal of meatballs and boiled potatoes, along with a salami “wurst.” As Lochner noted, the total cost for everyone was 60 cents.

At the embassy that Thursday, the diplomats watched the preparations for Hitler’s Reichstag speech, which included the arrival of sound trucks and large groups of people right outside the embassy building. The diplomats nervously closed the metal blinds, but, as Kennan recorded, no action was taken against them. Instead, while Hitler was announcing his declaration of war on the United States, denouncing Roosevelt and the “entire satanic insidiousness” of the Jews who were backing him, the phone suddenly rang in the embassy for the first time since service had been cut off. It was a summons for Morris to the Foreign Ministry. There, Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop kept him standing as he read out the declaration of war and screamed, “Your President has wanted this war; now he has it.”

At about the same time, the American correspondents were transferred to an unheated summer hotel annex in Gruenau, a Berlin suburb. But they soon received cheering news: the State Department had declared it would consider the arrested German newsmen to have diplomatic standing, which meant that would be the case for the arrested American journalists as well. The next day, a surprise visitor showed up.

An anonymous caller had tipped off Hilde Lochner about where her husband and the others were taken, and she had managed to talk her way past the guards to deliver apples, cigarettes, canned food and American magazines. The spirits of the journalists soared.

Hitler had ordered that the Americans had to be out of Berlin by the end of the week. On Saturday, Kennan was the one who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was instructed that all the American staffers had to vacate their apartments and report to the embassy with their luggage the following morning. That same day the American journalists were released with the same orders. Returning to their homes to gather up their belongings, several journalists discovered that intruders had already helped themselves to their possessions during their time in detention—everything from canned meat and cigarettes to clothing and silverware.