Berlin Diary (30 page)

R
OME
,
February
(
undated
)

Pius XI was buried today, the service beautiful, but St. Peter’s very cold, and there was a long hitch, due, it seems, to the fact that the mechanics who were to seal the casket before it was lowered to the vault below ran out of solder. An SOS call was sent out for some, but as most of the workshops in Rome had closed for the day, it was some time before a sufficient quantity could be found. Father Delaney, broadcasting the service for us from atop one of the pillars, did a magnificent job, filling in beautifully the hour or so that elapsed while they were hunting the solder.

R
OME
,
March
3

Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli is the new Pope, elected yesterday, and a very popular choice all around except perhaps in Germany. We had great luck with broadcasting the news a few moments after the election, though earlier in the day it looked disastrous for us. Suffering from the flu when I left Lausanne the day before, I had such a violent attack of it by the time I reached Milan that I had to go to a hotel there and take to bed. I managed to get to the train somehow, but was completely out when I arrived in Rome yesterday morning. Tom Grandin, our Paris correspondent, intelligent, but green at radio, having just been hired, arrived from Paris about noon, but he tells me I was completely out of my head and that in my delirium my instructions on what to do made no sense. He did gather that I had arranged a broadcast from the balustrade around St. Peter’s during the afternoon. He got there, found Father Delaney, who was talking for us, and just as
they were signing off, they got a message through their earphones from inside the Vatican to stand by, passed it on to New York, who understood. In a moment they were announcing the name of the new pontiff.

R
OME
,
March
9

A storm brewing in what is left of poor Czechoslovakia. Dr. Hacha, the weak little President—successor to the great Masaryk and the able Beneš—has proclaimed martial law in Slovakia and dismissed Father Tiso and the Slovak Cabinet. But Tiso, I know, is Berlin’s man. Strange—maybe not?—that Germany and Italy have never given rump Czecho the guarantee they promised at Munich. The Italian Foreign Office people admit London and Paris have been pressing Hitler for the guarantee, but they say Hitler considers Prague still too “Jewish and Bolshevik and democratic.” I don’t recall any reservations about that at Munich.

Still in bed with flu and must wait here for the Pope’s coronation Sunday.

G
ENEVA
,
March
14

The radio reports Slovakia has declared its “independence.” There goes the remains of Czechoslovakia
. Should go to Prague, but I haven’t the heart. Am I growing too soft-hearted, too sentimental to be a good reporter? I don’t mind so much the killings, bloodshed—I’ve seen and got over quite a little of that in the last fourteen years—but Prague now—I can’t face it. The radio says [Czech President] Hacha and [Foreign Minister] Chvalkovsky arrived in Berlin tonight. To save the pieces?

P
ARIS
,
March
15

The German army has occupied Bohemia and Moravia on this blizzardy day of spring, and Hitler in a cheap theatrical gesture from the Hradshin castle above the Moldau in Prague has proclaimed their annexation to the Third Reich. It is almost banal to record his breaking another solemn treaty. But since I was personally present at Munich, I cannot help recalling how Chamberlain
said it not only had saved the peace but had really saved Czechoslovakia
.

Complete apathy in Paris tonight about Hitler’s latest coup. France will not move a finger. Indeed, Bonnet told the Chamber’s Foreign Affairs Committee today that the Munich guarantee had “not yet become effective” and therefore France had no obligation to do anything. Ed Murrow telephones that the reaction in London is the same—that Chamberlain in Commons this afternoon even went so far as to say that he refused to associate himself with any charges of a breach of faith by Hitler. Good God!

Should have gone to Prague or Berlin today, I suppose, but talked it over with Murrow from Geneva early this morning and we decided the Nazi censorship in both places would be complete and that, with what inside stuff I could pick up here and knowing the background, I could tell a better story from Paris. I was relieved. My Paris plane, after getting iced up and lost in a snowstorm near the Bellegarde Pass shortly after we left Geneva, turned round and finally got us back to the airport. I took the noon train. Bonnet has laid down a radio censorship and I fought with his hirelings until long after midnight tonight over my script.

P
ARIS
,
March
22

Someone—I think it was Pertinax, who is just back from London—told me yesterday a weird tale of how Chamberlain suddenly reversed his whole position last Friday in his Birmingham speech. Two days before, he had told Commons that he would not charge Hitler with bad faith. In Birmingham he severely denounced Hitler for “treaty-breaking.” Pertinax says that Sir Horace Wilson, the dark little man behind the scenes at Godesberg and Munich had actually drafted the Birmingham speech for the Prime Minister along the appeasement lines of his remarks in the House, but that half the Cabinet and most of the leading London newspaper editors were so up in arms when they heard of it that Chamberlain suddenly felt forced to reverse his whole policy and actually wrote most of his new speech on the train en route to Birmingham.

How shoddy Paris has become in the last ten years! Some Frenchmen point to the neon signs, the gaudy movie palaces, the automobile sales windows, the cheap bars which now dominate the once beautiful Champs-Elysées, and say: “That is what America has done to us.” Perhaps so, but I think it is what France has done to herself. France has lost something she had when I arrived here fourteen years ago: her taste, part of her soul, the sense of her historical mission. Corruption everywhere, class selfishness
partout
and political confusion complete. My decent friends have about given up. They say: “
Je m’en fous
(To hell with it).” This leads to the sort of defeatist, anarchistic
je m’en fousism
which a writer like
Céline
is spreading.

G
ENEVA
,
March
29

Madrid surrendered yesterday, the rest of republican Spain today. There are no words to express what I feel tonight. Franco’s butchery will be terrible.

B
ERLIN
,
April
1

Just as Hitler began his broadcast at Wilhelmshaven this afternoon, an order came through to the RRG control room where I was standing by, to stop the broadcast from getting abroad. For a moment there was great confusion in the control room. I protested vehemently to the Germans about cutting us off, once Hitler had started to speak. But orders from Wilhelmshaven were explicit. They came from Hitler himself, just before he started speaking. The speech was also not being broadcast directly in Germany, but only from recordings later. This and our being cut off meant Hitler wanted to reflect on what he said in the heat of the moment before giving his words wider circulation. You can always edit recordings. I suggested to Dr. Ratke, head of the short-wave department, he should announce to our network in America that the speech of Hitler had been shut off owing to a misunderstanding and that the Führer was actually talking at this moment. A very excitable man, he refused. Instead he ordered some silly music records played. Just what I expected happened. Within fifteen minutes, Paul White was urgently on the line from New York. Why was Hitler cut off? Reports in New York he has been assassinated. He hasn’t been killed? How do you know? Because I can hear him this moment on the telephone circuit to Wilhelmshaven. The Germans are recording the speech.