Berlin Diary (42 page)

B
ERLIN
,
October
4

Two choice press bits today: The 12-
Uhr Blatt
headline in red ink all over page 1:
“ENGLAND’S RESPONSIBILITY—FOR THE OUTRAGEOUS PROVOKING OF WARSAW TO DEFEND ITSELF.”
The
Nachtausgabe
’s editorial, arguing that America is not nearly so anxious to join the war “as are Herr Roosevelt and his Jewish camarilla.”

B
ERLIN
,
October
5

Reichstag tomorrow. Hitler is expected to offer peace terms. No one expects them to be very generous. He himself flew to Warsaw today to hold a triumphant review of his troops. He made a speech to his soldiers, the speech of a conquering Caesar.

The people here certainly want peace. The government may want it for the moment. Will Britain and France make it now, and then maybe next year have to mobilize again? Hitler has won the war in Poland
and lost the peace there—to Russia. The Soviets, without a fight, get nearly half of Poland and a stranglehold on the Baltic states and now block Germany from its two main goals in the east, Ukrainian wheat and Rumanian oil. Hitler is hastily withdrawing all Germans from the Baltic states, where most of them have been settled for centuries. Estonia has capitulated to Moscow and agreed to the Soviets’ building an air and naval base on its soil. The foreign ministers of Latvia and Lithuania are shuttling back and forth between their capitals and Moscow trying to save the pieces. And once the Soviets get a wedge in these Baltic states, how soon will they go Bolshevik? Soon. Soon.

B
ERLIN
,
October
6

Hitler delivered his much advertised “peace proposals” in the Reichstag at noon today. I went over and watched the show, my nth. He delivered his “peace proposals,” and they were almost identical with those I’ve heard him offer from the same rostrum after every conquest he has made since the march into the Rhineland in 1936. These must have been about the fifth. And though they were the fifth at least, and just like the others, and just as sincerely spoken, most Germans I’ve talked to since seem aghast if you suggest that perhaps the outside world will put no more trust in them than they have learned by bitter experience to put in the others.

Hitler offered peace in the west if Britain and France stay out of Germany’s
Lebensraum
in eastern Europe. The future of Poland he left in doubt, though he said Poland would never again endanger (!) German interests. In other words, a slave Poland, similar to the present slave Bohemia.

I doubt very much if England and France will listen to these “proposals” for five minutes, though some of my colleagues think so on the ground that, now that Russia has come up against Germany on a long front and this past week has been busy establishing herself in the Baltic states, it would be smart of London and Paris to conclude peace and sit back until Germany and Russia clash in eastern Europe. Pertinax wrote a few months ago that the German problem would never be settled until Germany had a barrier on the East that it
knew
it could not break. Then it would stop being expansive, stop disturbing the rest of Europe, and turn its undoubted talents and energy to more peaceful pursuits. Russia might provide that barrier. At any rate Russia is the winner in this war so far and Hitler is entirely dependent upon the good graces of Stalin, who undoubtedly has no good graces for anyone but himself and Russia.

Hitler was calmer today than usual. There was much joviality but little enthusiasm among the rubber-stamp Reichstag deputies except when he boasted of German strength. Such a boast sets any German on fire. The members of the Cabinet—up on the stage where the opera singers used to perform—stood about before the session chatting easily, Ribbentrop with Admiral Raeder, Dr. Goebbels with von Neurath, etc. Most of the deputies I talked to afterwards took for granted that peace was assured. It was a lovely fall day, cold and sunny, which seemed to contribute to everybody’s good feelings. As I walked over to the Reichstag (held as usual in the Kroll Opera) through the Tiergarten I noticed batteries of anti-aircraft everywhere.

The early edition of tomorrow morning’s
Völkische Beobachter
, Hitler’s own sabre-rattler among the journals, seems transformed into a dove of peace. Its flaming
headlines:
“GERMANY’S WILL FOR PEACE—NO WAR AIMS AGAINST FRANCE AND ENGLAND—NO MORE REVISION CLAIMS EXCEPT COLONIES—REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS—CO-OPERATION WITH ALL NATIONS OF EUROPE—PROPOSAL FOR A CONFERENCE.”

If the Nazis were sincere they might have spoken this sweet language before the “counter-attack” was launched.

B
ERLIN
,
October
8

A whole page of paid death notices in the
Völkische Beobachter
today. How many only sons lost! Two typical notices: “In a hero’s death for Führer,
Volk
and
Vaterland
, there died on September 18, in the fighting in Poland, my beloved only son, aged 22.” And “For his beloved Fatherland, there fell on September 20 in the battle around Kutno my only son, aged 25.” Both notices signed by the mother.

I leave tomorrow for Geneva to recover my senses and fetch some winter clothing, as the weather has turned cold. I did not bring any winter things when I left Geneva exactly two months ago. I did not know. Two months! What an age it seems. How dim in memory the time when there was peace. That world ended, and for me, on the whole, despite its faults, its injustices, its inequalities, it was a good one. I came of age in that one, and the life it gave was free, civilized, deepening, full of minor tragedy and joy and work and leisure, new lands, new faces—and rarely commonplace and never without hope.

And now darkness. A new world. Black-out, bombs, slaughter, Nazism. Now the night and the shrieks and barbarism.

G
ENEVA
,
October
10

Home at last for two or three days. The sensation indescribable. The baby asleep when I arrived tonight; her face on the pillow, sleeping. Tess at the station, pretty and… She drove us home—Demaree Bess, who had come down from Berlin with me, and Dorothy. It was strange driving through Geneva town to see the blinding street-lights, the blazing storewindows, the full headlights on the cars—after six weeks in blacked-out Berlin. Strange and beautiful.

In Basel this noon Demaree and I stuffed ourselves shamefully with food. We ordered a huge dish of butter just to look at it, and Russian eggs and an enormous steak and cheese and dessert and several litres of wine and then cognac and coffee—a feast! And no food cards to give in. All the way down in the train from Basel we felt good. The mountains, the chalets on the hillsides, even the sturdy Swiss looked like something out of paradise.

Coming up the Rhine from Karlsruhe to Basel this morning, we skirted the French frontier for a hundred miles. No sign of war and the train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front since the war began. Where the train ran along the Rhine, we could see the French bunkers and at many places great mats behind which the French were building fortifications. Identical picture on the German side. The troops seemed to be observing an armistice. They went about their business in full sight and range of each other. For that matter, one blast from a French “75” could have liquidated our train. The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them.

Queer kind of war.

G
ENEVA
,
October
11

A curious sensation to see the Swiss papers reporting
both
sides of the war. If you had that in the dictatorships, maybe the Caesars couldn’t go to war so easily. Much fun romping around with Eileen and Tess. Coming down with a cold. No heat in the houses here yet.

B
ERLIN
,
October
15

Back again, depressed, the week in Switzerland over in no time. Of my three and a half days in Geneva, two spent down with a cold and fever and one preparing a broadcast which never got through because of atmospherics. But it was grand just the same. Tess came along as far as Neuchâtel in the train and it was sad parting in the little station above the lake there. Swiss train full of soldiers. The country has one tenth of its population under arms; more than any other country in the world. It’s not their war. But they’re ready to fight to defend their way of life. I asked a fat businessman in my compartment whether he wouldn’t prefer peace at any price (business is ruined in a Switzerland completely surrounded by belligerents and with every able-bodied man in the army) so that he could make money again.