Berlin Diary (95 page)

B
ERLIN
,
November
12

A dark, drizzling day, and Molotov arrived, his reception being extremely stiff and formal. Driving up the Linden to the Soviet Embassy, he looked to me like a plugging, provincial schoolmaster. But to have survived in the cut-throat competition of the Kremlin he must have something. The Germans talk glibly of letting Moscow have that old Russian dream, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, while they will take the rest of the Balkans, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. If the Italians can take Greece, which is beginning to look doubtful, they can have it.

When I went to our Embassy today to get a tin of coffee from my stores, which I keep there, the box, containing a half-year’s supply, was gone. It had just disappeared. If I were not leaving shortly, this would be a blow. Coffee, ever since it became impossible to buy it in Germany
, has assumed a weird importance in one’s life. The same with tobacco. Some times the Embassy takes pity on me, but for the most part I smoke German pipe tobacco. Of late it has made foul smoking.

B
ERLIN
,
November
14

We thought the British would come over last night when Ribbentrop and Göring were feting Molotov at a formal state banquet. The Wilhelmstrasse was very nervous at the prospect, for they did not like the idea of adjourning to the cellar with their honoured Russian guests. Instead, the British came over this evening—shortly before nine p.m., the earliest yet—while Molotov was host to the Germans at the Soviet Embassy. Molotov, we hear, declined to go to the cellar and watched the fireworks from a darkened window. The British were careful not to drop anything near by.

According to the German radio and the Warsaw
Zeitung
, Mr. Hoover’s American representative here has offered his congratulations to Dr. Frank, the tough little Nazi Governor of Poland, on the anniversary of his year in office. He congratulates him for what he has done for the Poles!

My information is that there will be no Polish race left when Dr. Frank and his Nazi thugs get through with them. They can’t kill them all, of course, but they can enslave them all.

B
ERLIN
,
November
(
undated
)

A pleasant dinner and evening at X’s in Dahlem. Two well-known German figures present, one a high Nazi official, and they spent the evening telling jokes on the regime, especially on Goebbels, whom they both appeared to loathe. About ten p.m. the British came and we went up on the balcony to watch the fireworks, which were considerable. Once there came the familiar whistle of a bomb just before it lands near you. Automatically we all dived through the open door into
a pitch-dark bedroom, landing in a heap on the floor. The bomb shook the house, but we got no splinters. Pitiful how few planes the British can spare for this Berlin
job. There were not more than a dozen of them tonight. They have done comparatively little damage here so far.

B
ERLIN
,
November
20

Today was
Busstag
, some sort of German Protestant holiday. Feeling low, I went to a candlelight concert in the Charlottenburg castle and heard a string quartet play Bach nobly. I am definitely getting away from here by plane to Lisbon on December 5 if I can get all the necessary papers in time. The Foreign Office, the police, the secret police, and so on must approve my exit visa before I can leave. And getting Spanish and Portuguese visas is proving no easy job. Harry Flannery has arrived from St. Louis to take over.

B
ERLIN
,
November
23

Was having a most excellent dinner and some fine table-talk at Diplomat G.’s about eight forty-five this evening when the butler called me away to the phone. It was one of the girls at the
Rundfunk
saying that the British bombers were about ten minutes away and that I had better hurry if I wanted to broadcast this evening. I dashed out to my car. An aid-warden who also had the advance notice tried to stop me from driving away, but I brushed past him. I was not familiar with the blacked-out streets in this neighbourhood and twice almost drove at great speed into the Landwehr Canal. I reached the Knie, about two miles
from the
Rundfunk
, when the sirens sounded. To stop, obey the law, put my lights out, park, and go to a shelter, as the law insisted? That meant no broadcast. Better to have remained at the dinner and enjoyed an evening for a change. I had never missed a broadcast because of air-raids. I decided to disobey the law. I left my hooded lights on and stepped on the gas. One policeman after another along the Kaiserdamm popped out waving a little red lamp. I raced by them, at fifty miles an hour. It was a stupid thing to do, because several times I just brushed other cars which had stopped in the darkness and put out their lights, as the law prescribes. You could not see them. By a miracle I did not smash into any of them, but about three blocks from the
Rundfunk
I decided my luck had been good enough, pulled up my car, and sprinted to the radio before the police could snatch me into a public shelter.

I hear from party circles that Julius Streicher, the sadistic, Jew-baiting czar of Franconia and notorious editor of the anti-Semitic weekly
Stürmer
, has been arrested on orders of Hitler. No tears will be shed within or without the party, for he was loathed by nearly all. I shall always remember him swaggering through the streets of Nuremberg, where he was absolute boss, brandishing the riding whip which he always carried. He has been arrested, say party people, pending investigation of certain financial matters. If Hitler cared much, he could make some additional investigations. He could look into the little matter of how it came about that so many party leaders acquired great country estates and castles.

B
ERLIN
,
November
25

I have at last got to the bottom of these “mercy killings.”
²⁸
It’s an evil tale.

The Gestapo, with the knowledge and approval of the German government, is systematically putting to death the mentally deficient population of the Reich. How many have been executed probably only Himmler and a handful of Nazi chieftains know. A conservative and trustworthy German tells me he estimates the number at a hundred thousand. I think that figure is too high. But certain it is that the figure runs into the thousands and is going up every day.

The origin of this peculiar Nazi practice goes back to last summer after the fall of France, when certain radical Nazis put the idea up to Hitler. At first it was planned to have the Führer issue a decree of law authorizing the putting to death of certain persons found mentally deficient. But it was decided that this might be misunderstood if it leaked out and be personally embarrassing to Hitler. In the end Hitler simply wrote a letter to the secret-police administration and the health authorities authorizing the
Gnadenstoss
(coup de grâce) in certain instances where persons were proved to be suffering from incurable mental or nervous diseases. Philipp Bouhler, state secretary in the Chancellery, is said to have acted as intermediary between Hitler and the Nazi extremists in working out this solution.

At this point Bethel, already mentioned in these notes, creeps into the story. Dr. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh is a Protestant pastor, beloved by Catholics and Protestants alike in western Germany. At Bethel, as I have noted down previously, is his asylum for mentally deficient children. Germans tell me it is a model institution
of its kind, known all over the civilized world. Late last summer, it seems, Pastor von Bodelschwingh was asked to deliver up certain of his worst cases to the authorities. Apparently he got wind of what was in store for them. He refused. The authorities insisted. Pastor von Bodelschwingh hurried to Berlin to protest. He got in touch with a famous Berlin surgeon, a personal friend of Hitler’s. The surgeon, refusing to believe the story, rushed to the Chancellery. The Führer said nothing could be done. The two men then went to Franz Gürtner, Minister of Justice. Gürtner seemed more troubled at the fact that the killings were being carried out without benefit of a written law than that they were being carried out. However, he did agree to complain to Hitler about the matter.

Pastor von Bodelschwingh returned to Bethel. The local
Gauleiter
ordered him to turn over some of his inmates. Again he refused. Berlin then ordered his arrest. This time the
Gauleiter
protested. The pastor was the most popular man in his province. To arrest him in the middle of war would stir up a whole world of unnecessary trouble. He himself declined to arrest the man. Let the Gestapo take the responsibility; he wouldn’t. This was just before the night of September 18. The bombing of the Bethel asylum followed. Now I understand why a few people wondered as to
who
dropped the bombs.

Of late some of my spies in the provinces have called my attention to some rather peculiar death notices in the provincial newspapers. (In Germany the custom among all classes is to insert a small paid advertisement in the newspapers when a death occurs, giving the date and cause of death, age of the deceased, and time and place of burial.) But these notices have a strange ring
to them, and the place of death is always given as one of three spots: (1) Grafeneck, a lonely castle situated near Münzingen, sixty miles southeast of Stuttgart; (2) Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube; (3) the Sonnenstein Public Medical and Nursing Institute at Pirna, near Dresden.