Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (48 page)

It was a warning that Harnack and other members of the Red Orchestra, which included Luftwaffe intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, repeated on several occasions—and Stalin refused to believe. The resisters kept taking huge risks in gathering and sending more information as the Gestapo closed in on them.
They also weren’t helped
by their Soviet handlers, who were guilty of major security lapses in their own radio transmissions.
In late August
and early September 1942, the German authorities rounded up the Red Orchestra members and anyone suspected of ties to them, arresting an estimated 139 people, including the Harnacks.

All the chief participants in the group were tried for treason. Arvid was among those immediately sentenced to death. Mildred was initially treated with more sympathy by the judges, who chose to view her as a woman who had been led astray by her German husband. She was sentenced to six years in prison and six years’ “
loss of honor
.” The first round of executions took place on December 22, 1942, with hanging as the chosen instrument of death for Arvid, Schulze-Boysen and two others. Afterward, the guillotine was used on four more members of the group.

In the end, Mildred wasn’t spared either. She was put on trial again. The new charge was that she had seduced an Abwehr lieutenant to steal state secrets, which offered a lurid justification for the death sentence that
promptly followed. The only American woman executed by the Gestapo, Mildred Harnack uttered these final words before she was guillotined in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on February 16, 1943: “
And I have loved
Germany so much.”

Most Americans who still remained in Germany in 1940 and 1941, of course, were neither traitors nor resistance fighters. But the diplomats and journalists, like the Roosevelt Administration back home, were increasingly open in choosing sides as well. The success of the Royal Air Force in winning the Battle of Britain, which forced Hitler to abandon Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of England, had cheered the Americans in Berlin who had watched Hitler’s military machine score one victory after another up till then. Although the diplomats and journalists had different roles to play, they often acted on the implicit assumption that they supported a common cause. Colonel John Lovell, a military attaché at the Berlin embassy, easily enlisted some of the American correspondents to monitor the numbers on the collars and shoulders of soldiers they saw coming through Berlin. “
When a new number
showed up we would report it to John,” recalled Harsch of the
Christian Science Monitor.

Since Lovell knew which units had been deployed on the Western Front, he assumed that when their soldiers began appearing in Berlin this was a signal that these units were moving east. Harsch had moved from the Adlon Hotel to a house known as the Cercle Français, which had been taken over by the American Embassy and where Lovell and several other staffers were living. One evening in December, the colonel invited Harsch to a dinner for the military attachés of Germany’s eastern and southeastern neighbors. After a French dinner that included a rare endive salad, Lovell asked his guests to come to the library, where he spread out a map of Eastern Europe. He then offered his estimates on where German troops were deployed and their battle readiness, and invited his guests to do the same. He added that these forces could move either east or south, but he believed they were more likely to move east—against the Soviet Union.

The attachés from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and
Greece offered minor modifications in some cases, but largely agreed with Lovell’s assessment. They also agreed that it looked like the German forces were getting ready to move east. The Soviet attaché then went to the map and acknowledged that his estimates on deployments were almost exactly the same. But he claimed that the German military machine would probably turn south next. Still, he warned that if they did turn against his country “it will not be a Sunday promenade.”

In fact, Hitler’s decision to abandon the invasion of England had prompted the Nazi leader to pursue his other dream: a swift victory over the Soviet Union. This was supposed to isolate Britain further and convince it that, in the end, a German victory was inevitable. The
Chicago Tribune
’s Schultz recalled a conversation with Karl Boehmer of the Propaganda Ministry about this time. He didn’t mention a possible invasion of Russia but suggested the Germans would engineer a takeover from within. “
Just imagine
what we can do with Russia’s resources,” he declared. “She squanders them as badly as America does hers.” Schultz claimed she then asked if his country planned to control America’s resources as well, and that he replied, “Why, yes.”

That may have been a bit of showboating on Boehmer’s part. In reality, Hitler hadn’t yet abandoned hope of keeping the United States out of the war, despite Roosevelt’s growing support for Britain. On December 7, 1940, the president declared that “
the best immediate defense
of the United States is the success of Great Britain.” In a fireside chat on December 29, he denounced Nazi plans “to dominate the rest of the world” and famously pledged that his country would be “the great arsenal of democracy.” All of which set the stage for the Lend-Lease Act that was signed into law on March 11, 1941, allowing for the shipment of massive amounts of military equipment and other supplies to Britain. But Hitler still clung to the belief that his planned invasion of the Soviet Union would convince the Americans that they had to abandon Europe, including their British friends, to German might.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s armies launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet dictator had refused to believe all the warnings not just from his spies but also from Britain and the United States. As a result, German forces initially scored easy victories
against the unprepared Red Army troops and pushed deep into Soviet territory, making it look like Hitler’s calculations would be proven right again. In the August 4, 1941, issue of
Life
magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, America’s most authoritative military writer, argued that the outcome of the war depended on what would happen on the Eastern Front. A successful German campaign would result in the completion of “the conquest of Europe,” he declared, dooming Britain as well. He discussed the possibility that Hitler’s armies could be defeated or at least worn down by a long, costly campaign. “But on the basis of all past experience—on our limited knowledge of the Red Army, on the operations of the first month—the world can anticipate in Russia another quick and decisive German victory,” he concluded.

For the Americans who lived and worked in Germany, however, Hitler’s optimistic predictions looked more and more unrealistic. The further his armies marched, the more strains they noticed on the home front. Life was changing in Hitlerland—for the Americans, but also for the Germans. And it wasn’t for the better.

During the Battle of Britain in August and September 1940, RAF bombers rarely made it to Berlin, but their initial forays were enough to shake the confidence of the inhabitants of the German capital who had been assured that it was invulnerable. On September 10, Berlin endured what Shirer described as “
the severest bombing yet
,” as firebombs hit the Ministry of Munitions right between the Adlon Hotel and the U.S. Embassy. Although the incendiaries were put out before they did much damage, they were scattered in various places, including the yard of the Adlon and the garden of the embassy. That evening after he had completed his broadcast, Shirer was rushing back to the Adlon in the dark when his car hit some debris, skidded and came to a stop about 20 feet from a fresh bomb crater. “I almost met a quick end last night,” he wrote in his diary the next day.

Shirer recorded that Donald Heath had an even closer call at the embassy. A splinter from the same bomb that made the crater had flown through Heath’s office double window 200 yards away, passing directly
over his desk and embedding itself in the wall on the opposite side. Heath had been scheduled for night duty, but chargé d’affaires Kirk had relieved him.

The German press trumpeted headlines vowing revenge for such bombings, which it claimed were targeting children, hospitals and other civilian targets. While London was living under the genuine terror of the Blitz, Berliners could be excused for believing that their country was suffering almost as much. “
Night Crime
of British Against 21 German Children—This Bloody Crime Cries Out for Revenge,” one newspaper proclaimed. Another warned, “‘Assassins’ Murder Is No Longer War, Herr Winston Churchill!—The British Island of Murderers Will Have to Take the Consequences of Its Malicious Bombings.”

For some time after the Battle of Britain, the Americans in Berlin felt almost eerily detached from the actual fighting. “
Except for
the outbursts from the Nazi orators . . . and except for the reports of feverish diplomatic activity and rumours of troop movements, we in Berlin hardly knew a war was on during the early part of 1941,” Flannery recalled. In that period, Americans still noticed relatively few wounded soldiers on the streets of Berlin. “
But after the Russian campaign
began, I saw them in every block along the principal streets—young men with their arms in slings, with an arm gone, walking with crutches or canes, or without one of their legs,” Flannery added.

When the CBS reporter approached a newsstand one day, he overheard the newsdealer ask a woman if she was all right. In a hollow voice, she replied: “No, I just had bad news, and must phone my husband at work. You know we lost a son in Poland, and another in France. Now I have word that Johann is gone, too, our last son. He has been killed in Russia.”

Even during Germany’s early victories in the Soviet Union, the newspapers left no doubt that the cost was high. Flannery estimated that almost half of German families had suffered a loss—and he saw that people were increasingly depressed. As the RAF bombings intensified, this, too, contributed to the drop in morale. Flannery, who was doing full-time duty in Berlin since Shirer’s departure in November 1940, was leaving his dentist one day when the woman elevator operator began complaining
about the war’s hardships. “
Mein Gott, mein Gott
,
” she told him, “
warum
? Why? It’s all caused by a mere handful of men.”

Flannery found himself within a block of falling bombs on more than one occasion. On a night when Colonel Lovell was watching a raid from the roof of an embassy house near the zoo, the bombs hit so close that the attaché threw himself flat. “I thought I was gone,” he said.

Sigrid Schultz observed another more subtle side of the war that was taking its toll as well. On the train from Berlin to Basel, she shared a compartment with a Luftwaffe colonel who freely discussed how the war was changing family relationships. “
I love my wife
and my children,” he said, “but when we soldiers get home, all our families can talk about is how many potatoes they get and what kinds of sandwiches other people have in their air-raid shelters.” The implicit message: Germany’s fighting men were impatient with what they often saw as the petty concerns of their families back home.

Earlier, Schultz had talked with a woman who appeared to have none of the material worries of so many of the other civilians; she exuded self-confidence. “I do war work. I am a plastic surgeon,” she said. “I ought to be prosperous; I’m working hard enough beautifying bustlines.”

When Schultz asked her what this had to do with the war, she replied: “Why, when the German men come home from France and the Balkans, they criticize the figures of their wives. All the Nazis have money, you know, so I operate.”

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.