In the Stomach

To most good Germans it was something of a shock. Had not they been told for six years that Russia was their bitterest enemy? But that didn't mean the Pact wasn't a wonderful thing. Did it not plainly mean peace? Now they would get from the Poles what rightfully belonged to them, and Russia, their friend, wouldn't march through to attack them. Now the "encirclement" of the democracies was at an end. Now it was certain that England & France wouldn't fight. If there was to be a war, it would be a one-front war, and the Army would like that. And those Czechs, who might have been hard to hold down, they would like it, too. A shock, yes, but once more they could feel a real security. Their Fuehrer had again played a masterful stroke, like that march into the Rhineland, like Austria, like Czechoslovakia. ... He was a Genius. . .

On Tuesday, when Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took off for Moscow, and on Wednesday, when he signed the Pact, all Germany was jubilant. The press gloated, called the Axis "blockade proof," chided the English & French for "groveling before the Kremlin." The radio gloated some more. By nightfall Berlin's streets were as gay as any holiday. Cafes along Kurfurstendamm overflowed. It was good sport to salute friends with "Heil Stalin," and when some young blades rang the doorbell of the Soviet Embassy, shouted "Heil Moscow" and ran away, that was very funny too. In a midtown Bierstube, a band struck up the Communist Internationale and everybody stood up. Gossip even got around that that great German Communist, Ernst Thalmann, who once polled three times as many votes as the Fuehrer himself, was to be released from a concentration camp. Along the Wilhelmstrasse, knowing officials bet 20 bottles of champagne to one there would be no war.*

On Thursday, when it got about that the British Parliament had been called in special session, that Great Britain and France were commencing to mobilize in earnest, the German people began to sober down. Now the streets were filled with marching men, not only youths but some of their fathers too, as far back as the Class of 1899. In Vienna, where war always seemed so far away, thousands of men in factories were called up, replaced by women.

On Friday, when Chancellor Hitler returned grim-faced to Berlin from Berchtesgaden and called off his Tannenberg speech--scheduled for Sunday--things seemed to take a turn for the worse. There was no great cheering crowd at the Chancellery. Cafes were practically empty. Nerves grew taut. Over the radio Nazi Deputy Rudolph Hess openly talked of the chance of war, roared that if it comes, "it will be terrible." In the Pankow District School some children heard the howl of a siren, remembered their air raid instructions, filed rapidly out. But it was only a factory whistle down the street.

On Saturday, after long-distance telephone service had been cut off all night, the newspapers printed no news about it or anything else except more & more Polish atrocities. News in the streets wasn't good news. Civilians weren't being allowed to travel on a train any more, the German air service had shut down, general mobilization--called "organization of all measures for eventualities"--was really under way. The radio blared nothing but martial music. That night the Fuehrer canceled the Nuernberg Congress, the great Party Congress of Peace to which at least a million Nazis had expected to go.

On Sunday and Monday it was almost as though war had really come. Truck after truck rumbled through the streets, plane after plane droned overhead. Outside the barracks-like Chancellery, where their Fuehrer hadn't shown his face these three days, crowds assembled--silent crowds. Still their newspapers told them nothing. Still their radios blared only marching music. But in their homes Berliners last Sunday at last came face to face with a sign of war that came closest to their lives. It was just a policeman who called, but in his hand he bore a card, a ration card, without which no housewife could buy a scrap of food. It was as though the very pens which signed the pact were now about to stab the German people in the stomach.

*There was only one secret, sour note, and that didn't matter much: some Germans of the old upper and upper middle classes discreetly muttered to themselves against a pact that had anything to do with the Communists. They remembered again, as many a foreigner forgets, that National-Socialism is a hyphenated name, joining together two opposing points of view, best symbolized by Goring to the Right of it, Goebbels, almost a Communist, to the Left.

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