Inside Germany

BERLIN DIARY -- William L. Shirer--Knopf ($3).

This diary is the most complete news report yet to come out of wartime Germany. In 1934, William Lawrence Shirer went to Berlin to report Nazi doings for Hearst's Universal News Service. Before he left in 1940, he had reported the destruction of European civilization from the center of the destroying whirlwind. This volume is the record. Says Shirer:

"I jotted down these things from day to day. Unfortunately some of rny original notes were lost; others I burned ... a few things I dared not write down. . . . But the bulk of my notes ... I was able to smuggle out."

When Shirer went to Berlin most people outside Germany knew (the liberal, refugee and Communist press had told them so) that the Nazis were crazy and would soon be turned out by a popular uprising. Goering was an overblown playboy who liked to wrestle with lion cubs and dress up like Lohengrin. Hitler was a mad man and a paper hanger to boot.

Those were the days when the Reichswehr maneuvered with the "defensive" weapons allowed them by Versailles, "but everybody knows they've got the rest--tanks, heavy artillery and probably airplanes." Those were the days of the Saar plebiscite; the winter Olympic games ("On the whole the Nazis have done a wonder ful propaganda job."); the Hitler peace speeches ("We have no territorial demands to make in Europe! . . . Germany will never break the peace.").

Vienna. One day Correspondent Shirer confided to his diary: "Have started, God help me, a novel. . . ." Three days later he made another jotting: "Trouble in Spain. . . ." Before the "trouble in Spain" was over, Shirer had finished his novel, changed jobs (from Universal to Columbia Broadcasting System), moved to Vienna. There he made another casual entry in his diary: "Much tension here this Sabbath. Schuschnigg has had a secret meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. ..." Next thing Shirer knew the Nazis were in Vienna.

Shirer describes the atmosphere in the newspaper circles of the Cafe Louvre: "Martha Fodor* is there, fighting to keep back the tears, every few minutes phoning the news to Fodor. Emil Maass, my former assistant, an Austro-American, who has long posed as an anti-Nazi, struts in, stops before the table. 'Well, meine Damen und Herren,' he smirks 'it was about time.' And he turns over his coat lapel, unpins his hidden Swastika button, and repins it on the outside. . . . Two or three women shriek: 'Shame!' at him. Major Goldschmidt, Legitimist, Catholic, but half Jewish, who has been sitting quietly at the table, rises. 'I will go home and get my revolver,' he says."

Hitler in Action. The Czech crisis took Shirer and his microphone to "Wagnerian" Godesberg, where the Swastika and the Union Jack flew side by side--"very appropriate, I find."

In Godesberg Shirer had a glimpse of Adolf Hitler. "I was having breakfast in the garden of the Dreesen Hotel. . . when the great man suddenly appeared. ... X. one of Germany's leading editors, who secretly despises the regime, nudged me: 'Look at his walk!' On inspection it was a very curious walk indeed. In the first place, it was very ladylike. Dainty little steps. In the second place, every few steps he cocked his shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. ... And now I understand the meaning of an expression the party hacks were using when we sat around drinking in the Dreesen last night. They kept talking about the 'Teppichfresser,' 'the carpet-eater.' . . . They said Hitler has been having some of his nervous crises lately and that in recent days they've taken a strange form ... he flings himself to the floor and chews the edges of the carpet. . . ." Shirer saw Hitler again right after Munich: his nervousness was gone.

It was gone too in the forest of Compiegne where Shirer broadcast the signing of the Franco-German armistice, and got one of his great news scoops--some three hours ahead of all newspaper correspondents. "Through my glasses I saw the Fuehrer stop, glance at the [Alsace-Lorraine] monument. . . ."

Then he read the inscription on the great granite block in the center of the clearing: Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire . . . vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave. "I look for the expression on Hitler's face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt. He glances back at it contemptuous, angry. . . . Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt. . . ."

Scoop. Newscaster Shirer knew that the Germans had hidden microphones in the armistice car. So he looked until he found a sound truck in the woods. "No one stops me so I pause to listen. It is just before the armistice is signed. I hear General Huntziger's voice, strained, quivering. I note down his exact words in French. They came out slowly, with great effort, one at a time. He says:

" 'I declare the French government has ordered me to sign these terms of armistice. I desire to read a personal declaration. Forced by the fate of arms to cease the struggle in which we were engaged on the side of the Allies, France sees imposed on her very hard conditions. France has the right to expect in the future negotiations that Germany show a spirit which will permit the great neighboring countries to live and work peacefully.' Then I heard a scratching of pens. ..."

The last section of Shirer's book has the smothered, nightmare quality of a man held prisoner by an enemy who will tell him nothing about what he wants most desperately to know--the fate of England. British air raids exhilarated him as they did the Belgians who "kept hoping the British bombers would come over. They did not seem to mind if the British bumped them off if only the R.A.F. got the Germans too."

Wrote Shirer in Berlin: "We had our first big air raid of the war last night. . . . For the first time British bombers came directly over the city, and they dropped bombs. . . . Not a plane was brought down. . . , There was a pellmell, frightened rush to the cellars by the five million people who live in this town."

Again & again Author Shirer urges the British to bomb Berlin regularly even if they can spare only a few planes. He says the Germans simply cannot take it.

The Germans, he says, are far from hungry; in general their morale is good. He gives three reasons why: 1) Hitler has satisfied the "millennium-old longing of Germans for political unification"; 2) the German people feel they have . . . revenged the terrible defeat of 1918; 3) their fear of the consequences of defeat.

At last the Nazi censors made it impossible for Shirer to broadcast anything but propaganda. They made it hard for him to broadcast even that. A favorite trick was for the censors to hold his copy until it was too late to go on the air. Once when this happened, the German Broadcasting Co. cabled New York: "Regret Shirer arrived too late today to do broadcast." So Shirer went home. As his ship moved out of Lisbon harbor, he observed that European civilization had shrunk to little more than the coast he was escaping from. Why?

Moral Vacuum. One advantage of a diary is its informal catching of passing moods, backgrounds, people. Sandwiched among the great disasters in this book are many casual entries about the European civilization which Shirer loved. They are revealing. There is the usual chitchat about El Greco's greens, The Decline of the West and The Magic Mountain, "a tremendous novel." There is a murmuring of the evocative names of storied cities. There is gnashing of teeth, impotent anger, weeping, physical illness at each new Nazi success.

But European civilization, as Shirer's people embody it, has become a complex of nostalgias, apathies, pleasant habits. As a moral force to counteract the Nazis' immoral force, it is a mere buzz. Another reason for the swift Nazi successes is made clearer: the Nazis found a moral vacuum, rushed in to fill it with a workable immorality. Europe could not save itself.

The question Shirer's book poses: Can what is left of civilization save itself? For it is the nature of men in crises that they usually prefer what is strong and effective, no matter how brutal, to what is weak and ineffectual, no matter how exalted.

* Wife of famed Correspondent Marcel W. Fodor, author of Plot and Counter-Plot in Central Europe.

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