Taking Their Holds. Chapter One: Bill Shirer, Muzzled by Goebbels
Shirer could see that he was a Goebbels target and knew the boxes of his diaries could get him killed. While he plotted his escape, he piled up more stories of Nazi horrors for his book to come.
This New Episode: A month before the American election, the air was full of free-floating trouble. Bill Shirer was in Berlin with the Gestapo breathing down his neck while his diaries of Nazi horrors were in his unlocked closet. He had getaway cash from an advance from Alfred A. Knopf Publishing in America and he and his wife Tess, in Geneva with their infant daughter Eileen, would use it to get safely home with the book that would secure their future. Henry Wallace’s weird letters to his guru who had become a tax fugitive were in the hands of a publisher who was a Willkie supporter. Joseph Stalin’s Russia was left out of a loyalty pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan. Churchill told Parliament that the Nazis were killing way fewer of his people with bombs per ton than had happened in the Great War with the Kaiser. Wendell Willkie was drawing closer by attacking Roosevelt as a warmonger gone mad with power. And Anne Morrow Lindbergh published a book endorsing Fascism.
This Chapter: Reports of Nazi horrors, and of anti-Semitic broadcasters who had defected to Germany to feed their contempt for Jews, were coming in a steady secret stream to Bill Shirer. His broadcasts were being monitored by the Gestapo for “irony” and he heard rumors that Goebbels was planning his disappearance. He had a gold mine of diaries of Nazi inhumanities in his closet and cash from a publisher’s advance that he would use to get himself, his diaries, and his wife and infant daughter to American safety. Smuggling people was dangerous enough but boxes of diaries were hard to disguise. He was teetering between safety and success in America and getting sent to one of Hitler’s camps if he got caught. But wasn’t everybody?
Contents: Here are the six chapters of “Taking Their Holds” from “Seeking the Hinge” with their dates of publication.
Chapter One: Bill Shirer, Muzzled by Goebbels. Saturday, May 10
Chapter Two: Harry Hopkins, Putting Out a Fire. Sunday, May 11
Chapter Three: Joseph Stalin, Feeling Neglected. Monday, May 12
Chapter Four: Winston Churchill, Tallying the Damage. Tuesday, May 13
Chapter Five: Wendell Willkie, Waking Up; Anne Lindbergh, Loving Fascism. Wednesday, May 14
Chapter Six: Tess Shirer, Escaping Boldly. Thursday, May 15.
Chapter One: Bill Shirer, Muzzled by Goebbels
Reading time: seven minutes
Bill Shirer was in Berlin and becoming more frustrated by the day with the censoring of his broadcasts. As he was reduced to reading text that met with German approval, he began to use tricks of presentation that he thought would carry meaning to his audiences in America, indications of the absurdities he was forced to utter. He wrote in his diary, “I’ve been trying to get by on my wits, such as they are, to indicate a truth or an official lie by the tone and inflection of the voice, by a pause that is held longer than is natural, by the use of an Americanism which most Germans will not fully understand, and by drawing from a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or their juxtaposition all the benefit I can.” But they were on to him and sat, at his elbow as he spoke, people who would make notes on their copies of his reports. He was, he wrote, “under great pressure for being too ‘ironic.’ Further, the Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry keep receiving reports from the United States — not only from their Embassy, but from their well-organized intelligence service throughout the country — that I’m getting away with murder and must be sat upon. My trickery has worked and the result is my silencing.” The censorship, and the Knopf agreement to publish his diary, sent him to longer spells at his typewriter.
A friend whom he identified as “X” in his notes came to him with the news that the Germans “were systemically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich. The Nazis call these ‘mercy deaths.’ He relates that the manager of a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children was arrested because he refused to deliver up his patients to the secret police. Shortly after his arrest, the hospital was bombed ‘by the British.’ I was mildly incredulous until two days later when the German press reported, in fiery indignation, that the British had bombed the Bodelschwingh hospital for mentally deficient children.” He checked with his sources in the area and they did not recall any planes overhead during the night in question nor any damage to any other parts of the city.
“Himmler has hanged without trial,” he wrote, “at least one Pole for having had sexual relations with a German woman, and many German women have been given long prison sentences for similar ‘offenses.’ Last week every household in Berlin received a leaflet from the local office of the ‘Bund of Germans Abroad’ warning the people not to fraternize with the Poles now working as laborers or prisoners in Germany. It read, ‘The servility of the Poles to their German employers merely hides their cunning. Their friendly behavior merely hides their deceit. The Pole must never be your comrade! He is inferior to each German! Never forget that you are a member of the master race!’
“Most Germans I speak to are beginning for the first time to wonder why the invasion of Britain hasn’t come off and why so many casualties are returning almost each night in the long hospital trains. They’re still confident the war will be over by Christmas. But then, until a fortnight ago they were sure it would be over before winter. I have won all my bets with Nazi officials and newspapermen about the date of the Swastika appearing in Trafalgar Square and shall — or should — receive enough champagne from them to keep me all winter. Today when I suggested another bet so they could win back some of their champagne, they did not think it was funny. Neither would they bet.”
He thought the British bombs were having an effect that went beyond their actual damage because it deprived the people of their sleep without the offsetting benefit of having days off from the strictly enforced work schedules. He wrote that he hoped it would continue and “keep the German people in their damp, cold cellars at night, prevent them from sleeping, and wear down their nerves. Those nerves are already very thin after seven years of belt-tightening Nazi mobilization for Total War.
“An old German acquaintance dropped in on me. He’s in the Luftwaffe now and for the last three weeks has been a member of a crew of a night bomber which has been working on London. He was impressed by the size of London, said they’ve been pounding away on it but there’s so much of it left! He said they were told on taking off that they would find their target by the city on fire, but they found only a fire here and there. He said the crews are tired and overworked, said they were told the British airmen are cowards but he now has the greatest admiration for their skill and bravery. He said one British pilot has become famous among them as he roars into a fight with a cigarette stuck at a smart angle between his lips. He says the bombers often are required to search for an airfield on their return other than the one they took off from and he thinks this is because the British are destroying them as quickly as they depart. It’s a fact that the Germans have given up large-scale day attacks and have gone over largely to night bombing. This in itself is an admission of defeat.”
He wrote of the men and women who had surrendered their citizenship and come to Berlin as radio broadcasters and film performers for the Reich. They included the famous “Lord Haw-Haw,” born William Joyce in Ireland, the English actor Jack Trevor, Baillie Stewart, a former captain of the Seaforth Highlanders, Fred Kaltenbach, an American from Iowa, as Shirer was, Edward Delaney, an American and another actor, and Miss Constance Drexel who formerly worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily Ledger. He said their duties were to extol the virtues of fascism to listeners in Britain and America, which came easily to them, but their bond with Germany was an abiding hatred of Jews. Ed Murrow had reported to him that Lord Haw-Haw had a large audience in England during the months of the “Phony War”, but much less now that the collision had come home to the British.
He wrote, “You don’t have to be profound to conclude that the rule of brute force over the occupied territories can never last very long. You cannot forever rule over foreign peoples who hate and detest you. They have been made into slaves who produce the raw materials to feed and sustain their German masters. They will be saved, of course, if Britain holds out and ultimately wins this war. But even if Germany should win the war it will lose its struggle to organize Europe in the ‘New Order’ it boasts of, for the German is incapable of organizing Europe. His lack of balance, his bullying sadism, his constitutional inability to grasp even faintly what is in the hearts and minds of other peoples, his instinctive feeling that relations between peoples can only be on the basis of master and slave and never on the basis of let-live equality make the German and his nation unfit for leadership and make certain that, however he may try, he will in the long run fail.”
He worried over the escape that Tess and Eileen would attempt from Geneva that month, and began to give serious thought to his own. Other correspondents had been banished by Goebbels, but only sent home. None had been imprisoned, but none of them had incontrovertible evidence of Nazi horrors stored in boxes in their closets.