The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940

William L. Shirer

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780795334269
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito giornalistico

The famous journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents his front row seat at the pivotal events leading up to World War II. In the second of a three-volume series, William L.Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II. This remarkable account tells the story of an American reporter caught in a maelstrom of war and politics, desperately trying to warn Europe and the United States about the dangers to come. This memoir gives readers a chance to relive one of the most turbulent periods in twentieth century history—painting a stunningly intimate portrait of a dangerous decade. "Mr. Shirer stirs the ashes of memory in a personal way that results in both a strong view of world events and of the need for outspoken journalism. Had Mr. Shirer been merely a bland 'objective' reporter without passion while covering Hitler's Third Reich, this book and his other histories could never have been written." — The New York Times

BOOK FOUR

The Coming of World War II

1939–1940

CHAPTER 14

The Last Months of Peace

1939

Early in the spring that year, Hitler struck again. At dawn on March 15, 1939, he sent in his troops to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia and, as he had threatened to do, wiped it off the map. The splendid little democracy, the only one left in Central and Eastern Europe, ceased to exist. I should have rushed to Prague to report it firsthand. But I was too depressed. “I haven’t the heart,” I confessed in my diary in Geneva.

Also, I was worn out from covering the death of a pope and the election of a new one in Rome, and exhausted from trying to do it during nearly a month of the worst flu of my life. Besides, as I told Murrow when we discussed whether I should fly to Prague, German military censorship wouldn’t have allowed me to say anything anyway about the takeover in Czechoslovakia. Even in Paris, which was as far as I eventually got, the insufferable French foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, had clamped down a censorship of my broadcasts. He was afraid of offending the Nazis.

Busy at the Vatican covering the change at the Holy See I had not followed developments in Prague and Berlin as closely as I should have. I did note in my diary in Rome on March 9: “A storm brewing in what is left of poor Czechoslovakia.”

Dr. Hácha, the weak little president—successor to the great Masaryk and the able Beneš⁷⁷—has proclaimed martial law in Slovakia and dismissed Father Tiso [the premier] and the Slovak cabinet. But Tiso, I know, is Berlin’s man….

Hitler, who had recently maneuvered Tiso into the top job, would not, I was sure, accept Prague throwing out the fat little Catholic prelate.

“Strange—maybe not?—” I mused, “that Germany and Italy have never given rump Czecho the guarantee they promised at Munich.” I inquired at the Italian Foreign Office about that and was told that Hitler was holding the guarantee up.

“Hitler still considers Prague too Jewish and Bolshevik and democratic,” one of Ciano’s smart-aleck young henchmen had wise-cracked to me. The truth was, as I had felt instinctively in Munich, Hitler would never give his guarantee. In Rome, Mussolini was snickering about his Axis partner’s brazenness.

A few weeks before I had personally seen him snickering behind the back of Neville Chamberlain. This was on January 11, when Chamberlain and Halifax arrived in Rome to visit Mussolini. I was at the railroad station when the Duce and his son-in-law and foreign minister Ciano arrived to greet them. I noted the scene in my diary.

…Chamberlain, looking more birdlike and vain than when I last saw him at Munich, walked, umbrella in hand, up and down the platform nodding to a motley crowd of British local residents whom Mussolini had slyly invited to greet him. Mussolini and Ciano, in black Fascist uniforms, sauntered along behind the two… Englishmen, Mussolini displaying a fine smirk on his face the whole time. When he passed me he was joking under his breath with his son-in-law, passing wise-cracks.

Mussolini, I noted, looked “much older, much more vulgar, than he used to, his face having grown fat.”

My local spies tell me he is much taken with a blond young lady of nineteen whom he has installed in a villa across the street from his residence and that the old vigor and concentration on business is beginning to weaken.

This was the first I had heard of the Duce’s latest mistress, Clara Petacci, a pretty and vivacious twenty-six-year-old daughter of a Vatican physician, with whom Mussolini had fallen in love six years before, and who would stick to him loyally to the bitter end. I do not believe that at this time I had yet identified Hitler’s mistress. It was a pretty well kept secret—at least from the likes of me.

***

I got back to Geneva from Rome on March 14 and jotted down in my diary reports I picked up on the radio that Slovakia had declared its “independence,” adding: “There goes the rest of Czechoslovakia.” It was obvious that Hitler was pulling the strings for a takeover. I concluded my diary that evening:

The radio says [Czech President] Hácha and [Foreign Minister] Chvalkovsky arrived in Berlin tonight. To save the pieces?

Their savage ordeal that night at the brutal hands of Adolf Hitler ushered in the end, for the moment at least, of the Czechoslovak nation. From 1:15 A.M. until 4 A.M. Hitler, aided by Göring, Ribbentrop and General Keitel, hounded Hácha and Chvalkovsky with threats to bomb Prague into smithereens, wipe out Czechoslovakia, and “exterminate” the Czech people unless they surrendered their country to him forthwith. He had given the order, he said, for his troops to march into Bohemia and Moravia at 6 A.M. Czechoslovakia, he explained, was to be “incorporated in the Reich.”

At this news, Dr. Paul Schmidt, who was interpreting, noted, Hácha and Chvalkovsky sat as though turned to stone. Only their eyes “showed that they were alive.”

Further threats, hurled by Hitler, Göring and Ribbentrop, revived them. As Robert Coulondre, the new French ambassador in Berlin, who got it from one who was present, said, the Germans “were pitiless. They literally hunted Dr. Hácha and M. Chvalkovsky round the table on which the documents were lying, thrusting them continually before them, pushing pens into their hands, incessantly repeating that if they continued in their refusal half of Prague would lie in ruins from bombing within two hours….”

At this point Dr. Schmidt says he heard Göring shout: “Hácha has fainted!”

For a moment, it seems, the Nazi bullies were afraid that the prostrate Czech president might expire in their hands and, as it occurred to Schmidt, “the whole world would say tomorrow that he had been murdered at the Chancellery.”

Göring yelled for the doctor. This was Hitler’s quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, whose specialty was injections—much later he would almost kill Hitler with them. In a jiffy he poked his needle into the arm of Hácha and brought him back to consciousness. A few minutes later the aging Czech guest fainted again and was again revived by Dr. Morell and his needle—revived enough, eyewitnesses say, to stumble back to the august presence of Hitler to sign his country’s death warrant, the text of which had been dictated by the Nazi dictator before Hácha’s arrival and hurriedly translated into Czech during the president’s fainting spells.

It was one of the most brazen documents the shabby Nazi leader ever concocted. The Czechoslovak president declared, it said, that in order to restore “calm, order and peace in Central Europe he confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Führer of the German Reich. The Führer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich.”

Despite all my experience of Nazi deceit, I was outraged when I heard these words being read over the Berlin radio the next day, as German troops poured into the stricken Czech land without resistance and Göring’s bombers occupied the airfields of the conquered country. For sheer chicanery Hitler had reached a new height.

One of his secretaries later told how he rushed from the signing into his office, embraced all the women present (even at four o’clock in the morning!) and exclaimed: “Children! This is the greatest day of my life! I shall go down in history as the greatest German.”

This was the first time that Hitler had invaded and occupied a non-German country. In the Sudetenland he had acquired three million people of Sudeten German blood, and the Anschluss brought him six million Austrian Germans. Now in Czechoslovakia he was taking his first Slavic country.

By nightfall on March 15 the German troops and air force completed their unopposed occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. That night Adolf Hitler, who as a youthful waif in Vienna had, like many Viennese, been contemptuous of the Czechs, slept in Hradschin Castle, the ancient seat of the kings of Bohemia, high above the River Moldau. Before leaving Berlin he had issued a grandiose proclamation to the German people, full of tiresome lies about the “wild excesses” and “terror” of the Czechs against the Germans which he had been forced to bring to an end. “Czechoslovakia,” he proclaimed, “has ceased to exist!”

Next morning, from Hradschin Castle, Hitler proclaimed the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” And in words that set a new record for distortion of history he declared:

For a thousand years the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia formed part of the Lebensraum of the German people. … Czechoslovakia showed its inherent inability to survive, and has therefore now fallen a victim to actual dissolution. The German Reich cannot tolerate continuous disturbances in these areas…. Therefore the German Reich, in keeping with the law of self-preservation, is now resolved to intervene decisively to rebuild the foundations of a reasonable order in Central Europe. For in the thousand years of its history it has already proved that, thanks to the greatness and the qualities of the German people, it alone is called upon to undertake this task.

Here you could see megalomania taking hold—not only in the Nazi dictator but in his people, who appeared to swell with pride at his silly boasts about their greatness. None of them spoke out against this naked aggression or the skulduggery with which it was done. For the Czechs a long night of German savagery now settled over their land.

On that day too, March 16, Hitler took Slovakia, whose phony “independence” he had concocted, under his “protection”—also in response to a “request,” whose terms had been drafted in Berlin. He now had the whole of Czechoslovakia in his pocket, from which to mount his next military aggression.

Neither Great Britain nor France made the slightest effort to save it, despite their guarantee of it against aggression given at Munich. Chamberlain brazenly took the out Hitler had offered him. He told the House of Commons that “the proclamation of Slovakia’s independence put an end by internal disruption to the State whose frontier we had proposed to guarantee. His Majesty’s Government cannot accordingly hold themselves any longer bound by this obligation.”

Not a word that, as he well knew, the “internal disruption” of Czechoslovakia had been engineered by Hitler. In fact, the prime minister told the Commons he would not go so far as even to say that Hitler had broken his word!

It is still difficult to believe that a British prime minister, after what had just happened, could stoop to say such a thing. But he went on. “I have so often heard charges of breach of faith bandied about,” he said of Hitler, “that I do not wish to associate myself today with any charges of that character.”

The prime minister did not even lodge a protest in Berlin, as the French at least did. He did have delivered a note which, in Geneva trying to broadcast a few sane remarks about what was unfolding, I found difficult to stomach:

His Majesty’s Government have no desire to interfere unnecessarily in a matter with which other Governments may be more directly concerned. They are however, as the German Government will surely appreciate, deeply concerned for the success of all efforts to restore confidence and a relaxation of tension in Europe. They would deplore any action in Central Europe which would cause a setback to the growth of general confidence….

Not a word about what had taken place that day! To the prime minister, Hitler’s military occupation of Czechoslovakia was a mere “matter.”

And then, suddenly, to the surprise of friend and foe, Neville Chamberlain woke up. It took some prodding. He had been surprised that most of the British press (even the Times) and many members of the House had reacted violently to Hitler’s latest aggression. Half his cabinet, led by Halifax, had turned against him.

The prime minister was scheduled to make a speech in his home city of Birmingham on March 17—the eve of his seventieth birthday. Some days before he had drafted a speech, mostly about domestic affairs. At first not even Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia persuaded him to address a new subject. On the sixteenth, Sir John Simon, on behalf of the government, had made a speech so insensitive to what had occurred in Prague that, according to press dispatches I saw, the House had been roused to “a pitch of anger rarely seen.”

But on the seventeenth, probably on the train going up to Birmingham, Chamberlain experienced his great awakening. He threw away his prepared speech and made rapid notes for a new one.⁷⁸ To his own country and others—his speech was broadcast (I caught it in Geneva)—he apologized for “the very restrained and cautious… somewhat cool and objective statement” that he had made to the Commons two days before.

“I hope to correct that statement tonight,” he announced.

With that he began to reveal how the scales had fallen from his eyes. It dawned on him at last that Hitler had deceived him. He went over the times the Nazi dictator had assured him that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand in Europe and that he “wanted no Czechs.” Now Hitler had gone back on his word—“he has taken the law into his own hands.” Listening to the broadcast of the speech I began to sit up. Only two days before, in the Commons, Chamberlain had refused to “associate” himself with any such charges “bandied about.”

Now he hurled some questions at the man he had trusted so long. If there were disorders in Czechoslovakia, which Hitler cited as grounds for occupying the country, “were they not fomented from without?”

Is this the end of an old adventure, or is it the beginning of a new one? Is this the last attack upon a small State or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in effect, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?

If it were, Chamberlain said, “no greater mistake could be made than to suppose that because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, this nation has so lost its fiber that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge, if it ever were made.”

This was a fateful turning point for Chamberlain and indeed for Hitler and for the history of these times. Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, tried to warn the Führer of it. “It would be wrong,” he wired Berlin the next day, “to cherish any illusions that a fundamental change has not taken place in Britain’s attitude toward Germany.”

Chamberlain made that even clearer a fortnight later. On March 31, sixteen days after Hitler entered Prague, the British leader rose in the House of Commons and made a fateful announcement.

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter.

Neville Chamberlain, so blind so long, at last had recovered his sight. He knew very well which “small state,” after Austria and Czechoslovakia, was next on Hitler’s list.

Hitler was at first surprised and then enraged at Chamberlain’s sudden guarantee of Poland. When the news reached him that Friday he was with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German counterintelligence, who later reported that the Führer stormed about the room, pounding his fists on the marble tabletop, his face contorted with fury, and shouting against the British: “I’ll cook them a stew they’ll choke on!”

I had flown up to Berlin to get the madman’s reaction. He gave it publicly the next day, Saturday, April 1, in a speech at Wilhelmshaven, at the launching of the battleship Tirpitz. I had arranged with CBS to broadcast it live and was in a control room of the German Broadcasting Company in Berlin to introduce Hitler and check on the relay to New York of the broadcast. In Berlin it was being recorded for airing later to the nation, which surprised me since the Führer’s speeches were always broadcast live.

The dictator had scarcely started speaking before he was cut off. This also had never happened before. But I could hear some excited official in Wilhelmshaven—it sounded like Goebbels—bellowing orders that the broadcast to CBS, on the Führer’s orders, was to be immediately stopped. It could be carried later, he said, from the recording the Germans were making for their own broadcast.

I protested vehemently at being cut off, pointing out that it would give rise to suspicions in America that the Führer had been assassinated, cut down in the middle of a sentence. I knew I was wasting my breath. No one in Germany would risk his neck disobeying a command from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Book One: The Road to Berlin, 1930–1934
• Book Two: Life and Work in the Third Reich, 1934–1937
• Book Three: The Road to Armageddon, 1935–1938
• Book Four: The Coming of World War II, 1939–1940
• Epilogue: The End of the Third Reich—Judgment at Nuremberg, 1945–1946
• Endnotes