rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

504 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICHmight be transpiring on Mars. This ignorance of the mind and character andpurposes of Adolf Hitler, and’ indeed of the Germans, who, with a few exceptions,were ready to follow him blindly no matter where nor how, regardlessof morals, ethics, honor, or the Christian concept of humanity, was to cost thepeoples led by Roosevelt and the monarchs of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg,Norway and Denmark dearly in the months to come.Those of us who were in Berlin during those last few tense days of peaceand who were attempting to report the news to the outside world knew verylittle either of what was going on in the Wilhelmstrasse, where the Chancelleryand the Foreign Office were, or in the Bendlerstrasse, where the military hadtheir offices. We followed as best we could the frantic comings and goings inthe Wilhelmstrasse. We sifted daily an avalanche of rumors, tips and ”plants.”We caught the mood of the people in the street and of the government officials,party leaders, diplomats and soldiers of our acquaintance. But what was saidat Ambassador Henderson’s frequent and often stormy interviews with Hitlerand Ribbentrop, what was written between Hitler and Chamberlain, betweenHitler and Mussolini, between Hitler and Stalin, what was talked about betweenRibbentrop and Molotov and between Ribbentrop and Ciano, what wascontained in all the secret, coded dispatches humming over the wires betweenthe stumbling, harassed diplomats and foreign-office officials, and all the moveswhich the military chiefs were planning or making – of all this we and the generalpublic remained almost completely ignorant at the time.A few things, of course, we, and the public, knew. The Nazi-Soviet Pact wastrumpeted to the skies by the Germans, though the secret protocol dividing upPoland and the rest of Eastern Europe remained unknown until after the war.We knew that even before it was signed Henderson had flown to Berchtesgadento emphasize to Hitler that the pact would not prevent Britain from honoringits guarantee to Poland. As the last week of August began we felt in Berlin thatwar was inevitable – unless there was another Munich – and that it would comewithin a few days. By August 25 the last of the British and French civilianshad skipped out. The next day the big Nazi rally at Tannenberg scheduled forAugust 27, at which Hitler was to have spoken, was publicly called off, as wasthe annual party convention at Nuremberg (the ”Party Rally of Peace,” Hitlerhad officially called it), due to convene the first week of September. On August27 the government announced that rationing of food, soap, shoes, textiles andcoal would begin on the following day. This announcement, I remember, aboveall others, woke up the German people to the imminence of war, and theirgrumbling about it was very audible. On Monday, August 28, the Berlinerswatched troops pouring through the city toward the east. They were beingtransported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every other sort of vehicle thatcould be scraped up.That too must have alerted the man in the street as to what was up. Theweekend, I remember, had been hot and sultry and most of the Berliners, regardlessof how near war was, had betaken themselves to the lakes and thewoods which surround the capital. Returning to the city Sunday evening, theylearned from the radio that there had been a secret, unofficial meeting of theReichstag at the Chancellery. A D.N.B. communique stated that the ”Fuehreroutlined the gravity of the situation” – this was the first the German public hadbeen told by Hitler that the hour was grave. No details of the meeting weregiven and no one outside of the Reichstag members and of Hitler’s entourage