Under a Darkening Sky

CHAPTER ONE

Nazi Germany Means War

January 30, 1933. It is a typically cold, midwinter day across northern Europe. In London, the world’s largest city, fresh winds blow. Across southern England intermittent rain, sleet, and snow keep people indoors. In Germany that night a political winter sets in that is to last for more than twelve years and encase the entire world in its frozen embrace. In the Times (London) the following day Canadian-born journalist Matthew Halton described the previous night’s events in Berlin, when the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler had taken control of the Reichstag. A man now on a crusade against the new totalitarianism taking root in Germany, Halton pulled no punches. Strutting up the Chancellery steps is Hitler, the cruel and cunning megalomaniac who owes his triumph to his dynamic diabolism and his knowledge of the brutal corners of the human soul, he wrote in his memoir, Ten Years to Alamein in 1944, using language that made many in the West consider the journalist one of those alarmists who naively saw the world through a simplistic, sensationalist, and self-righteous lens:

Surrounding him is his camarilla of braves: the murderous fat Goering, a vain but able man; the satanic devil’s advocate, Goebbels; the cold and inhuman executioner, Himmler; the robustious radical, Roehm, organizer of the Brown Shirts. . . . Their supporters were decreasing in numbers; but by intrigue and a trick, Germany is theirs. Supporting this terrible elite are the brown-shirted malcontents of the S.A., nearly a million of them, and the black-uniformed bullies of the S.S., the praetorian guard. And the whole structure is built on the base of a nation whose people are easily moved by romantic imperialism, by the old pan-Germanism, in new and more dynamic form, by dreams of Weltmacht [World Power] and desire for revenge, and even by nostalgia for the jungle and for the tom-toms of the tribe.

Halton, the Toronto Star’s London-based Europe reporter, was to prove one of the most prescient journalists of the age. The language he had begun to utilize when describing what he was seeing around him during his visits to Germany was urgent, prophetic, full of warning for what would happen to Europe, and the world, if it ignored what was happening at great speed to Germany. Laying aside journalistic convention, Halton became one of a tiny group of prophets who began urgently to warn the world of impending doom. The things I saw being taught and believed everywhere in that nation, he wrote in one of his reports from later in 1933, the superiority of one race and its destiny to rule—will one day become the intimate concern of all of us.

Halton was in no doubt about what Hitler’s ascent to power meant for Germany. He visited twice that year, first in January and then, more extensively, in the fall. From the very first instant he suspected that the name Hitler had given to his political party—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—was merely an enormous, brazen hoax, designed for one end, and one end alone: an aggrandizing, racist agenda that would attempt to place Germany ahead of every other country of Europe, with force if necessary. From what he could see, Hitlerism was neither national nor socialist, nor, for that matter, about the workers. It seemed to him to be about the creation of a racially pure Germany (in which Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs were obvious disposable imperfections), disciplined, obedient, militaristic, and imperial. Most worryingly of all was that the fabulous lie inherent in the banality of the name of this political party was widely believed, and constituted the basis of Hitler’s ascent to tyranny. To the fanatical few, the believers, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was a means to an end, the first step of which was the assumption of total, dictatorial power, after which the principal themes of the February 24, 1920, Declaration—racial purification from within and territorial aggrandizement outside to form a Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany) of eighty million Germans, in which Lebensraum (living space) was to be achieved—would be acted out, with legal violence if necessary. The name therefore fooled lots of Germans, as well as much of the watching world, few of whom ever bothered to read (or knew where to look for) the defining articles of Nazi faith. The lie was carefully concealed within other myths of Germanhood, ones that enjoyed a widespread appeal, particularly among a people humiliated by defeat in 1918, confused by the political uncertainties of the Weimar years, and pauperized by the collapse of Wall Street in 1929. It was the latter, much more than the impact of 1918, that lit the path for Germans, and Germany, down the road to the gates of a Nazi Valhalla. With a shock Halton understood that the Nazi creed was not being foisted unwillingly upon a reluctant population. Many in Germany welcomed the Nazis with open arms. Germany enters a nightmare, Halton wrote. I feel it in my bones. She has heard the call of the wild.

In the comfort of his English home, H. G. Wells dismissed the Nazi coup d’état that placed Hitler on the chancellor’s chair as a revolt of the clumsy lout, a charge that led to the Nazi burning of his books—among thousands of others—in Berlin’s Opernplatz on May 10, 1933. Wells underestimated the simplicity of the Nazi program, the ferocious tenacity of its adherents, and the unchallenging acquiescence of the mass of the population. His accusation proved to be naively offhand, akin to the view among the aristocracy in the Heer (i.e., the German army: together, the German armed forces were known as the Wehrmacht) that they could control the little Corporal. Wells gave no thought to the consequences that the rise to power of the lout he described would have for Germany, or the world for that matter. This was no schoolyard bullying that would disappear with the maturity of age. That Hitlerism was ever able to so dominate European and global politics to the extent that it did for twelve hellish years, sending the world screeching into a cataclysmic war from which it escaped only by the skin of its teeth, battered, bloodied, and changed forever, is no mystery now. In the early 1930s, however, the fast-approaching catastrophe wasn’t so obvious to everyone. Even though Europe was awash with North American journalists reporting back fearfully about the developments in the heart of Europe, where the Enlightenment legacy of centuries—before which lay the Reformation and before that the Renaissance—was being buried by a darkness so unfathomable as to be unimaginable, few read the warning signs correctly. That the warning bells were ringing, loudly, in every country of Europe and indeed across the world is indisputable; what seems so shocking is that few bothered to lift their heads to listen.

One of those who noisily rang the alarm bells, and who was roundly ignored, was the New York Herald Tribune journalist Leland Stowe, whose fears were succinctly articulated in a small book published in London in December 1933 with the uncompromising title Nazi Germany Means War. Stowe, who had received a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for his reporting of Great War reparations, was as shocked as Halton after he spent two months in Germany that year. He concluded that Germany had two voices. One was a public voice meant to pacify the fears of outsiders, and spoke repeatedly of peace. The other was for internal, German consumption, and spoke relentlessly of martial values, social discipline, the needs of the state eclipsing those of the individual, Germany’s requirement for living space, self-evident German racial superiority among the nations of Europe, and the imperative to achieve a homeland for all Germans, not just those who currently had the good fortune to live within the present boundaries of the Reich. What this meant for Austria, and for large slices of Poland and Czechoslovakia, was clear to the Nazi propagandists, and a message preached diligently and persistently every day. These ends would be achieved, Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf, by a strong and smiting sword. Hitler declares that Nazi Germany wants peace at the very moment when Nazi Germany is busy, with an appalling systemization and efficiency, preparing its 65,000,000 people for perfected martial co-ordination such as has never existed before, Stowe warned. This, in its logical sequence, can finally lead only to war.

Stowe’s book flopped. Neither buying public nor politicians wanted to spend money on a tome that suggested that on its current course war was inevitable, and confirmed that their persistent ostrichitis was a terminal illness. Equally, Halton’s reporting of his two-month tour of Germany in the autumn of 1933 for the Toronto Star was regarded to be so alarmist that he was dismissed by many as an exaggerator, a warmonger. He was criticized for reading into situations and events a meaning far beyond their reality. For suggesting, for example, that the Nazis and their followers were not Christians, truly following the sayings and precepts of Christ, he incurred the wrath of Catholics and Protestants alike, who accused him of ignorance. Germany was, after all, the most observant country in Europe. It was factually erroneous, the argument went, to suggest otherwise. The dominant theological worldview across western Christendom in the 1930s was pacifism, which, although it attempted to express politically Christ’s blessings on the peacemakers and the instruction to turn the other cheek, seemed to assume that simply believing in nonviolence would somehow persuade an enemy to think twice about using violence at all.

Halton, and others like him, were accused by Germans of not understanding the country or the German hunger for a new political settlement and an honorable place in the world. It was a common enough accusation. Although Halton robustly dismissed the Western reactions to his warnings, he nevertheless worried at the time that well-meaning ignorance of Nazism abroad was almost as bad as Nazism itself. If people only knew what hatreds lay at the heart of the Nazi creed, he thought, they would oppose it just as strongly as if they were fighting a burglar in their house. But because Nazism was cloaked in a cunning disguise, few people could see it for what it was.

Indeed, he believed that the fox was already inside the chicken coop. The German people, or at least large numbers of them, had embraced ideas they would have regarded, in another political or cultural milieu, as desperately irrational. Vast swathes of Germany now espoused nonsensical racial views about their own superiority over other varieties of humankind that had no place in rational or scientific thought and which, as Halton observed, one would have expected children to laugh at. What had happened to the most intellectual country in Europe? He concluded despondently that it seemed apparent that the Germans were the least intelligent, if the most intellectual, of Western peoples. Using the same analogy, they were also the most religious, if unchristian. Shockingly, the crazy notions of Aryan supremacy propagated so assiduously by the Nazis had already received academic and intellectual legitimacy, and had been translated into notions that had quickly become widely accepted by otherwise thinking people, taught in schools and subsumed into common, everyday thought. He noted the prolifically published arguments of men such as geographer Professor Ewald Banse, whose Military Science: An Introduction to a New National Science, published in 1933, argued among other things that

War is both inevitable and necessary, and therefore it is imperative, and the nation’s mind must be directed towards it from childhood. Children must learn to infect the enemies’ drinking water with typhoid bacilli and to spread plague with infected rats. They must learn military tactics from the birds, hills and streams.

How was it possible for the most cultured society in the world to embrace such extremism? Why—and how—could otherwise deeply intelligent, well-educated, rational men and women embrace such nonsense? Halton observed the transformation of the German mind at first hand. The recipe was simple. If one lived within a lie for long enough, it didn’t take much to fail to distinguish the lie from the truth. Ultimately, the power of the lie would trump reason and the exercise of rational thought. Indeed, one began to believe the lie. In 1930 he had made several friends in Germany during visits when a student at the University of London. His new acquaintances were all socialists and internationalists, and laughed at the Nazi buffoons clowning around on the outskirts of politics. Three years later, after Hitler’s rise to power, he went to meet one of these men, living with his parents in the Rhineland town of Bonn. Halton was relieved to learn that this man had not supped from the Nazi cup, but was disquieted to hear that two of the others had become Nazis. Five years later, he returned to the family home during the Bad Godesberg conference in September 1938. What a pity you should have come up from Godesberg the man’s mother exclaimed when she saw Halton at the door, because Friedrich is there! He commands a detachment of the S.A. which was sent from here to the conference. All that was required was time, and the repeated articulation of the lie.

Leland Stowe’s experience of living in Germany in 1933 shocked him with how diametrically different it was from ordinary life in France, Britain, or the United States. In Germany, for instance, uniforms abounded. A packet of cigarettes he purchased in a café included a gift of a picture of a soldier sitting behind a machine gun. In restaurants, the music was a mixture of popular airs, an occasional waltz, and the obligatory quota of Nazi marches:

I saw more uniformed men on the streets and in the public places of Berlin than I had seen in any foreign city from London to Constantinople. I witnessed more parades and marching troops in three weeks than I had seen in Paris in nine months. I heard rousing military bands at eleven o’clock in the morning, going by the office window, or on Hermann Goeringstrasse at eleven o’clock at night. I saw long columns of boys and girls in their teens, uniformed and carrying flags and marching somewhere at all sorts of unexpected hours. Often they sang and their voices were clear and high and in striking unison. I saw great swastika or imperial flags hung out everywhere; thousands of them, outdoors and indoors—always flags.

Three years later, when 22-year-old Rhodes scholar Howard Smith arrived in Germany through the port of Bremen, he was overwhelmed by the militarization of society:

It took my breath away. I had read about Nazi rearmament, but to me it was still a word, not a sense-idea. In New Orleans, I could sum up in a figure of two integers all the uniforms I had ever seen. Before our boat docked in Bremen I saw a big multiple of that figure, sailors of Germany’s war navy, walking up and down the long wharves. The railway station in Bremen, and later every railway station I saw, was a milling hive of soldiers in green uniforms in full war-kit and with rifles, getting off trains and getting on them. Farther inland, towns looked like garrisons, with every third or fourth man in uniform. On trains, all day long, one passed long railway caravans of camouflaged tanks, cannon and war-trucks lashed to railway flat cars, and freight depots were lined with more of these monsters hooded in brown canvas. In large towns, traffic had to be interrupted at intervals on some days to let cavalcades of unearthly machines, manned by dust-covered, steel-helmeted Men-from-Mars roar through the main streets on maneuvers.

In 1933 Stowe commented on the catchy little musical ditty played during intermissions in radio programs, which proved to be the popular song Volk an’s Gewehr (People, to Arms!). On the streets, young boys dressed in Hitler Youth uniforms played with wooden cannons in the parks and practiced throwing hand grenades as part of their school curriculum. At the time Halton, among many others, was concerned about the vast gulf that existed between what the Nazis said they were doing and the interpretation of these things by newspapers, politicians, and observers in other, far distant places, especially those safely cushioned in the protective cocoon of Western liberal democracies, who thought that all systems of government operated similarly, and where bad people were constrained by the law and the structures and systems of civilization. But it wasn’t only wishful-thinking Western intellectuals and politicians who harbored delusions about the Nazi program in Europe. In a 1933 interview with Goering, Halton was struck by how deeply the Nazi leadership had itself drunk from the cup of its own delusions. What was worse than believing their ridiculous racial bigotries, especially against the Jews within and the Untermenschen without, was their unfounded conviction that the policymakers in the West secretly supported them, even if they couldn’t express this support openly. After all, it wasn’t a secret that it was Western capital—sourced through London and Wall Street—that was financing the rebuilding of Germany, and which by necessity was close to the Nazi economic program. The interests of both sides were therefore closely aligned. If the outcome of Versailles was to be reversed, Goering asserted, Britain and France would be sensible. Both countries knew that Germany was Europe’s bulwark against the specter of Soviet bolshevism. Germany will save Europe and Occidental civilization, he blathered. Germany will stop the rot. Germany will prevent the Untergang des Abendlandes (a reference to the book The Decline of the West, published by Oswald Spengler in 1926). Goering was well briefed about attitudes in the West. The well-read man or woman on the street in London and New York was already saying, and believing, some of this. Those in Warsaw, Prague, and Paris were less inclined to do so, however. The unbelievers were widely ridiculed in their own countries. In Britain, Winston Churchill was the most prominent of those who did not accept this worldview, but for the most part the political establishment ignored and reviled him in equal measure. Churchill was, at the time, like a biblical prophet crying out in the wilderness, scoffed at by those who considered him a warmonger for advocating robust responses to the militaristic posturing of the totalitarian states.

Yet all it needed, argued Halton, was for people—in Germany and the West—to read. The 25-Point Program of 1920 was unequivocal (see Appendix 1). It was the Articles of Faith of a new religion, and held to fanatically by true believers. This was the foundation stone upon which all else was being built. Hitler mapped out these plans for rebuilding Germany in this image in Mein Kampf, but wisely refused his publishers permission to have the rambling tome translated into English. It would give the game away. When Halton interviewed Albert Einstein at a secret location on England’s south coast in September 1933, he asked the famous scientist whether it was Hitler’s plan to destroy European Jewry. Jewry? Einstein retorted. Jewry has less to fear than Christendom. Can’t you people read? When Halton asked him what the ultimate result of the Nazi project would be, Einstein immediately responded, War. Can’t the whole world see that Hitler will almost certainly drag it into war . . . [?] They couldn’t. Most Western diplomats and statesmen in 1930s Europe made the mistake of misunderstanding Hitler’s true nature and ambitions. After all, these—articulated in Mein Kampf, in repeated public utterances in Germany, in speeches and interviews—were so fantastical, outrageous even, that most reasonable men and women did not consider them viable, and so dismissed them utterly. This was the underlying reality of appeasement: sane politicians and statesmen believed that Hitler likewise was rationally calculating what he could secure by beating the war drum without taking his country and people into a ruinous war. When they visited Hitler in person, the German Führer mollified them with honeyed lips. He was a man, the representatives of the democracies believed, with whom they could do business. Did he not repeatedly assert that he wanted peace? The appeasers did not realize—until it was too late—that if Hitler could not secure peace on his own terms, he would do so by means of war.

Halton visited Dachau in the late summer of 1933, at a time when carefully escorted visitors were still allowed, and he came away—even in these early days of the Nazi concentration camps, before they had become mass killing machines—shocked not so much at the casual brutality of the place but at the political and social environment that sent people there in the first place. The inmates needed social reeducation, the guards explained, and training them to learn social discipline and civic obedience was an essential part of the program. The prisoners had only themselves to blame: if they had not behaved in a socially irresponsible way—demonstrated by their dalliance with communism, or Seventh Day Adventism, or whatever their personal weakness had been—they would not have had to be punished. Brutalism was the new creed. The following year Dorothy Thompson, who had been reporting from Berlin on and off since 1925, recorded for Harper’s magazine the sight of what appeared to be a delightful Hitler Youth summer camp at Murnau. On first arrival, she was much taken by the sight and sound of six thousand adolescent voices singing in unison. Then she saw, on the hillside above the camp, in stark, black letters, a banner proclaiming ominously YOU WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY. Self-sacrifice on behalf of the state was a lifelong expectation. A brutal life would precede a brutal death, all in the name of Greater Germany. She found herself driving away from the place at the unprecedented speed of sixty-five miles per hour, so desperate was she to put it behind her. The Reverend Stewart Herman of the American Church in Berlin listened every Sunday morning in 1936 as the bells of all the surrounding steeples rang out at church time:

And almost every Sunday morning when the bells were inviting people to service I would hear the sound of tramping feet and singing voices marching down the converging streets into the near-by square. When I went to the window, as I often did, to see what was going on, the same scene always met my eyes. Columns of boys in brown shirts and dark-blue shorts—ski pants in winter—with heavy boots on their feet were parading along under banners and flags. They marched three abreast just like the regular infantry and they tried to take long steps like the soldiers they wished to imitate.

They were not marching to church, as they frequently used to do before Hitler came to power. These were the Hitler boys and they were going into the movie theatre just across the street to practise singing their songs of hatred and war and to be exhorted once more that to live and die for Germany—the greatest nation on earth—is the noblest aim in life. Other nations, they were informed, were trying to destroy the Fatherland but the Fuehrer had rescued the country just in the nick of time.

If the Germans accepted brutality among themselves, Halton observed, it would be easy, when the time came, to accept it as necessary for others. Loutish brutality was being coldly cultivated as an instrument of national policy, he concluded. The behavior of many otherwise sane, intelligent Germans towards their enemies during the war that was to come had its roots deep in the common acceptance of such ideas long before hostilities were ever declared and German men donned their Hugo Boss–designed black or gray-green uniforms and goose-stepped to war.

Brutalism extended to the deliberate trampling of other social sensitivities and age-old cultural and religious proscriptions. On one occasion during their tour of Germany, Halton and his wife visited a summer camp at Vaterstetten a few miles east of Munich, housing young women being groomed to be brides of Hitler. Their duty was to couple with carefully selected local soldiers—tall, strong, fair-haired, and blue-eyed specimens of racial superiority—to produce sound Aryan stock with which to populate the lands that Grossdeutschland would one day encompass. The young women they interviewed believed this mission, passionately. Here was the evidence that the Nazi plan, even in its infancy, was acting out the program first laid out in 1920. The inevitable consequence of Lebensraum was the subjugation of the Untermenschen who already lived in these territories, and their displacement by true, racially pure, German stock. No stigma was attached to the Hitler-brides’ production of children out of wedlock. Indeed, the regime encouraged and applauded their efforts. The body of the German girl must be steeled and hardened like that of the German man, recited one young woman they interviewed. Only the sound health of millions of German women can guarantee the vitality of the German people and the historical greatness of the German race. The idea of the Hitler-bride, Halton recorded, was to become as rarefied and mystic as anything in theology. Piece by piece the old Germany was being destroyed and reshaped into a different, more terrifying, image.

Stewart Herman was later to equate the encouragement of Aryan procreation with the careful and deliberate slaughter of the old and the mentally and physically infirm:

In August, 1940, a German pastor, boiling with helpless indignation, told me that the Gestapo planned to disembarrass the nation of three-quarters of a million mental and physical invalids who were eating German food and absorbing the energies of healthy German doctors, nurses, and guardians. Some next-of-kin were the startled recipients of notifications that their relatives had died shortly after being transferred, without warning, to one or the other of three institutions which quickly became notorious. Other next-of-kin were frantically trying to withdraw their relatives from public hospitals and homes.

The destruction of these useless mouths, Herman noted, helpfully provided extra space for the additional tens of thousands of babies which German mothers were to be prevailed upon to bear.

A year after Halton’s tour of Germany, the journalist William (Bill) Shirer and his wife, Theresa (Tess) Stiberitz, an Austrian photographer, returned to Berlin after an absence of several years, in the employ of William Randolph Hearst’s Universal Service. Shirer was profoundly shocked by what he found, and staggered around for the first few days in a fog of depression. Where was the old Berlin he had known and loved only a few years back? The stimulating conversations of yore in the care-free, emancipated, civilized air of an age now lost to history, where snub-nosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion had been replaced by the depressing paraphernalia of a police state. It was now September 1934. Uniforms were everywhere. Heels clicked. Bloodred swastika flags adorned windows and lampposts. Posters depicted steel-jawed soldiers defending the Fatherland, or rapine Jews rubbing their hands over ill-gotten (German) booty. Troops marched. A favorite song was Siegreich Wollen Wir Frankreich Schlagen (Victoriously We Must Smash France). The ubiquitous Heil Hitler grated. It was increasingly dangerous not to acknowledge, using the Nazis’ preposterous raised arm salute, marching troops and banners on the street. Likewise, the journalist Janet Flanner watched this new cultural norm spread across Germany like an inkblot.

[T]he Roman arm salute (originally a password among his militia), soon became the social greeting de rigueur among Germany’s civilians, and was officially called the German greeting in distinction to the old Bürgerliche Gruss, or bourgeois Guten Tag. In Bavaria, where the greeting used to be Grüss Gott Hitler’s name has been substituted for that of God. As most German aristocrats still click their heels, kiss the ladies’ hands, and, if in uniform, add the old-fashioned military salute, these, plus the Nazi arm-flinging, make modern German salutations fairly acrobatic affairs.

Shirer found himself ducking into shops just to avoid these increasingly frequent occurrences. He gritted his teeth. He had a feeling that things were going to get much worse before they got better. Two days later, following the long train ride south to Nuremberg, he recorded his first ever Nazi Party parade. It was only the fourth of its kind in history, and yet this party of gangsters now ran Germany. Where would they take it? Would the German people allow it, or would sense and rationality return after the nightmare? He watched Hitler ride into the ancient town like a Roman emperor past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Nazis who packed the narrow streets, but he was surprised at the dullness of the man. Dressed in a worn gabardine trench coat, Hitler did not present an imposing figure. He had none of the self-conscious grandiloquence of Mussolini, fumbled with his cap and stared blankly at his Germans, as he liked to call them, as the crowds cheered in ecstatic adulation. It was all rather confusing. The man who had transformed the political dynamic in Germany so dramatically, and was a demigod to many, appeared to have none of the personal charisma that Shirer expected to be a prerequisite for such a figure. He almost seemed to be affecting a modesty in his bearing, he was forced to conclude. I doubt if it’s genuine. Yet that night he watched as a mob of ten thousand hysterics . . . jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: ‘We want our Führer.’

The young Howard Smith was equally confused. He caught sight of Hitler close up at the opera in Munich in 1937, and observed that the spectacle was impressive because Hitler was not:

He was a short, very short, little, comical looking man. Had his eyes had the firm, warm glow of Lincoln’s or the dash of Kaiser Wilhelm’s, it would have been different, but his eyes were beady little black dots with timid circles under them. Had his moustache the boldly turned up ends like that of Hindenburg, it would have been otherwise. But his was a laughable little wisp of hair not as broad as his crooked mouth or the under-part of his nose. That was what, after you smothered your first unconscious smile, alarmed you, and brought back in its fullest strength the haunting fear of the Myth. This was the thing that had built a party in impossible circumstances, taken over control of a nation and created the mightiest army in the world. This, the apotheosis of the little man, was what I saw as the blood-spitting, fire-breathing monster of the future. This funny little figure with its crooked smile, flapping its hand over its black-coated shoulder in salute, was God the omnipotent and infinite, Siegfried the hero of Nordics, and Adolf Hitler, the coming ruler of a destroyed world.

Shirer thought that the behavior of these frantic disciples reminded him of religious enthusiasts he had once met in the Louisiana backwoods. These Germans certainly considered Hitler to be their messiah. The outstretched arms of thousands of devotees reached to the sky. It was thus in a flash of understanding that Shirer understood the truth. Nazism was, of course, a religious creed as powerful as any in history. Hitler was the God of this faith. Dorothy Thompson likewise saw this in 1934 when she was expelled from Germany, remarking, As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler was just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people—an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. Hitler did not force Christianity to kneel at the altar of National Socialism. With a few exceptions it did so willingly, understanding only too clearly that the German people now had a choice of religions, and that Hitler was as attractive as anything the liberal German Church could offer. Here was gorgeous pomp; glorious ritual; dramatic heraldry fluttering over the medieval streets; bands playing Hitler’s own Badenweiler Marsch, with its resonating cymbals and heavy drum beat, and the magical feast of black uniforms (designed by party member Hugo Boss), shining swords and polished helmets. It was a martial heaven, as the Nazis always intended it to be. Unbelievably, the spectacle went on for a week. By the end Shirer was exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally. But he now realized the hold that Hitler had on the people, to feel the dynamic in the movement he’s unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess.

The relentless diet of propaganda inside the borders of the Reich was accompanied by the strangulation of unbiased news from abroad. In an age before mass travel, few knew anything about what was happening outside their country other than what they were told. Only the friendliest of foreign newspapers were allowed to circulate freely in Germany, one of which was London’s Times, which Shirer observed to have an immense circulation in January 1936. As time went on, however, the German state attempted to secure a monopoly of news, and listening to foreign radio stations, the most popular being the German-language programs of the BBC, Radio America, Radio Moscow, and the Swiss Beromünster, rapidly became criminal offenses.

On May 21, 1935, Shirer recorded in his diary that Hitler had made yet another masterful speech in the Reichstag proclaiming his desire for peace. Yet, like Halton, Stowe, and Thompson, among others, Shirer saw clearly through the noisy charade. Hitler was in fact calling for war, under the cloak of demands for concord. It was the assassin’s knife: hidden until it was plunged, deep and red, into the body politic of Germany’s enemies. Shirer was now convinced of Hitler’s remarkable powers of oratory: what he lacked in visual presentation he made