Reviewed by Gary L. Wolfstone
HOWARD K. SMITH was an American correspondent in Berlin for approximately six years, and in 1941 he was the last American to leave Berlin as a free man ~ his train crossed the border into Switzerland just before Germany declared war on America. Mr. Smith's fellow American reporters who remained behind were locked up by the Nazis. Pre-war Germany was so thoroughly militarized that Smith remarks that he arrived at a new genus: homo militaris ! [At page 11] Smith suggests that the observer would alternate between seeing Hitler as a Good Thing and a Bad Thing, but he asks what fantastic combination of circumstances would lead to a second rate psychopathic housepainter becoming head of a nation of sixty-six million souls when Hitler himself was a rank foreigner ! [At page 23]
Chapter 6, The Eternal [Chosen People], is by far the most frightening and revealing: ~ The discussion of a man named Fritz [At 185] whom he met during an air raid and who wanted his help to leave the country reveals not only the plight of the Staatlenloss, the stateless, but also how easily one lapses into callousness [At 187]. "It is hard to feel with them the paralyzing fear that gripped their hearts even at something so trivial as an unconscious stare at them from some uniformed Nazi on the streets." [At 186] Mr. Smith describes the victims as a handful of helpless human beings assigned to death by slavery whom the Nazi press characterized as hopeless wretches who were involved in a plot to destroy Germany, the most powerful military nation in the world. [At 187] In the dead of night, the Gestapo fell upon them. There was no warning ~ just a pounding on the door and then a few fleeting minutes to settle the affairs of a lifetime. [At 188] Some were lucky and were taken to the disease-ridden ghettos of Eastern Poland where starvation was almost certain for the weakest but where there was a fighting chance to survive while others were transported to Russia where they were worked to death more quickly and more painfully. [At 189] "At home in Germany, their pitiful belongings were sold at public auction and the good Aryans fought like jackals over a carcase to buy shabby objects the Russian war had made scarce." [At 190]
Striving to justify the Yellow Star requirement, Goebbels resorted to a "whispering campaign" based on the observation that "a rumor, unsupported by written evidence, could enjoy far more credibility than a written fact." [At 198-199] The German Propaganda Minister spread the rumor that the Roosevelt government was requiring the American Germans, 30,000,000 strong in the United States, to wear a black swastika on the left breast of their clothing. Howard Smith said he was "speecheless" when presented with this rumor in Berlin as an "established fact." [At 199]
Another insightful incident in pre-war Berlin and throughout Germany was the propaganda attacks on the Artistenwelt, the film studios, and specifically the personal attack on Joachim Gottschalk, who was widely loved and respected as "one of Germany's most intelligent and hardest working actors ... a sort of German Fredric March." [At 201] Smith points out that the film studios were a small clique who enjoyed much independence and who had been waging a losing battle against Nazi propaganda for years. Joachim Gottschalk was being denied publicity in film magazines and newspapers because his wife was one of the Chosen People. The Nazis warned him to divorce his wife on several occasions, but he refused and his popularity continued to grow in Germany. [At 202] With an actress named Paula Wessely he made the biggest box office hit of the first year of the war, Ein Leben lang, which won praise in countries outside of Germany as well. Two more excellent films followed in short time: Das Maedchen von Fanoe, with Brigitte Horney, and Die Schwedische Nachtigall in which he played Hans Christian Andersen. [At 202] Finally, the Gestapo gave his wife and child one day to pack their belongings and join the exodus in cattle cars to the East. Ten minutes before the Gestapo arrived on the appointed evening, Gottschalk killed his wife, his child and himself. "German women who, in legions of millions, had cried their eyes dry at Gottschalk ... were horrified." [At 203] Goebbels had also symbolically committed suicide when he destroyed Gottschalk. Howard Smith ends Chapter 6 with the sentence, "The Racial Idea has died a painful death all over Europe, and even if there were no other gain, this alone almost justifies our war against Hitler." [At 205]
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