[2] Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Vol. XVI, pp. 497-498.
[3] William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York, 1960, p. 1113.
[4] H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler. London, 1947, pp. 124-127.
[5] All quotations from Hanna Reitsch are from her interrogation at Nuremberg, printed in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Vol VI, Washington, 1946, pp. 551-571.
[6] Before they were herded into the gas chambers, over whose entrances were signs "BATHS," the victims were told they would simply go through a "delousing." But Hoess cooked up even more macabre deceptions. For example, hardly had the captives left the freight trains in which some of them had been transported a thousand miles or more without food or water, than they were given pretty picture postcards marked "Waldsee," a typical name for a vacation spot in Germany, to be signed and sent back home to their relatives. The printed inscription on the card read: "We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival."Finally, while the selection was being made for the gas chambers, light music was rendered by an orchestra of "young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts," as one survivor remembered. The musicians were chosen from young Jewish women inmates, whose lives, for the moment anyway, were spared. Thus the death marches at Auschwitz and at other Nazi extermination camps were carried out to the merry tunes from Viennese and Parisian operettas.
[7] His compatriot, Norman Baillie-Stewart, whom I also saw on occasion around Broadcasting House, where for a short time he wrote broadcasts for the English-language section, sometimes under the direction of Joyce, whom he detested, had done it for love. And twice! A 1927 graduate of Sandhurst and soon a captain in the Seaforth Highlanders, he had been found guilty in 1932 of betraying military secrets to Germany (Weimar Germany then) and sentenced to five years' imprisonment in the Tower of London. The girl who had led him to this was German, and on his release from prison he set out to find her or another like her, for apparently he had a fixation on German women, which also caused him to have the same feelings for Germany-any Germany, Weimar or Nazi. In Berlin I got the impression that the Germans found Baillie-Stewart difficult to deal with-his Scottish nature, they said, was unbending-and he was transferred from the broadcasting service to the Foreign Office, where he was employed as a translator.In the end, due to the strange vagaries of British justice, Baillie-Stewart escaped the fate of Amery and Joyce. The original charge of high treason against him was reduced to an offense against the Defense Regulations, for which he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.There was a third British radio traitor I used to see at Broadcasting House, Jack Trevor, an English actor. I wondered what had happened to him. I never heard he even had been arrested. Perhaps he died in Berlin after I left, and the war became more grim, even in Germany. He popped up a couple of times in my diary of those days. On Christmas Eve, 1940, in the midst of the Sitzkrieg, as the Germans called the Phony War, I had dropped in on a party at the Rundfunk. Joyce and his wife had come in to drink champagne and dance. Jack Trevor soon joined them, "much in his cups," I noted. Later, when I was commenting on the British radio traitors, I jotted down this note about Trevor in my diary: His one burning passion is hatred of Jews. Last winter it used to be a common sight to see him stand in the snow, with a mighty blizzard blowing, and rave to an S.S. guard outside the studio door about the urgent necessity of liquidating all Jews everywhere. The guard, who undoubtedly had no special love for the Jews, but whose only thought was how much longer he must stand guard on an unholy wintry night, would stamp his freezing feet in the snow, turn his head from the biting wind, and mutter: "Ja. Ja. Ja. Ja," probably wondering what freaks Englishmen were.
[8] On the contrary! He was defiant to the last. "In death as in this life," he said in a last statement issued by his brother Quentin immediately after the hanging, "I defy the Jews, who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent.…May Britain be great once again and in the hour of the greatest danger to the West may the standard of the Hakenkreuz (swastika) be raised from the dust crowned with the historic words: 'Ihr habt doch gesiegt! (You have conquered nevertheless!)'" Like the maniac he worshipped, Adolf Hitler, William Joyce, intelligent though he was, had learned nothing from recent history, from the recent war which Hitler had started and now lost, from the exposure of Nazism as a fraud and a barbarism. He was the victim, as so many are up to this very moment, of a mindless devotion to an outlandish ideology.
[9] This was finally confirmed by the Russians in July of the following year. The Soviet Army Command in Berlin informed the American authorities that Kaltenbach had died in a Russian detention camp "of natural causes."
[10] In 1945 the Justice Department dropped the indictment against him and in 1951 he surfaced as a broadcaster for a Tucson, Arizona, radio station. He admitted he had broadcast for the Nazis, but denied that he was anti-Semitic. In fact, he posted a thousand-dollar bond for anyone who could "prove" he was anti-Semitic. Queried by the Arizona Daily Star about that, I replied I stood by what I had written about Delaney in Berlin Diary.
[11] After the Anschluss in the spring of 1938, the American newspapers closed down their offices in Vienna and assigned their correspondents to other capitals. I myself, with most of the European continent to cover, moved my CBS headquarters from Vienna to Geneva, where communication facilities were free of Nazi control. The news agencies, with the exception of the United Press, hired local nationals to provide them with the news. Best, reduced now to being a "stringer" for the United Press since there was little news from the former capital, which had now become just another provincial German city, became, I believe, the only American journalist there.
[12] Quoted from Edgar Snow's memoirs by his widow, Lois Snow, in an article in the New Republic, January 26, 1974, entitled "The Burial of Edgar Snow."
[13] See Volume I of these memoirs.
[14] By August 7, 1941, when the letter was written, Berlin Diary, I believe, had climbed to the top of the best-seller lists in the Times and Herald-Tribune.
[15] 485 Madison Avenue, New York, was the CBS office.
[16] The book sold at $3.00 in the bookstores, of which the author received a royalty starting at 10 percent, rising to 12 ½ percent after the first 5,000 and 15 percent after the first 10,000 copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club paid, so far as I recall, a straight 25 cents per copy, divided equally between publisher and author.
[17] Later, to some extent, it would be. Authors were allowed to balance income, for tax purposes, over five years, though this was eventually reduced to three years. And the 50 percent lid on income taxes helped in a big year. But the big years were few and far between. Very few authors in America could live on their royalties and thus devote full time to writing. They had to make their living elsewhere.
[18] Two days before he had received a wire from London telling him that his new office had been bombed and demolished by the Germans. His old office had been destroyed only a couple of months previously.
[19] In a letter to me Harsch wrote that, "anticipating events," he asked out. "CBS would have booted me out had I not got in the first blow. It seems that they considered me an expensive luxury. The one thing I resent above all is that they took the Sunday show away from me on the ground that I had not been able to attract a sponsor when they themselves had deliberately withheld the time from sale.…Then they announce that I am unsalable.…It's kind of good to be an honest reporter again."
[20] Sevareid, too, had been an old friend. I had known him just before the war when he was working on the Paris Herald and at the U.P. bureau in Paris, and had urged Ed to hire him as our correspondent in France, which Ed had done. Eric wrote me a day after my last broadcast reiterating his "loyal" friendship, wishing me well but sticking up for CBS. He accused me of wronging the corporation. He did not feel that I had been "done an injustice" nor could he "go along," he said, with my "accusations against CBS." Three months later he again wrote: "I still think you were a crazy bastard to do what you did and say what you said; I still think you were wrong…." Alexander Kendrick, an old colleague on the foreign staff, in his biography Prime Time-The Life of Edward R. Murrow, written and published while Kendrick was still an employee of CBS, was as misleading as Sevareid. He had Murrow declaring that my sponsor "had clearly expressed their displeasure at not selling more shaving cream." The charge was not true, and could not be true, given the high Hooper rating of the program. Neither the sponsor nor Murrow had ever complained about the ratings. As far as my departure from CBS was concerned, Kendrick wrote: "Murrow tried to persuade him [Shirer] to stay.…Murrow was sure moreover that Shirer would soon find another sponsor and wanted him to remain on the air." Nothing could be farther from the truth.
[21] David Halberstam, The Powers That Be. New York, 1979, p. 132.
[22] See p. 98.
[23] In January 1952 the number of TV sets in use during the evening hours surpassed for the first time the number of radio sets, though radio was still ahead of TV in advertising revenue.
[24] Halberstam, op. cit., p. 150.
[25] "I remember you once wanted me to be a preacher, but I had no faith, except in myself," Ed wrote his parents from London during the war. "But now I am preaching from a powerful pulpit.…I am trying to talk as I would have talked were I a preacher."-William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p. 514.
[26] He had a special place in the lives of Britons, too. According to a poll taken by the BBC in 1940, some 30 percent of the adult population, or about nine million persons, listened to Swing's once-a-week broadcast to Britain. A lengthy portrait of Swing in the Saturday Evening Post, December 14, 1940, observed that "today Swing reaches more listeners than any other person in the world who speaks over radio." And eight years later in America he couldn't find a sponsor and was dropped!
[27] The yelping in Washington for war with the Soviet Union had plunged Albert Einstein into gloom. Harlow Shapley, the Harvard astronomer, who was also deeply concerned at the war cries, had sent me the contents of a letter he had received from Einstein: "I now feel sure that the people in power in Washington are pushing systematically toward preventive war."
[28] Few seemed to realize that loyalty tests would never uncover Communists or hamper them in the slightest way, since they would have no qualms about swearing that they were not now and never had been party members.
[29] The story of his wartime activities is on pp. 43-47.
[30] They had been tried in Boston because their plane from Germany had been forced by bad weather to land there. Its destination had been Washington, where both men had been indicted and where the government had intended to try them. The defendants, as I recall, dug up some ancient law that said that in a case of treason an accused person brought back from a foreign land must be tried in the place where he lands.
[31] Later I saw a beautiful film based on his novella Death in Venice. I believe it was done in Europe.
[32] Permanent registration, at least in the states in which I voted-first New York and then Connecticut-was then unknown. You had to register for each new election. Also during the years I worked in Europe, from 1925 on, there was no absentee ballot.
[33] Some years later, when Labour was out of power and Strauss had more time to devote to his business, he made a trip to Pittsburgh to confer with a group of American steel magnates there, who wanted to increase their orders from his firm. They did not connect him with the left-wing labor minister who took over and managed the nationalized iron and steel industry in Britain. All through his talks with them he listened to them cursing that minister and his Socialist party and urging him to help the Tories (at the moment in power) get the industry back into private hands. Strauss never divulged his identity to them. He had never, he told us later, enjoyed so much an attack on him. He was tempted, he said, in the end to tell the American tycoons who he really was but desisted out of fear of provoking a series of apoplectic strokes, if not worse.
[34] I believe I was referring to the case of Jean Muir. Listed in Red Channels, she was dropped from the popular daytime serial The Aldrich Family, sponsored by General Foods.
[35] Among others listed in Red Channels were: Howard K. Smith, my former colleague at CBS, who had succeeded Ed Murrow as chief of the London CBS bureau; the writers and playwrights Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Abe Burrows, and Irwin Shaw; Olin Downs, music critic of the New York Times; the musicians Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland; and the actors Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hazel Scott, Judy Holliday, Burl Ives, and Lee J. Cobb.
[36] The distinguished actors Frederic and Florence March had sued Counterattack for having labeled them as Communists, and the publishers had settled out of court.
[37] And he had waged mighty battles against censorship. In one of them he won the reversal of the ban on bringing James Joyce's Ulysses into the United States, a landmark case that began the loosening of book censorship in our country. In another case he fought successfully against the suppression of Marie Stopes's Married Love. As counsel for the Authors League, Dramatists Guild, and the Newspaper Guild, he triumphed in many a court battle for the rights of authors and dramatists, and for the right of newspaper people among other things, to organize.
[38] "Morris does not seem to realize," I noted in my diary, "the enormity of the crime involved or the real danger to American liberties of such bigots and the facility with which they can stampede the bizmen who today run America."
[39] This was Justice Irving Saypool in the suit of a CBS actor, Joseph Julian, against the publishers of Red Channels. To A. M. Sperber, biographer of Murrow, who testified for Julian and was constantly harassed by the judge, "the trial was a disaster, the presiding judge Irving Saypool…making no pretense to impartiality…narrowing admissability to zero levels, sustaining objections so as virtually to gag testimony on the blacklist, taking over cross-examination, like a prosecutor, from the bench, in tandem, at times, with the defense." A. M. Sperber: Murrow: His Life and Times.
[40] They did share a hatred of Communism.
[41] Sperber, op. cit., pp. 371, 364.
[42] Some of the perpetrators of Red Channels eventually broke away and went into the business of clearing (for a fee) some of those they had implicated in its pages. One of Kenneth M. Bierly's first paid jobs was clearing names for Columbia Pictures. He did this notably for the film actress Judy Holliday. "You can say," he told the press, "that Miss Holliday is not a Communist and neither are a lot of other people in it [Red Channels]." "It was immaterial," he once explained, "whether they [the 151 listed in Red Channels] were Communists.…In the first place we don't know who's a Communist. In the second place, we couldn't find out if we had asked them…."
[43] New York Times, June 6, 1954.
[44] Vincent Sheean, a Chicago Tribune colleague of mine and a lifelong friend, was one of the most distinguished journalists of our time, the author of a number of fine books, including his autobiography Personal History. I have written of him in the first volume of these memoirs. Of Dosch-Fleurot, too, who gave me the chance to return to Berlin in 1934 and begin a new reporter's career in the Third Reich.
[45] In those days Newsweek ran a column entitled "Where Are They Now?" Each week it named a couple of persons it pointed out were once prominent in their fields but who had not been heard of in some time. It was not malicious in tone or content but, as the title indicated, insinuated that its subjects had hit the end of the trail and were has-beens if not failures. No one heard of them anymore. What had happened to them? Where were they now? In Newsweek, November 25, 1957, the column featured two persons under the rubric "Where Are They Now?" Elmer Davis, my former colleague at CBS, director of the Office of War Information, a distinguished writer and caustic wit and a wonderful man; and me. Davis had retired from radio because of ill health and was living in Washington with his wife. About me: "William L. Shirer, made famous by his nightly radio reports from Berlin during the early days of World War II and by his book 'Berlin Diary,' has been off the air nearly ten years and is now a writer and part-time lecturer." It said I was "presently working on a book," and gave its title. Wasn't that what the press usually said about someone consigned to oblivion? That he "was working on a book"? A sort of face-saving expression for those considered "finished"? One thing consoled me about "making" that column. I was proud to be coupled with Elmer Davis.
[46] As I noted in the first volume of these memoirs, André Maurois made a similar observation, inspired by Marcel Proust's attempt to recapture the past in À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past): It is vain [he wrote] that we return to places we have loved: we will never see them again because they were situated not in space but in time, and the man who looks for them will be no more a child or an adolescent who embellished them with his imagination.
[47] William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey, The Start. New York, 1976, pp. 162-163.
[48] This was Beria, the sinister chief of the Secret Police. Malenkov himself soon disappeared from office. But he was not shot, ushering in a new era in Moscow in that regard.
[49] Published as The Consul's Wife.
[50] Owner-publishers of Time-Life, Reader's Digest, and Look, respectively.
[51] I was further emboldened by the plaint of E. H. Carr, the British historian, in his fine book on German-Soviet relations between the two world wars published in 1951. "No serious attempt has yet been made," he wrote, "to write a history of Germany under Hitler."
[52] Stanley Salmon suddenly resigned as editor-in-chief at Little, Brown early in 1955. But neither his successor nor anyone else at the firm showed any more interest in publishing the book.
[53] I was surprised-and I admit somewhat relieved-to find how little American historians had poked into the vast historical treasure of the captured Nazi documents. One day a group of the ranking librarians at the Library of Congress, obviously pleased that someone was interested in their unique holdings, trundled out a whole hand-truck full of Hitler's personal papers. I was astonished that they had not been opened since being catalogued. We took to untying the ribbons that bound them. Out fell what to me were priceless objects: among others, scores of drawings and paintings that Hitler had done in his vagabond youth in Vienna.
[54] In 1938, when Hitler almost pushed Germany into war over Czechoslovakia, a war the German generals knew the country was not prepared for and which they feared might lead to a European war and another defeat for the Reich, General Halder, according to his own account, led a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. Plans to arrest the dictator were abandoned, Halder said, when Prime Minister Chamberlain agreed to go to Munich to appease the mad Führer. This meant that there would be no war-for the moment.
[55] The Oxford don's loathing of long books did not prevent him from writing a book, English History, 1914-1945, published in 1965, that was 708 pages in length.
[56] In a letter to the Herald-Tribune, Kay Boyle, the novelist and a friend of Mrs. Van Doren, protested Craig's review. (She had reviewed the book in the New York Post.) Gordon A. Craig's review of William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is indeed a poor tribute to Mr. Shirer's monumental accomplishment. The patronizing attitude of the review and Mr. Craig's listing of the journals, documents and books which Mr. Shirer should have read might be seen to have a humorous side if it were not for the fact that the book is, just as Mr. Shirer wrote it, a vitally important contribution to the history of our time…. Miss Boyle also objected to Craig's "dismissing" the book as "a commendable job of research." She thought it was considerably more than that.
[57] See page 183.
[58] The Siegfried Line was supposed to be the German equivalent of France's famed Maginot Line. Begun on the western German border after the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, it was never completed. But Hitler bluffed France and Britain into believing that it was a formidable barrier.
[59] Berlin Diary was never published in Germany. No German publisher would touch it.
[60] "Sixteen months after its publication here…," Sidney Gruson cabled the Times from Bonn, "William L. Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' continues to roil West Germany." Although the argument concerns the historical and literary value of the work, it is centered on why Shirer wrote the book and why it was such a success in America. In effect, the book is taken in Germany as a current political document.…Germans took the book as both a cause and symptom of what they consider to be a new anti-German campaign in America…stimulated by what are always tartly called "certain circles."…There has probably been no other book published here since the war which had so great an impact with so relatively small a sale. Only about 14,000 copies have been sold in the German edition, but the reviews, criticisms, articles, letters to the editor and letters answering the letters to the editor continue without let-up. There is a single theme to all this comment-that Shirer equates Nazis and Germans in such a way as to imply that the German character made Hitler's rise and rule inevitable. The current complaint further is that the logic of such a view must create a view that Germans can never be trusted, nor eventually reform.
[61] Sometime after writing the above I came across a diary entry for January 1, 1961, saying that the Digest bought it but never published it.
[62] There were other causes and their consequences too intimate to expose, ever, to the outside world. I am attempting to keep in mind the words of Shaw that "no man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and his friends and his colleagues. This is especially true about a spouse."
[63] In all, 29,660 French hostages would be executed by the Germans during World War II.
[64] "France is every man's second home," Thomas Jefferson once wrote.
[65] Martha Dodd, Through Embassy Eyes, p. 69. The book is an account of her four years in Germany.
[66] Two days after his eighty-seventh birthday which, according to his biographer, "was full of joy, cake, champagne, neighboring children, friends." On his return to Italy twelve years before, after being released from St. Elizabeths, he had greeted the press on disembarking at Naples with a Fascist salute and told the reporters: "All America is an insane asylum."
[67] Volume I of these memoirs.
[68] Fortunately for history the government long ago had published most of the pertinent records for the First World War.
[69] That was the attitude of many Germans toward my Third Reich book.
[70] By a narrow margin the Senate failed to convict President Johnson.
[71] "This was a serious act of omission," he said, "for which I take full responsibility and which I deeply regret."
[72] Ford pardoned Nixon a month later. As TRB put it: "For crimes identified or yet to be revealed, he gave him a 'full and free and absolute' pardon, sight unseen. He did this out of compassion, he said. He did it without an admission of guilt from Nixon.…Nixon gulled Ford and made a fool of him." Despite his disgrace, unique in the history of American presidents, Nixon would stage a comeback of sorts, his sins, his crimes, his lies apparently forgiven, if not forgotten, by a surprisingly large number of Americans, especially on the right. Were there no longer in our country any standards of morals, of ethics, of decency?
[73] On becoming president, Ford had appointed Nelson Rockefeller vice-president.
[74] Gerald W. Johnson, the eminent journalist-historian and sage of the old Baltimore Sun, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, had a different impression of the introduction. t is an introduction that is a syllabus of his philosophy of history and comprises seven pages of the best philosophical discourse turned out by an American writer in many years.
[75] Which on viewing it later I thought it was.
[76] My memory was faulty. Knopf, my first publisher, had rejected the manuscript of my second book after Berlin Diary.
[77] Perhaps Prof. Allen was too immature to know that, like most writers, I certainly never knew what the public liked to read and never gave the matter any thought.
[78] Gandhi-The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Beacon Press. Boston. Paperback ed., pp. 137, 160.
[79] Tolstoy forgot to include in his list the American writer who he often said had the most influence on him: Henry George, the single-tax advocate. As I glanced at the wall in Tolstoy's study in the midst of this recollection, I saw a portrait of Henry George on the wall above his desk. Tolstoy's admiration for Henry George and his idea of the single tax never waned. In a letter to an American correspondent in 1894, Tolstoy wrote: "Henry George has sent me all his books. I knew some of them before, but some others as the 'Perplexed Philosopher' and others were new to me. The more I know of him, the more I esteem him, and am astonished at the indifference of the civilized world to his work." Tolstoy added that should the new czar ask his advice on how to run Russia, he would ask him to introduce "the single-tax system." On close inspection, there were portraits of other Americans on the walls of his study. One was a photograph of an American I had never heard of, Ernest H. Crosby. I made a note to look up his name and I found it in the American edition of Tolstoy's letters. There the editor, R. F. Christian, revealed that Crosby (1856-1906) had served in the New York State Assembly and later as a judge in the International Court in Egypt, resigning after having been converted to Tolstoy's beliefs. He visited Yasnaya Polyana in 1894. Tolstoy advised him to work with Henry George for the single tax. Near one window was a portrait of William Lloyd Garrison with the inscription in English: "Liberty for each, for all, and forever!" Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Boston. October 23, 1873.
[80] Dr. Dusan Makovitsky, a Slovak and ardent Tolstoyan, was the family doctor, who lived in the house. Sasha was Alexandra, Tolstoy's youngest daughter, who sided with her father against her mother.
[81] The president made a curious remark at a press conference on April 29 at the White House with representatives of foreign radio and television, mostly German. Asked if he knew that some of the S.S. men buried at Bitburg may have participated in the massacre at Oradour, Mr. Reagan replied: "Yes. I know all about the bad things that happened in the war. I was in uniform for four years myself." But in Hollywood, rather far from any front. One wondered how he could know of such things as a soldier in Hollywood. Just as the correspondents in Washington, I was told, wondered how Reagan could say that he knew what had happened in the concentration camps because he had been in on the liberation of some of them.
[82] One early morning in New York the German consul-general in New York had knocked at my door and served me court papers from Hamburg on behalf of one of the worst of the Nazi party criminals, who claimed I had libeled him. Such is German justice even today that he had been able to hold up the publication of the German edition of the book all through the weeks preceding Christmas, when Germans traditionally buy a great many books. The firm that made the ovens for some of the Nazi concentration camps threatened to sue me in New York and I hoped it would, but it dropped the idea and instead brought suit against my publisher in Munich. Its argument was that it was a respectable, upright firm that had been making ovens for a century and did not know what its product would be used for in the concentration camps. But I had copies of its correspondence with the S.S., showing it knew perfectly well what its ovens were going to be used for. In the face of this, the firm, so far as I remember, dropped the suit.
[83] As a symbolic gesture, the president had arranged for two old generals from World War II, one American, the other German, to meet and shake hands at the close of the wreath-laying at the Bitburg military cemetery. The American was General Matthew B. Ridgway, ninety years old and a former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division under General Eisenhower. The German was General Johannes Steinhof, seventy-one, a former ace in Göring's Luftwaffe.
[84] In the spring of 1946, an American military tribunal sitting at Dachau sentenced forty-three officers of the S.S. group to death. But a hue and cry against the sentences arose in the U.S. Senate, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. So in March 1948, thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted by the court. In 1951, General Lucius D. Clay reduced the death sentences from twelve to six, and in 1951, John J. McCloy, the U.S. high commissioner in Germany, commuted the remaining sentences to life imprisonment. Soon all were released from prison.
[85] Three and a half years later, in October 1988, Weisaecker took on German revisionist historians who had been peddling the thesis that German guilt for the Nazi crimes was relative, that other nations had behaved just as badly. The issue had sharply divided the historians in West Germany, who had convoked a Congress at Bamberg to try to resolve it. The West German president left no doubt on whose side he was. The revisionists, he said, had sought to raise a multitude of comparisons and parallels that would cause "the dark chapter of our history to disappear, to be reduced to a mere episode." But the German nation [he answered] cannot make others responsible for what it and its neighbors endured under National Socialism. It was led by criminals and allowed itself to be led by them. Auschwitz remains unique. It was perpetrated by Germans in the name of Germany. The truth is immutable and will not be forgotten.
[86] Chancellor Kohl revealed something about the Bergen-Belsen camp that few people were aware of-one wonders whether he told Mr. Reagan of it when they visited the camp together. When the camp was set up [he said] Russian prisoners-of-war were first brought here. Their accommodation and treatment amounted to no less than torture. Over 50,000 died alone in this region. This we must also remember today and in the future: of the almost six million Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans as prisoners-of-war, far less than half survived.
[87] A few days later, Fuerst himself was forced to resign by the Council of Jews for applauding Jenninger's speech.
[88] Even for the New York Times. "How Scotland's fiery Jennie," it commented editorially, "would have scorned the robes of a baroness early in her Labor Party career."
[89] Better apparently than Paul Claudel, the French poet, at eighty. 80 years old! [he wrote in his diary.] No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!
[90] Some thought one day a few years ago that it had already come. It was mentioned in the esteemed Springfield (Mass.) Union on February 26, 1974. Lenox. Reports of the death of author William L. Shirer, which appeared in the Gardner syndicated column in The Union last Saturday reached Shirer during his 70th birthday celebration. In the column, he was referred to as "the late William L. Shirer, author of Berlin Diary…." Shirer, paraphrasing Mark Twain, said, "The reports of my death are exaggerated and premature."
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