August 9. – Ribbentrop has approved the idea of our meeting. I decided to leave tomorrow night in order to meet him at Salzburg. The Duce is anxious that I prove to the Germans, by documentary evidence, that the outbreak of war at this time would be folly.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
And that was in the days before email.
I knew I shouldn’t have stepped through that worm hole. Shouldn’t this be in breaking news? :^)
This is very interesting to me. My father, his brother and his mother were visiting relatives in Poland 70 years ago today. When the Germans invaded they didn’t get out till 1947. He would tell some stories about it but not many. It was a very difficult time for them.
This is what National Socialism looks like.
As for the articles themselves, the complete objectivity and lack of bias is striking.
On the first pass, I missed the little blurb about the American woman not in Dachau - or at least she wasn’t after her husband escaped.
On the first pass, I missed the little blurb about the American woman not in Dachau - or at least she wasn’t after her husband escaped.
Pelosi threatens dissenters with iron fist!
Threatens to wipe them out if conditions are not met
August 10. – The Duce is more than ever convinced of the necessity of delaying the conflict. He himself has worked out the outline of a report concerning the meeting at Salzburg which ends with an allusion to international negotiations to settle the problems that so dangerously disturb European life.
Before letting me go he recommends that I shall frankly inform the Germans that we must avoid a conflict with Poland since it will be impossible to localize it, and a general war would be disastrous for everybody.
Armed with such commendable but, in the circumstances, naive thoughts and recommendations, the youthful Fascist Foreign Minister set out for Germany, where during the next three days – August 11, 12 and 13 – he received from Ribbentrop and especially from Hitler the shock of his life.
[From Shirer's diary]
“How completely isolated a world the German people live in,” I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. “A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it.” I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland two days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:
Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland . . . here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained .. . What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion . . .
“POLAND, LOOK OUT!” warns the B.Z. headline, adding: “ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLAUFFER] AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!”
Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: “WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG – UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS [POLNISCHEN GROESSENWAHSN]!”
You ask: But the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
kneel before KIng Zog of albania
Reading the excerpts from the Nazi press is chilling. The bombastic rhetoric is really over the top, but it’s chilling for two reasons.
1: It was really just a preview of coming attractions. The German leadership really did want a war, and their propaganda machine was trying to whip up fervor for one. It presaged the most destructive global war of all time.
2: This crap is being printed yet today in places like Tehran and Pyongyang.