Reporting on Hitler by Wainewright Will;

Author:Wainewright, Will; [Will Wainewright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4790628
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2017-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

- CHAPTER XI -

RHINELAND

The Nazis celebrated their third anniversary of taking power in January 1936. They had achieved much in the first three years, consolidating their control over Germany and making territorial gains in the Saar. The Daily Mail greeted this landmark with more enthusiasm than other major British newspapers. ‘The enemies who so persistently predicted [Hitler’s] early fall have had to confess their complete want of foresight,’ it said in a leading article. ‘At the end of three years of power he is stronger than ever and more popular with his countrymen.’331

Ebbutt in The Times marked the anniversary with less fanfare. ‘That three years of contact with hard realities have brought a certain amount of disillusionment to the party and to the country at large is not to be denied,’ he wrote in a long article about Germany. ‘Not everyone is so confident as the Storm Troopers who marched through the streets singing.’332 Ebbutt’s article reflected how he and the correspondents in Berlin were feeling. The mood was despondent. In February Ebbutt made his feelings clear to the American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd. ‘I only wish I could leave this country. Everything here is in such a condition and all of us newspaper people kept in such a state of mind that life is miserable.’333

Working under the constraints imposed by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was taking its toll. The Nazi propagandist tried to keep foreign correspondents in as much darkness about what was going on in Germany as the wider population. In January, Shirer noted details in his diary about Goebbels’s secret daily orders to the press. ‘They made rich reading, ordering daily suppression of the truth,’ he wrote. ‘The German people, unless they can read foreign newspapers (the London Times has an immense circulation here now), are terribly cut off from events in the outside world and of course are told nothing of what is happening behind the scenes in their own country.’334

In February, Germany was scheduled to host the Winter Olympics in Bavaria and the Nazi regime started the year keen to show its best side to the world. ‘The Nazis at Garmisch had pulled down all the signs saying that Jews were unwanted (they’re all over Germany),’ Shirer wrote in his diary. ‘The Olympic visitors would thus be spared any signs of the kind of treatment meted out to the Jews in this country.’335

The newly built Messe Berlin exhibition hall, which hosted Olympic events in 1936, pictured a year later. (PA-1456 Thomas Neumann, The National Archives of Norway)

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