 Vincent
Sheean
1899
- 1975
Introduction
The son of William and Susan MacDerrnot Sheean, James
Vincent Sheean was born in Pana, Illinois in December 1899. Red-haired and
freckled, Vincent—as he was known—was a bookish child and absorbed
himself in studying German and French. At the age of seventeen he enrolled
at the University of Chicago, where he became a reporter for the Daily
Maroon. Three and a half years into his university career his mother
died, forcing Sheean to leave the University. He took a job with the Chicago
Daily News, which lasted only a couple weeks. Disgusted with his
luck, he went straight from the office of the editor who fired him to the
train station—with no luggage and little money—and traveled to New York.
In Manhattan Sheean worked for the Daily News, a
tabloid unrelated to the paper he had recently left. This time, however,
Sheean fared better. He took to spending much of his free time in Greenwich
Village—drinking and carousing with Village radicals, though, and soon
became restless. In the spring of 1922 he sailed to Paris and that fall—as
Mussolini’s Black Shirts were taking over the streets—visited Italy.
Sheean soon returned to Paris, took a job as a foreign correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune and became one of Ernest Hemingway’s
favorite drinking buddies. As a roving reporter, he traveled to Switzerland
and the Rhineland. Sheean also went to Madrid and London, and returned to
Rome to report on the antics of the Duke. Eventually, he went to Morocco to
interview the popular rebel Abd el-Krim. That adventure led to the writing
of Sheean’s first book, An American Among the Riffi.
Sheean
managed to be present at some of the most important events of that time. He
toured China—where he met Madam Sun Yatsen during the early days of the
Communist revolution—and crossed the Soviet Union, where he
sympathetically witnessed the unfolding of Bolshevism. Sheean saw the
Palestinian uprising in Jerusalem in 1929, as well as later the German
reoccupation of the Ruhr Valley and the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. In
1935 Sheean married Diana Forbes-Robertson, daughter of the English actor
Johnston Forbes-Robertson. The two often traveled on assignment together and
later collaborated in writing books. After the beginning of the London Blitz
the couple worked to find homes for English children in the United States,
where they also sought refuge from the Battle of Britain. Vincent Sheean
once told an interviewer that his reputation for being in the midst of the
news arose because of his “ardent sympathy for the downtrodden.”
When he and his wife had fled from the Battle of
Britain to Bronxville, New York, Vincent Sheean had expected to return to
England in March 1941. A serious housefire in February of that year,
however, kept Sheean in the United States long enough to rewrite a pending
novel, Bird of the Wilderness. Eventually, he went to England on
assignment for the Saturday Evening Post. In England he found a
summer job teaching U.S. history to British schoolteachers. Afterwards, he
spent two months in the Dutch Pacific islands, India and China reporting on
the war for the New York Herald Tribune.
Sheean returned to the United States after his Asian
assignment and resumed writing novels. The 1946 publication of his third
work, This House Against This House, coincided with his
divorce with Diana Forbes-Robertson. Three years later Sheean published Lead
Kindly Light and remarried Forbes-Robertson in London. The couple had
two daughters, one of whom became a London actress.
In 1951 Sheean wrote The Indigo Bunting, a
tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay, his friend who met a sad end. While
going on to publish additional novels, Sheean also produced non-fiction
accounts of Gandhi and Nehru. His bestselling Dorothy and Red told of
the disastrous marriage between his friends Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair
Lewis, while his Personal History consisted of his own revised
memoirs.
As he had before the war, Sheean continued to witness
famous historical events unfold. He innocently went to India in 1947 to find
out “something about life’s meaning, purpose and significance”; three
days later he watched as a Hindu fanatic assassinated Gandhi.
Sheean died of lung caner in May 1975 in Arolo, Italy, where he and his
wife had lived for many years.
Long
before becoming an angry dropout in Vienna and his Fascistic politicking
days in Munich, Adolf Hitler based his ideological worldview almost
exclusively on the concept of “race.” Like many others in
late-nineteenth-century Europe, he did not question the theory of distinct
and unequal racial groupings or the assumption that Northern European
“Aryan” peoples surpassed all other races in superior intelligence and
worth. Naturally, Hitler’s fanatical racism demanded that after coming to
power he would strive to reunite all “Germans”—regardless of
nationality—into a single German empire. While he respected Swiss military
might and needed access to the unshakeable Swiss banks too much to seriously
consider invading the Teutonic districts of that Alpine land, he lusted
early in his career after the “little Germans” in Austria and he longed
to stretch Germany’s borders to include those ethnic Germans who lived in
western Poland and in what was known as the “Sudetenland” in neighboring
Czechoslovakia. Hitler trusted that once united, the Germans would take
their “rightful” place as the eternal, invincible master-race rulers of
the world.
By
coupling clever political manipulation with the threat of gross force,
Hitler annexed all of Austria without firing a single shot on 12 March 1938.
Soon afterward he turned his attention to obtaining “legal” possession
of the Sudetenland. Milking on-going frictions between the Czech and Slovak
peoples and the minority German population (which formed 20% of
Czechoslovakia, but a third of the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia),
he announced in September of 1938 that Germany demanded the “return “ of
all Czechoslovak lands where at least fifty-one percent of the population
considered itself “German.” Citing exaggerated charges of political
oppression of the Sudeten Germans, he promised that war would soon erupt in
Europe if his demands were not granted.
With vivid memories of the butchery of the last World
War close in mind, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain trekked to
Germany to avoid another widespread Continental war through the negotiations
he promised would ensure “peace in our time.” While the
French—established allies of Czechoslovakia since its independence from
the Hapsburg empire in 1918—more shamefully disregarded the long-standing
treaties and alliances it had made with Prague in return for political
favors and support, the British government more actively gave away
Czechoslovakia’s autonomy and future. Arguing that the country was too
“remote” to risk infuriating the already-rageful Fuehrer, Chamberlain
agreed with France’s Prime Minister Edouard Daladier literally to sign
away possession of the Sudetenland to Germany. “If we have to fight it
must be on larger issues than that” the British Prime Minister
rationalized. Adding that it was a “quarrel in a far away country between
people of whom we know nothing,” Chamberlain defended what basically
represented the failure of the western European democracies’ last chance
to stop Hitler’s ambitious, horrific expansion.
Although a faithful representative of France’s
interests east of the Rhine, Czechoslovakia’s President Eduard Benes soon
found that both the British and the French would offer no support should his
country take on the Nazi monster by itself—as it had considered doing
should the restless giant spill over the heavily fortified
German-Czechoslovak frontier. Devastated by the collapse of the unadmirable Petite
Entente he personally had designed and championed since 1918, Benes
later told his fellow Czechoslovaks regarding the Munich Agreements, “This
case is unique in history: our friends and allies have imposed on us such
terms as are usually dictated to a defeated enemy.”
Shortly after Hitler had executed his artful
Anschluss of Austria, the world realized he meant what he had said in Mein
Kampf and turned its attention to Czechoslovakia, correctly speculating
that it stood next in line as the proving ground for Nazi foreign policy.
Journalists rushed into Prague hoping to report on the drama which was sure
to unfold over the following months. Among those who came to observe and
report, Vincent Sheean and his English-born wife Diana Forbes-Robertson
arrived to witness the growing political tension in Czechoslovakia. Although
they came to Prague early in the summer expecting a crisis of some sort,
what they would watch transpire would confound even their most fantastic
imaginings.
Early on Wednesday evening, 21 September 1938,
Vincent Sheean returned to Prague, having spent the day in the Sudetenland.
He found that loud speakers posted throughout the city had just announced to
the Czechs and the stray Slovaks living in Bohemia that under pressure from
London and Paris, the government in Prague had accepted the German
dictator’s demand for a revision of the two countries’ border. Although
they knew that President Benes had been handed an ultimatum shortly after
midnight that morning by the British and French foreign ministers, the
people wondered what would happen now that their country’s allies actually
had delivered them into Berlin’s hands.
Sheean pushed his way down the city streets at dusk
through the
endless crowd that had assembled to monitor political developments.
He observed a “general feeling of disillusionment, distrust and unease.”
As he later recounted, “I saw women weeping convulsively, men with set,
silent faces, boys standing in groups singing.” Because his British-marked
car evoked hostile jeers from the betrayed Czechoslovaks, he soon left it
parked at a garage and continued on foot. He found that “Traffic in the
vast [Vaclavske] square had ceased, for the crowd had suddenly grown so
enormous that it filled the whole area from wall to wall. The trams had come
to a stop as islands in the crowd, and there were too many people for the
police to disperse without violence.”
While the masses thronged the city center, Sheean
surprisingly found that the mostly-peaceful demonstration lacked any
organization: “there were no flags, no marchers, no shouts in unison. All
that came later. For the moment it seemed as if the population of Prague had
merely turned out into the street, stunned and grief-stricken, for lack of
anything better to do.” He clearly saw that the shock of Britain’s, but
moreover France’s abandonment of the young democracy had left the people
in shock: they had no idea what to do next. “They moved aimlessly, here
and there” he noticed, “without direction, most often without
speaking.” It was, indeed, a very sad day. Years of nationalistic Czech
and Slovak hopes crashed on the sharp rocks of political expediency. In
response, the people openly mourned.
Walking further among the crowd, Sheean searched the
people’s faces for signs of their often-despondent reactions. “The young
ones took to singing patriotic songs” he said, “most of them melancholy
in cadence, the old songs of the Bohemian people who were now condemned
again to serfdom.” Hearing “plangent chords” of what he thought came
from Smetana’s Libuse play over the loud speakers as he passed
through the gathered crowd, like the Czechoslovaks he watched, Sheean fully
realized the significance of the moment. He later wrote: “Never have I
seen an assembly of people so instinctively moved to grief. Hope was to
revive again later, and again to be betrayed, but on that Wednesday,
September 21, the sure instinct of the people perceived the whole tragedy at
once and mourned over the passing of their nation.”
Later, the demonstration slowly split into “semi
organized forms.” After about an hour Czechoslovak national flags appeared
and the young people solemnly marched off to the Czechoslovak National
Parliament, their arms locked, singing patriotic Bohemian anthems.
Laborers—who had appeared straight from the factories still wearing
overalls—marched through Vaclavske Namesti and to the Parliament, also.
“Men and women of all ages and classes, in every sort of costume” joined
them. In front of the Parliament building, groups of women gathered and
demanded “We give you our sons. Give them arms!”
Sheean marveled as the marching, singing and
passionate cheering continued for hours. He estimated that between four and
five hundred thousand people—half of the city’s population—had filled
Prague’s streets. “Many thousands of these people” he reiterated,
“were weeping all through the night. I even saw a policeman in tears” he
noted. Although the German press described the demonstration the next day as
a “Red riot in Prague,” Sheean maintained that it was completely
peaceful and fitting the political crisis. “Those who witnessed it, in
whole or in part” he said, “know that it was a truly spontaneous
expression of the grief of a people; in years of experience of such matters
I have never seen anything like it... The cry of the people of Prague on
that night was from the heart.”
Finally leaving the demonstration and returning to
the Hotel Ambassador, Sheean found his wife in tears—“tears partly of
sympathy and partly of shame. Any English or French person who was in Prague
on that night” he assumed, “must have suffered as she did.” As someone
from the United States, Sheean reported “Three different English
correspondents, at different moments on that evening, congratulated me
bitterly on being an American.” While at times he questioned
Washington’s reactions to events in Europe that year, he conceded “I
knew what they meant.” When he went to bed at three o’clock the next
morning, Sheean observed “there had been some diminution in numbers, but
the demonstration was still going on. It was still going on the next morning
at a quarter to ten, when I got up.”
For some ten days the people’s reactions
reverberated through Prague, as did the political maneuverings of President
Benes, who was forced to form a new cabinet. After the demonstrations on
Wednesday evening and Thursday, however, an air of “unnatural calm, of
tense and expectant waiting” overtook the Czechoslovak capital. Then, on
Friday evening the twenty-third, the Prague regime announced a general
mobilization. Easily out-matched by Germany’s intimidatingly strong
Wehrmacht, the adament Czechoslovaks dug trenches, observed strict nightly
blackouts, distributed sandbags and gas masks, devised elaborate evacuation
plans and prepared as best they could to meet the formidable wrath of
Hitler. People stockpiled food, blankets, candles and what under normal
circumstances would be considered camping gear. As it waited for German
bombers to arrive and level the country’s cities, the populace braced
itself for the assault from the German Goliath. During this time, Sheean
gathered that “The Czechs apparently believed, like the Spaniards, that it
was better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
By now all communication between Czechoslovakia and
the rest of the world ceased, as all telephone and telegraph lines passed
through German-controlled Berlin or Vienna. Isolated both physically as well
as politically, the Czechoslovaks helplessly waited for their fate to be
decided for them. Recognizing that nothing further could be done—for the
time being—the people bade their time. In wonder, Sheean recounted that
“Under the most terrific stress, facing an ordeal so unprecedented that it
was impossible to imagine it with any exactness, the inhabitants of Prague
went about their business in discipline fashion... The resolute calm with
which these things were done deserved that abused and abusable word, heroic.
Men went to the war” he said, “women took their places at work; that was
all.”
Finally, on 30 September Prime Ministers Chamberlain
and Daladier signed the formal surrender of the Sudetenland to the Germans
in Munich. In spite of the wishes of the Czechoslovak people and their
government, Czechoslovakia’s “allies” had carved up the country and
offered a huge slice of its territory to Hitler. Ultimately, however, he
would not be satiated with only a partial victory, for Hitler coveted the
rest of the country as well, for he wished to use it as a stepping stone to
world domination.
After the act of betrayal had been completed, Benes
had resigned to the forced partitioning of his beloved Czechoslovakia and
the Germans received confirmation that they could occupy the Sudetenland
unopposed, the Sheeans drove out on an early-October morning into the
contested territory to observe the transfer of it to German control.
Accompanied by the U.S. American reporter Walter Kerr, the three set out for
Carlsbad to witness Hitler’s arrival in that provincial city. Reaching the
ancient spa resort, they found a town and a region awkwardly shifting
between regimes. Noting that the Czechoslovaks retained possession of the
area until half an hour before the German army was to thunder in, Sheean
later said “The whole procedure of transfer was very curious indeed: I
doubt if anything of the kind has happened often.” He remarked that “all
those who might have objected to the German victory (i.e. Jews,
intellectuals, Social Democrats and other Germans as well as Czechs) were no
longer in the conquered areas,” leaving the Nazis to enter to “the
unfeigned rejoicing of a whole population—that is, such population as was
left.”
The Sheeans had ventured to Carlsbad two nights
earlier to find it “bedecked with swastikas, alive with the agitated and
happy movement of a people who thought themselves ‘liberated’ by their
change of masters from bad to worse.” Contrary to rumor, however, Hitler
was not yet ready to visit the newly acquired Sudetenland, so they returned
to Prague. On the drive that night, they encountered insightful German
collaborators who warned that Czechoslovak guards were “murdering
everybody who moved along the road, that passage was impossible.” The
anxious reporter recalled “We drove as slowly as we could, with our dimmed
lights, expecting a shot to be heard at almost any moment.” Despite the
false scare, they returned to Prague safely.
On the morning that the little delegation again set
out to witness the German dictator’s pompous show of victory in the land
of the “liberated” Sudeten Germans, they stopped at the Horse’s Neck,
a roadside inn for a quick breakfast. Proceeding on their way, at nearby
Buchau they saw their first swastika that day hanging from a farmhouse.
Buchau represented “the frontier of the areas surrendered to Hitler by
Chamberlain; it was an ordinary Bohemian village with a mixed population,
Czechs bearing German names and Germans bearing Czech names, a muddle and
confusion of races like most of those villages.”
Shortly after leaving Buchau, “down one of those
beautiful fertile slopes which are characteristic of the Bohemian
countryside” they found “a brick farmhouse which had anticipated the
Fuehrer’s advent by sticking up a swastika, even though the Czech army was
still in possession of all this area for another day.” In Buchau itself
they had seen “more evidence of preparation for the Fuehrer’s visit,
although at the time we did not know what it was. This was a sort of maypole
with evergreens on it, lying alongside the road, which was later to become a
triumphal arch.”
After
Buchau the road from Prague to Carlsbad seemed to be once more in good
repair. Earlier, in anticipation of a German invasion the Czechoslovak army
had barricaded it, dynamited several bridges and prepared “every sort of
improvised difficulty in case this road might have to be defended against
the invader.” By now, however, it had been made clear again, making the
rest of the drive to Carlsbad unimpeded. Although the road no longer was
obstructed, driving through the Sudetenland the Sheeans soon encountered
another kind of distraction. “The Czech army, retreating down the road,
dispirited and not in good order, let us pass with only the cursory glances
at our documents. We went through a kind of continuous mob of them of all
the different varieties, eating their breakfast and slogging along home.
They were an unhappy and beaten lot” Sheean thought, “beaten without
having had the chance even to fight.”
When the Sheeans and Kerr returned to what was
perhaps the Sudetenland’s most symbolically important city at about nine
o’clock, they rolled into a Carlsbad giddy with expectation of the
Fuehrer’s appearance. Passing over the hill overlooking the town they saw
the “first real signs of the joy of the German population at their
annexation to Germany.” The Sudeten Germans were draping swastikas “on
nearly every house, at the windows, on the roofs and on the doorways.”
Sheean noticed that the exuberant Germans had placed ladders against the
houses “so that the inhabitants could put the swastika as high up on the
facade as
possible.”
He continued “Men, women and children greeted our car as it passed with
the Fascist salute and shouts of ‘Heil Hitler!’” He complained “This
annoyed us all a good deal, but there was nothing much we could do about it
except ignore it.”
Descending down the winding road into the town
center, the Sheeans and Kerr saw two “great Jewish charitable
institutions,” a hospital and a home for the elderly. The hospital staff
had securely boarded up the building “without a sign of life and without a
swastika on it.” The home, on the other hand, seemed still
occupied—“by whom” Sheean pondered “I do not know”—and swastikas
hung from its windows.
At exactly nine o’clock they crossed the Muellerbrunn, the stream
dissecting the center of Carlsbad. Just as they crossed it “the first
carloads of German officers in uniform started to come across it from the
other direction. They were cheered by a crowd which was, as yet, very
small” Sheean recounted, “but they saluted with broad grins and reached
out to take the flowers that were offered them by: the girls along the
way.” Soon, as they moved into the town’s central square, the foreign
visitors would see a reception like they’d never before seen.
Entering the Schmuckplatz, the square in front of the
Carlsbad city theater, they found a place at the Hotel Goldenes Schild—the
“Golden Shield”—as Nazi Party and propaganda functionaries had taken
over the hotel where journalists usually stayed. Sheean explained that
“All the other hotels in Carlsbad had been closed for about two weeks for
lack of either guests or workmen [in the face of the impending invasion].
Some of them” he noted, “were now reopening—at least those of the
Schmuckplatz—to afford places and food for the throng of visitors expected
either as part of the Hitler show or as spectators at it.” The Goldenes
Schild had reopened only that morning. Sheean found the proprietress
comically obsessed with where she and her husband would find enough food
stuffs, dishes and tableware for the expected masses. “They had a son”
he added “who had just returned that day from across the hills in Germany
somewhere: he had been a member of [the] ‘Freikorps’, that body
of volunteer local Nazis who were never called upon to do any fighting
beyond an occasional murder or assault on a Jew.”
The Sheeans ordered a second breakfast in the
hotel’s restaurant. Because of the disruption of food supplies since the
recent crisis, Sheean received two rotten eggs in a row, leaving him without
an appetite. Sitting near the restaurant window, however, he spied a strange
sight. Out in the Schmuckplatz “A regiment of men, women and children had
suddenly appeared and started uprooting all the plants, trees, rosebushes
and other growing things in the...Municipal Gardens. What had been a
formally planted garden was transformed under our eyes, in due course, into
an open square.” The dumbfounded Sheeans and Kerr wondered “if this
could be plain looting—whether the retirement of the Czech soldiery at
seven o’clock had not left the town too unpoliced, so that industrious
looters could not be prevented from taking what they pleased, even for
firewood.” Seeing several German officers in the square, however, they
soon realized that the “regiment” was simply “making room for a crowd
for the Fuehrer to address.”
After their failed attempt to enjoy breakfast, the
three curious visitors went on a walk around the busy town. As the SS
already had confiscated and occupied the former police station “there were
a good many gray-uniformed men of the regular army, as well as Brownshirts”
to be seen. While Sheean had never liked the heavy-handed thugs Hitler made
into uniformed guards, he found that they offered him a solution to the
problem of where to park his car amidst the growing crowd. “I think I was
aided” he confessed, “in this chiefly by a local Nazi who was influenced
by the Great Britain license plate—that G.B. license plate which, cheered
in German areas and jeered in Czech districts, showed so clearly who was the
author of the present rearrangement of Europe.”
While in Prague Sheean had witnessed the most
spectacular public outpouring of shared mourning and anguish, in Carlsbad he
watched open displays of the opposite. He saw many people in the crowd who
were “weeping for sheer joy. ‘This is the happiest day of my life,’
they told you when you gave them a chance” he said. Others, however,
“had got mixed up in it by sheer accident... I saw two old ladies”
Sheean reported, “walking along the street who had to stop and give the
Fascist salute on one occasion... Both of these saluted perfunctorily, and
one of them was obviously too puzzled either to know why she saluted or to
do it halfway correctly. She flapped her right hand in the air” he
laughed, “ as if she wished the whole thing—Fascism and Hitler and the
rest of it—would go away.”
Despite the two flustered old women’s awkward
stumbling through the new social etiquette, Sheean did not doubt the
genuineness of “the natural enthusiasm of most in that crowd. They were
glad of the annexation of this area to Germany: they were anxious to greet
Hitler with as much adulation as they knew how to muster for him.” With
any possible opposition having fled the area, Sheean realized that “none
were left except those who were glad to welcome Hitler as the new master of
Europe.”
The Sheeans and Kerr returned to the Hotel Goldenes
Schild in time to watch huge trucks from the German propaganda office arrive
to distribute swastikas and bring loudspeakers to be placed throughout the
Schmuckplatz. “Great swastika banners were hung out over the balconies at
the Municipal Theater” Sheean observed, “where Hitler was to speak.”
On the Hirschensprung—the peak towering over Carlsbad—workers had
painted a huge white swastika on pieces of wood arranged against a canvas
background. Also, a swastika flag now stood alongside the sacred crucifix
that had capped the mountain peak for many years.
At about ten o’clock additional German trucks
arrived in the Schmuckplatz, this time carrying infantry with machine guns.
The hoods of the cars at the head of the procession bore flowers, while the
soldiers wore flowers on their helmets and at the ends of their rifles.
Sheean watched with disdain as “all the girls in the streets reached out
eagerly to touch their hands as the trucks passed.” By a quarter to noon
the German army displayed “the trooping of the colors, a drill performed
with terrifying precision in goose step.” Just as he speculated “if any
other troops in the world could perform a parade drill like the Germans when
they are on their mettle,” Sheean noticed large and small German tanks
rolling down the street along the theater—“named, in Carlsbad fashion,
the Old Meadow.”
By this time the loudspeakers the Germans had erected
announced Hitler’s movement from the Sudeten town of Eger to Carlsbad,
“point by point, interspersing these bits of information with advice and
orders to the crowd. The sound trucks and film cameras” he said, “were
busy in all this from eleven o’clock on, and the scene was one they did
well to take—it was, in fact” Sheean thought, “something like a movie
to watch, and must have been excellent material for the sound film.”
A potential threat to the pageant, it had been
raining intermittently that morning in Carlsbad. When the crowd opened their
umbrellas at one point the emcee “admonished them about this, saying that
the Fuehrer was on his way to them in an open car, unprotected against the
elements, and that they should be prepared to endure a little rain while
they waited for him.” As the paternalistic emcee promised that
“Umbrellas will be raised the next time it rains,” the people laughed
and collapsed their umbrellas. In addition, the emcee repeatedly cajoled the
spectators to pack the square, claiming “There is room in the Schmuckplatz
for fifteen hundred thousand people.” Sheean mused “I doubted if there
were fifteen hundred thousand people in Carlsbad just then, unless all were
brought in from all the streets leading to Eger: and in that case who would
be there to line the streets and cheer the Fuehrer as he passed?”
Sheean noted that despite the emcees’ less than
subtle manipulation, the Schmuckplatz did not fill quickly. Suspecting that
the authorities in charge of crowd control wanted to guarantee that
continuous crowds would stretch along Hitler’s arrival route, he granted
that “it took a little careful management to make the available number of
people look like the usual frenzied mob of Berlin or Munich.”
Having reserved rooms at the Hotel Goldenes Schild
directly opposite the city theater, the Sheeans and Kerr moved from the
square to their rooms to watch the impending spectacle. Sheean celebrated
their good fortune at obtaining the rooms, as he maintained “there was no
other place where we could have had a better view of the machinery by which
the demonstration was worked up.”
At one-forty that afternoon music began to pour out
of the loud-speakers. Ten minutes later “the booming voice of the chief
announcer said very solemnly: ‘The Fuehrer is in Carlsbad’. From then on
until the great man appeared in the square “ Sheean recounted, “the
cheering was continuous. We could hear it starting afar off, out of sight,
by the Eger bridge presumably, growing stronger as the cars surrounding the
Fuehrer pushed their slow and would-be majestic way through the streets.”
At exactly one fifty-four a sound truck “with the crank steadily
grinding” entered the Schmuckplatz, followed by Hitler’s car. Sheean
described the Fuehrer as “rigid in his long military coat and cap, his
hand at the military salute.” Prompted by “cheerleaders scattered here
and there,” the crowd began chanting in unison “Wir danken unserem
Fuehrer”—“We thank our Leader.” Sheean reported that “This
seemed to be the principal slogan of the day, and was chanted again and
again both during Hitler’s speech and afterwards, alternating with the
brief, savage barking noise of ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!’”
At two o’clock sharp Hitler emerged from the
theater onto a balcony overlooking the Schmuckplatz, “giving the Nazi
salute and receiving it from the massed crowd in the square beneath. The
applause—general now” Sheean noted, “not cadenced or organized, but an
outburst of hysterical yells and howls—continued for exactly five minutes,
after which Hitler turned it off by signaling with his hand. It stopped”
he compared, “as a light goes off when you turn the switch.”
As the local Nazi leader and the first speaker, a
Herr Frank, thanked Hitler for the people of Carlsbad, exclaiming with much
emotion “you have taken us home, mein Fuehrer”. The people again
began chanting in unison. “Wir Danken unserem Fuehrer.” Then,
Hitler spoke.
The Sheeans listened closely to Hitler’s speech.
Although they could not understand all of it due to their general
unfamiliarity with German, they were surprised by its uncharacteristically
subdued tone. Sheean marveled “The speech on the whole was calm (for
Hitler) and contained only one moment of the maniacal intensity which we
expected.” Sheean claimed that one outburst came when Hitler pounded the
balcony railing in front of him proclaiming “Dass ich hier ein Tag
stehen wuerde, das hab’ ich gewusst!”—“That I would be standing
here one day, that I knew.” Sheean added “the maniacal intensity was
there in the statement, and everybody who heard it felt some kind of
electric shock. There were some women in the crowd who fainted; I saw one
carried out of the square and another brought into our hotel.”
Although its preparation had consumed the whole
morning and early afternoon, the pageant ended by two thirty. Sheean and
Kerr then rushed downstairs to eat and phone a report to their respective
news agencies. After a short argument they decided to drive to Bayreuth—the
nearest large town which happened to be in nearby Germany—because the
telephone system in the Sudetenland continued to be wrecked since the
crisis. Sheean admitted “It was a rash and almost idiotic idea to go there
under such conditions, with a military occupation going on and a world war
scare so recent that any foreigner must be subject to pretty severe
scrutiny; but the nearest telephone in such cases is the nearest telephone,
and go we did.”
The threesome decided to drive through Asch, the
Bavarian town Hitler had passed on his way to Carlsbad. They found it
crowded on the Czechoslovak, “or rather on the newly Germanized side, but
there was little enough traffic once we got into Bavaria itself. Here”
Sheean remembered later, “we saw our first evidence of the confiscation of
Jewish goods in the newly seized areas: a big truck from Carlsbad, belonging
to a Jewish department store, was being driven into Bavaria with a lot of
German soldiers in it.”
To their amusement, Sheean found that “At the
frontier, which was now a frontier no longer, nobody knew just what to do
with us. The Czechoslovak frontier was gone, the posts there deserted and
the bars taken down, but the customs and other guards at the German frontier
were still on duty.” Sheean presented to the Germans the required
passports and papers for the car. Citing that there existed no reason for
them to be detained, he expressed surprise when “the man who stamped our
papers said we would have to go to the Gestapo in Bayreuth to get an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung
(a certificate of harmlessness or unobjectionability)” before they
could return to Czechoslovakia.
When they reached Bayreuth Kerr successfully placed
his report quickly. Sheean on the other hand tried to reach the North
American Newspaper Alliance in London and the New York Times offices
in Paris or in Berlin for hours, but to no avail. In frustration, a number
of times he asked the manager of the hotel where they had stopped to eat and
telephone to place the calls. Sheean eventually tried to complain to the
operator himself “but the answer always was: ‘It hasn’t come through
yet.’ I was getting so nervous with delay, and so mystified by it”
Sheean recalled, “that I could hardly eat the excellent dinner provided by
the Goldener Anker Hotel.”
Finally, Sheean left Diane and Kerr to eat their
dinner and returned to the phone booth to ascertain why Kerr’s call had
been connected so easily, but his simply would not go through. A voice he
had not before spoken with came on the line, saying “Ah, so you were in
Carlsbad today! You saw our Fuehrer, did you? Now wasn’t that fine! I hope
you enjoyed that.” Sheean felt stymied by this: “Why should the operator
care what I had been doing” he demanded, “and how could she know?”
When he answered affirmatively to her rhetoric, she replied sweetly “That
will be all right. You are sitting in a nice warm place, aren’t you, there
in the hotel, with a good meal? You can wait. You will get your
communication.”
Stunned and disarmed, Sheean returned to his
companions yet they could barely believe his story. At ten o’clock trying
once more—three and a half hours after Kerr effortlessly had reached
Paris—Sheean finally resigned from reaching his news bureau and handed his
press release to Kerr to call to his office in Paris: it went through in
less than three minutes.
Realizing that Kerr had been reporting in Europe for
less than a year and so was less likely to have a Gestapo dossier kept on
him, Sheean conceded “These are the mysteries at work in Germany under the
Nazi regime.”
So that they could return to Prague, the next morning
the Sheeans and Kerr left the Goldener Anker Hotel and visited the local
Gestapo headquarters. To his consternation Sheean discovered “Nobody in
the Gestapo office knew what to do with us; they said it was unnecessary for
us to have an Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung; that these were only
for German citizens. But before we elicited this piece of information we had
wandered through half the offices in the police station and talked to
several officials who were just as puzzled as were.” At one point the
authorities called the regional Gestapo headquarters in Nuernberg and
thought the three Auslaender would have to travel there to secure the
necessary papers.
As an U.S. American unused to merely submitting to
bureaucracy, just as they were about to set off for the ancient city Sheean
approached the Gestapo officials once more. “This time I went in alone and
found that most of the officials were out to lunch. There was one man on
duty” he found, “ a police officer, very military and heel-clicking
type, who said to me, with a broad grin, ‘Why don’t you just go to the
frontier and try to pass through? These are unusual times on the frontier
and it might work. It isn’t very far, and if they turn you back you can
return here and go to Nuernberg’.”
Following the sly bureaucrat’s advice, the Sheeans
and Kerr drove to and passed through the frontier without incident. At the
border the same officer who had said they must visit the Gestapo to obtain
prerequisite papers now claimed “You should have told me that you belonged
to the press.” According to him, journalists were not required to get
permission.
Once the three travelers returned to the Sudetenland,
“everything was different. Yesterday” Sheean mocked, “had been the day
for flowers and jubilation; this was the day of tanks, armored cars, heavy
trucks loaded with ammunition, staff cars, and a general movement of the
German army to take possession of its prey.” He found the traffic from
Franzensbad to be very heavy. “We had expected to be stopped and asked for
papers” Sheean said, as the frontier guards had “warned us that a new
motorcycle corps known as the Feldgendarmerie, with green arm bands,
were patrolling the roads with orders to stop strange cars, and that we
should show our papers and ask to be taken to press headquarters when this
happened.” Instead of being stopped, however, when such patrols did pass
“they always saluted us as if we had been members of the general staff and
went whizzing on their way. My car was gray” he explained, “like most of
the German staff cars.” He supposed that without stopping the car, there
was no way to know it was not an official German army vehicle.
Sheean was not sure why he, Diane and Kerr
encountered no problems back in the Sudetenland. He stated simply, “In any
case among the strange things in those two days of wandering through a sort
of no man’s land the like of which has seldom existed before, the
strangest thing of all was that nobody stopped us or made the slightest
attempt to find out what we were doing.” He continued “If we had had a
machine gun, for instance, it would have been fairly easy to kill Hitler and
his friends there on the balcony over the Schmuckplatz. Nobody searched us
or asked us questions; there might have been lethal weapons in our one
suitcase; but in any case we were allowed to circulate without let or
hindrance. I began to think” Sheean recalled, “that the myth of German
efficiency was a mere journalistic approximation, like so many other myths
of the age.”
When they passed again through Carlsbad the Sheeans
and Kerr found the town “was still bedecked in swastikas and was still in
the state of hysteria that had descended on it the day before. The women and
children” Sheean projected, “were, if possible, even a little more
wrought up than on October 4, and at times the children risked their lives
by rushing out into the road and yelling ‘Heil! ‘ with their hands
raised in the Fascist salute. We had to swerve a couple times” he said in
wonder, “to avoid such enthusiastic little idiots who took our car for a
German one.”
Sheean found that “The hysteria died down swiftly
after we left Carlsbad.” The farmhouses still flew swastikas from their
windows and gables, but the procession of tanks and trucks had disappeared.
Between Carlsbad and Buchau he saw only German footsoldiers, “stolid and
good-natured, with bayonets fixed but without—apparently—any desire to
interfere with our progress. At Buchau” he continued sarcastically, “we
saw yesterday’s may-pole, which had become a triumphal arch at some point
in the proceedings—two great garlanded poles with an arch of evergreen,
swastikas and other tasteful bits of Nazi decoration.”
After Buchau, as the little troupe passed the last
German soldiers, Sheean entertained for a moment a most unsettling vision.
“Here I saw” he later wrote, “for one brief flash, a scene which
seemed to me to indicate a state of mind. Two officers of the Wehrmacht were
standing at the side of the road looking through field glasses at the
further hills—the Czech lines and fortifications which had not been
surrendered. They were laughing” Sheean conjured, “and there was
something about the way they stood, looked, laughed and nodded that
suggested a whole set of ideas.” In his mind Sheean imagined the two
German army men saying to each other: “There they are, over there, secure
behind some paper-mache fortifications that we can break through whenever we
like. We have already taken more than anybody believed possible” he heard
the invisible soldiers boasting. “We have only to wait a little while and
we can take it all.”
Indeed, Hitler occupied Austria in March of 1938 and the Sudetenland that
September, each without any effective armed resistance. Having only in March
of 1939 occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia, on 1 September of that
year Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland and ignited what would become the
second global war in less than twenty-five years to tear Europe apart. By
May of 1940 the German army blitzed its way into the Low Countries and
France—irrevocably engaging Germany in a state of “total war”—a war
which eminated from the homefront, then eventually engulfed it as much as
the earlier battlefront.
related
letters
from George F. Kennan on
Events
in Prague
Tour
of Nazi-Occupied Countries
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