The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  Kirkpatrick’s eventual return to the United States was a sobering experience. She could find no entry-level salaried positions in her field. In New York she tried Macy’s management training, and then marriage — a double stab at becoming part of the American culture. Both proved a mistake. The Depression was in full swing, and a background in international affairs was neither pertinent to most job descriptions nor helpful in a marriage she had had doubts about from the beginning. Desperate to recover a purposeful life, she took a summer job escorting thirty teenage girls about Europe, and at the furthermost point, Vienna, cabled her husband, “NOT RETURNING” — a cowardly solution, she admitted later. Once freed of her charges, Kirkpatrick returned to Geneva, where she was promptly hired to run the office of the Foreign Policy Association. This was an affirmation of her potential, and she was delighted. The FPA was in the League of Nations building, just below the press room, and before long Helen was covering for friends upstairs when they were ill or out of town. She wrote for the Manchester Guardian and the London Daily Telegraph, Herald, and Express. When the European office of the New York Herald Tribune offered her job as a stringer at a hundred dollars a month, she left the FPA. Reporting, she decided, was her calling. What she earned only barely sufficed, but that was to be expected. The point was, she was in.

  Helen Kirkpatrick, 1942.

  HELEN KIRKPATRICK PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  It was as a Herald Tribune stringer that Kirkpatrick reported how the Nazis blew their own cover on rearmament. Against all intent and stipulation of the Versailles Treaty, the Reich army, navy, and air force were ballooning in size. Krupp, the armaments manufacturer, had been redesigning tanks for a decade. Submarines were being covertly assembled in Finland and Spain. I. G. Farben, the chemical trust, had discovered how to make gasoline and synthetic rubber from coal. Hider reestablished universal military service and, in March 1936, sent his army into the demilitarized Rhineland.

  In Basel, Kirkpatrick heard rumors of unusual activity along the riverfront. She and a friend left Switzerland at dawn and drove north along the east bank of the Rhine to investigate. Brand-new Nazi flags flew from every conceivable railing or pole. Soldiers crowded the streets of towns and villages, though Helen felt their presence was somehow tentative: they were positioned where they could withdraw quickly if a confrontation occurred. At Strasbourg she and her friend crossed over the Rhine and doubled back southward. On the French side the atmosphere was more apprehensive. Along the west bank the French had constructed an elaborate string of defenses known as the Maginot Line. Kirkpatrick was struck by the extent of the fortifications, the large numbers of antiaircraft and long-range guns, the thousands of newly summoned French troops. They seemed prepared, but she felt that it was all a gamble on Hitler’s part, that the Germans were bluffing and the French were not calling the bluff. “The French and British consulted, and decided that nothing had happened, so they wouldn’t do anything,” she later recalled. “They were obligated to enforce the treaty. But they didn’t.” Her story in the Herald Tribune European edition earned her considerable attention.

  The same summer that Helen Kirkpatrick wired an airy farewell to her husband from Vienna was the summer that Josephine Herbst, enduring a wrenching separation from hers, took on a highly dangerous assignment in Berlin.

  Josephine Herbst, Nation, New Masses, New York Post

  Growing up poor in Sioux City, Iowa, Josephine Herbst was always restless and filled with longing — for someplace that was not Iowa. At the University of California at Berkeley she discovered radicals and socialists, artists, poets, and writers, and especially the newspapermen of the Bay Area. “I always knew that somewhere in the world were people who could talk about the things I wanted to talk about and do the things I wanted to do,” she wrote home. Her new friends believed, as she so passionately did, that it was possible to affect how things happened in the larger world.

  Herbst graduated in 1918 and moved to New York — one of a number of young women who migrated from the Midwest to live dangerously and try their talent. For Josephine, danger took the form of an affair with the young socialist journalist and poet Maxwell Anderson, who was trying to maintain his creative capacities while supporting a wife and children. At the time she believed herself capable of free love, no entanglements. She nabbed a job on an H. L. Mencken-George Jean Nathan magazine, and in time two of her short stories were published in Mencken’s Smart Set. Deciding to go where she could live cheaply and write, she chose Berlin. In New York she met an aspiring novelist, John Herrmann, friend of Ernest Hemingway, as Josie soon was, too. Herrmann and Herbst returned home and married. There the misfortune of needing jobs to pay the rent was offset by camaraderie with fellow writers such as Katherine Anne Porter and John Dos Passos, and for Herrmann by other women, something Herbst chose to ignore. They were committed to each other as writers; free love still prevailed. But John’s eventual departure left her devastated.

  Herbst turned to reporting. She covered the Scottsboro case and Cuban politics for the radical New Masses and Iowa farm strikes for the Nation. In 1936 the New York Post asked her to go to Germany to gather information on underground resistance to Hitler, which correspondents in the Berlin bureaus knew about but were too visible to investigate. Government censors favored stories that stressed national unity and stability, but people who fled the country testified to unrest, and insisted there was still time to turn the situation around.

  This kind of investigation was difficult, dangerous. Worn down by her personal troubles, Herbst was unsure she could take on so demanding an assignment. Still, it was a big story. She who felt so strongly that Americans must face the truth about Nazi Germany could hardly turn down a chance to help expose that truth. Besides, the trip would offer the best kind of distraction — wholly absorbing work in a changed environment.

  Herbst arrived in Berlin with a scattering of names and addresses provided by exiles she had met in New York and elsewhere, and settled down in a comfortable hotel on Unter den Linden to get her bearings. The capital was both the same and very different. On her 1922 visit, rampant inflation had resulted in an often desperate populace, but people talked freely and the press published what it chose. Now everything seemed muzzled. To find the covert opposition, she had to pretend she was part of it, take every precaution they themselves were taking. No names or addresses could be written down, meetings must seem to happen by chance, the telephone was to be avoided. Other people’s lives depended on her vigilance.

  In the first of six installments (which could not be written until she left the country) she described the atmosphere in the capital:

  The newspaper, the radio and the newsreel repeat that all is quiet in Germany, everything is in order. To the eye, streets are clean, window boxes are choked with flowers, children hike to the country in droves, singing songs. The slogans of the opposition groups have been whitewashed from the walls. Only by word of mouth, in whispers, the real news circulates stealthily through the German world. From hand to hand tiny leaflets inform the uninformed.

  A worker tells me about the Bismarck strike in the secrecy of his home. It is in an apartment house where the doors are plastered with the different stickers of Nazi activities to show that the occupants have made their contributions. Within, we speak in lowered voices. The radio is turned on loudly and we sit near it with our heads close together. The walls have ears....

  Herbst found the tension hard to live with on a daily basis. People told her of strikes, and of retribution on the strikers. There was whisper of Gestapo jails and concentration camps. She noticed how, in bookstores, works once considered important were no longer on display. The Berlin of her youth seemed to have vanished:

  For anyone who knew Germany in former years, it is a changed and sick country. Perhaps it is cleaner than before. The countryside is peculiarly orderly and beautiful. One may forget much in the country. Babies lie beside the wheat fields while mothers cut away with old-fashioned sickles.... Boys b
icycle on country roads. Who sees a concentration camp? Yet silence is over the very countryside, in little inns where one is sharply scrutinized, in trains, along streets. Talk does not bubble up anymore.

  To Josie, for whom talk was the supreme nourishment, the first necessity, it was as if civilization had vacated the country.

  It was during the summer of 1936 that the virulence of German anti-Semitism hit American correspondents head on. They had grown up with the American variety, but in America one could combat anti-Semitism or try to avoid those who practiced it; even if Jewish, one had choices. By the mid-1930s choices for Jews in Germany were almost nonexistent. Herbst wrote despairingly of walking through Berlin and other cities and seeing sidewalks in front of small shops painted with red signs indicating Jewish ownership. Outside the capital, persecution was even more rampant. Many small-town Jews moved to Berlin to be less conspicuous. But any sense of greater security there was nullified the night that storm troopers charged into cafes on the Kurfürstendamm demanding of patrons “Are you a Jew?” and, if there was no denial or the customer “looked Jewish,” flinging his cup of coffee in his face. Men were hustled off and severely beaten. Herbst believed that the fiscal hardships of the working-class German increased his susceptibility to anti-Semitism, that racial consciousness was often the only thing he could take pride in. “The small disappointed shopkeeper gains some kind of distinction by being at least an ‘Aryan,’” she wrote.

  The Josephine Herbst who slipped out of Germany with her store of secrets was a different woman from the one who had entered a mere five weeks before. She went directly to Paris; saturated with her experience, she found it difficult to relate to her friends, and scorned their interests and concerns, although they were the same or similar to her own a short time before. Their failure to treat the situation in Germany seriously appalled her, even while she conceded that someone who had not seen what she had seen could not be expected to agonize as she did — or for that matter to plumb the depths of her despair at having heard nothing at all from her husband.

  “Behind the Swastika,” the six-part front-page series that appeared in the New York Post, documented the underside of Nazi Germany as no other journalist of either sex had yet done. But America slumbered on.

  Like Herbst, Sigrid Schultz regretted the passing of the old Berlin. In the decade that she had served as bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, the city had lost its cosmopolitan aura, its air of carefree emancipation. It was hard to take a morning stroll down Unter den Linden with uniformed men clicking their heels and heiling Hitler in stiff-armed salutes. Once-friendly neighbors were afraid to be seen talking with foreign reporters, particularly one with a reputation for anti-Nazi bias like Schultz.

  Most foreign correspondents in Berlin tried to cover events objectively, irrespective of what light they cast on the Nazi regime. Hermann Goering, who saw reporters regularly, did his best to discourage a negative slant, and tried various tacks to that end — like favoring compliant correspondents with special interviews while boycotting others. Such stratagems seldom worked with American reporters who, over drinks at the Taverna, shared information any one of them had obtained.

  So a backup ploy — planting incriminating documents in a reporter’s residence and then staging a raid — was inaugurated, and Schultz was one of the first targets. An agent arrived at her apartment with a large sealed envelope which he handed to her mother with the directive that Fraulein Schultz should open it when she returned that evening. Forewarned, Frau Schultz phoned her daughter, and Sigrid rushed home, took one look at the design for an airplane engine inside the envelope, and burned it to ashes in the fireplace. On her way back to the office she passed a man she recognized, heading toward her home with two shady figures in tow. She planted herself squarely in their path and informed them it would be a waste of time to go any further as the contents of the envelope left at her house had already been destroyed. Then she flagged a taxi and loudly ordered the driver to take her to the American embassy.

  Schultz decided the time had come to lodge a direct protest with Goering, and chose the occasion of a postwedding luncheon given by the Foreign Press Association to honor him and his new bride. Sigrid later described how Goering, scowling down the long banquet table, announced it was time these reporters began respecting the new Germany instead of constantly harping on concentration camps, which were needed to teach discipline to people who had forgotten about it during the days of the weak Weimar Republic. Schultz ignored that diatribe and began quietly to speak of her recent encounters with his agents provocateurs. “You are imagining things,” he sputtered in response. Not at all, she said, and added that the American embassy was fully informed, which caused him to lose his temper and snarl about her never having learned proper respect for the authority of the state, probably a characteristic of people from “that crime-ridden city of Chicago.” After that, Goering always referred to Sigrid as “the dragon lady from Chicago.”

  Schultz was not at all fazed by the intended slur, but now that the number two Nazi had declared openly against her, she had to be more on her guard than ever. The days when her working life and her private life meshed were over, and the latter was of necessity a lot more private and less fan than it had been. She enjoyed the respect of her colleagues, who admired her network of contacts, and relished the good fellowship at the Taverna, but she must have felt isolated. She was older than most of them by now and not privy to the banter she would have understood automatically had she grown up in the States.

  Another matter separating Schultz from her colleagues at that time was a secret she was not sharing. The Chicago Tribune had begun a series of articles under the byline “John Dickson,” which it prefaced with remarks to the effect that tight censorship and a controlled press having prevented a complete telling of the story of Nazi dictatorship, the Tribune had “sent one of its trained correspondents into Germany to obtain facts, which its accredited correspondents in the Tribune’s Berlin bureau have been unable to cable to America.” In fact, Dickson and Schultz were the same.

  The first series of stories, printed between May 15 and 19, 1937, and datelined Paris, explored problems currently facing Hitler, such as the resentment of farmers at the lack of available labor and the dis-grundement of the populace at the visibly increasing wealth of the Nazi leaders. There was friction in the ranks. Nazi leaders were unhappy that there was no immediate plan for the army to strike, while the army complained that the Hitler Youth, having been taught to think they were leaders, had to be retrained to obey before they were useful as soldiers. “Dickson” found the spring syllabus for Hider Youth leaders of particular interest: eighteen-year-olds were advised what biological qualities to look for in a wife, to marry in a civil ceremony, and not to have their children christened since Christianity “undermines true heroic values.”

  For Schultz, to whom individuality and privacy were sacrosanct, her final “Dickson” piece was particularly damning. It described how in German society every citizen was “card-indexed” — not once but many times as he was registered with the local police, the central police, the secret police, the army, the “cell” in which his home fell and the “block” in which his “cell” fell, the guild of his profession, as either a donor or a recipient of winter relief, on the income tax lists, the city tax lists, the church unemployed insurance lists or the old-age insurance lists, as the owner of a house, a boat, a car, or a dog, and — if he were lucky — as a member of the Nazi Party.

  Most Chicago Tribune readers accepted the stated identification of “John Dickson.” If the Berlin correspondents were more skeptical, if they discerned in his writing the directness and style characteristic of their colleague Sigrid Schultz, they said nothing. The secret was hers alone — a cause of both satisfaction and unremitting anxiety.

  Another American to confront the Germany of the mid-1930s was a young woman whose forebears were themselves German; her father, in fact, was a native of Breslau who had received
his M.D. from the University of Würzburg and had come to America because of his anti-militarist beliefs. His children must often have heard from him, and discussed with him, events occurring in the country he still revered for its music and culture.

  Martha Gellhorn, Collier’s magazine

  Martha Gellhorn grew up in Saint Louis, an only daughter in a family of four children. This was no ordinary family: her father and maternal grandfather were both practicing physicians and professors of medicine, her mother and grandmother deeply involved in education and civic affairs. Martha’s mother in particular, the beautiful, loving Edna, immersed in all the best causes, of which women’s suffrage was only the most prominent — even had Martha wanted to rebel against her, how could she? She adored her mother. She rebelled instead against Saint Louis, against its provinciality, against the upper-class society that her family moved among and yet (because her mother was half Jewish? because dinner conversation tended to be intellectual? because the Gellhorns thought a debut for their daughter too frivolous?) was never quite part of.

  Martha was in the first class at the experimental (coed) John Burroughs School, founded under Edna’s guidance, and when it came time for college, the daughter went off to the mother’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr. Edna thought the college perfect, and perfect for her daughter, but in Martha’s view her fellow students were no more sophisticated than her friends in Saint Louis. She already knew more than they did, read more, smoked a lot more. And having led an unregulated youth among adults too busy to watch over her much, she resented the rules, or rather the fact that there were rules. She would always rebel against rules.

  Martha Gwllhorn, 1940.

  AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  At twenty, to Edna’s great disappointment, Martha left Bryn Mawr to live the life of a single and self-supporting woman in New York. She joined the staff of the New Republic; when that proved too academic, she took a job on the Albany Times Union, where as a cub reporter she covered the morgue. Two years later, in February 1930, she traded a favorable article on the Holland America Line for a one-way, third-class ticket to Europe. Paris did not disappoint her. She settled on the Left Bank, reported for Vogue and UP, and freelanced for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. On assignment for them she traveled to Geneva and interviewed women important in the structure of the League of Nations.