David Halton revisits dad Matthew’s world scoop on the Nazi threat,
In 1933, young Toronto Star reporter Matthew Halton scooped much of the world on Germany’s tilt toward global slaughter
“Germany enters a nightmare. I feel it in my bones.”
— Matthew Halton, Toronto Star, March 1933
In early September 1933, Matt returned to Germany for an extended two-month assignment. It produced what became known as “the German Series,” 30 reports that chronicled almost every defining aspect of Nazi Germany. Apart from Berlin, Matt travelled to tiny villages in Thuringia and the Rhineland, as well as to a dozen major cities, including Hamburg, Heidelberg, Bonn, Leipzig, Munich, and Nuremberg.
He visited factories, schools, universities, Storm Troop centres, and a concentration camp. He interviewed dozens of Nazi officials from senior party functionaries to Brown Shirts staffing local party headquarters. And he made surreptitious contact with victims of Nazi tyranny — the few, that is, willing to risk speaking to a foreign reporter. In terms of investigative reporting, the German Series was Matt’s greatest accomplishment.
“Parachute” correspondents — those who drop into a foreign country for short assignments — are rarely able to match the knowledge of a resident correspondent. In Matt’s case, though, it was a distinct advantage. The 110 foreign correspondents based in Berlin faced a stark choice. If they wrote too aggressively about the excesses of Hitler’s regime, they would be expelled, as 19 were between 1933 and 1937.
Most of the resident correspondents self-censored their reports to avoid jeopardizing their prestigious posting or risk displeasing their employers back home. Louis Lochner, bureau chief of the Associated Press in Berlin during the 1930s, later summarized the message Berlin correspondents were getting from home management: “To tell no untruth, but to report only as much of the truth without distorting the picture, as would enable us to remain at our posts.”
As a consequence, the correspondents tended to rely heavily on statements by Nazi leaders and press releases from the government. There was a reluctance to report on the dark side of the regime, and a general avoidance of critical analysis. Even as accomplished an American correspondent as William Shirer (later author of the bestselling The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich) wrote guiltily in his diary that he softened up a story to avoid angering the Nazis: “If I had any guts, or American journalism had any, I would have said so in my dispatch tonight. But I am not supposed to be ‘editorial.’ ”
Another factor helping to create a generally tame foreign press in Germany was the extent to which it was courted, as well as threatened, by the Nazi regime. Hitler himself occasionally invited pliant correspondents for off-therecord sessions at his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. Josef Goebbels’s Orwellian-named Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda would do much of the legwork for correspondents in providing sources and interviews — all, of course, with Nazi sympathizers.
“I have seen and studied the most fanatical, thorough-going and savage philosophy of war ever imposed on any nation . . . Germany is literally becoming a laboratory and breeding ground for war, unless I am deaf, dumb and blind.” MATTHEW HALTON IN THE TORONTO STAR, 1933
The ministry supplied other favours: help in leasing apartments and arranging travel, special passes to big events, and tickets at reduced rates for concerts and operas. It built a lavish club for foreign journalists with a well-equipped press room that served as an office for some correspondents. It also organized regular bierabend, beer-and-sausage evenings where correspondents would be briefed by Nazi insiders.
Few correspondents objected to the rather cosy relationship with their hosts. The annual Foreign Press Association ball in the Adlon Hotel was the social event of the Berlin season, attended on occasion by Goebbels himself and leading members of the party hierarchy.
The Nazis also used more sinister tactics to encourage a docile foreign press. Correspondents were allowed to exchange their salaries into German currency at a rate two or three times better than the official exchange rate. For some correspondents that meant tripling their income — a not-sosubtle form of bribery. One Nazi party document even stated explicitly that “the friendship of newspaper people is to be secured, if possible, by bribery.”
Another German practice was to plant fabricated anti-Nazi stories which, if published, would then be revealed as false and used to discredit the correspondent. In London, in1935, Matt was himself targeted. A German claiming to be a refugee gave him a story about an alleged Nazi atrocity. Fortunately, Matt checked out the informant’s identity and was told the “refugee” was a suspected German agent.
As a temporary correspondent, Matt was free of most of the constraints faced by resident foreign correspondents in Germany. He had also decided to hold back most of the German Series from publication until he left the country to avoid harassment by the authorities. Once again, he settled into the opulent Adlon Hotel, whose frescoed salons and chandeliered rooms were frequented by celebrities, visiting foreign statesmen, and top Nazi leaders.
Jean accompanied him for almost a month, as she sometimes did on his foreign trips. They would take walks along the Unter den Linden and among the trees and flowers of the lovely Tiergarten. A photograph at the time shows the couple arm in arm in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Jean elegant in a long fox-trimmed overcoat. They would often dine at the Taverne, the favourite meeting place for foreign correspondents, where one of the occasional guests was Martha Dodd, the bright, promiscuous daughter of the American ambassador. Gestapo spies were conspicuous, watching and trying to listen from nearby tables.
Matt got his accreditation from the propaganda ministry where he met Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the eccentric Harvard-educated foreign press chief. Hanfstaengl ingratiated himself with Hitler by regularly playing piano excerpts for him from Wagner and Beethoven. Four years later he fell out of favour, defected, and ended up first as a prisoner in Canada then as a consultant in Washington D.C., building a psychological profile of Hitler for the Roosevelt administration.
In 1933, though, he was still the faithful Nazi. His message to Matt was the same as he gave other foreign correspondents: report the news but don’t interpret it. Matt did precisely the opposite.
The changes since his last visit to Berlin were immediately noticeable. The security was tighter, the mood grimmer. Books by Proust, Gide, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, and Thomas Mann had long since disappeared from bookstores, many to be destroyed in public book-burnings. Gestapo agents could be seen checking documents at rail stations.
Everywhere there were signs of the rapid militarization of the Third Reich. The streets were full of uniformed men. Teenage boys and girls paraded in columns in the streets. Swastikas hung out permanently on many buildings. Lurid posters in shop windows denounced the Treaty of Versailles and called for “Death rather than slavery.” At a restaurant in the busy Potsdamer Platz, a uniformed Hitler Jugend boy, not even in his teens, went around collecting money for Nazi projects. At each table he would raise his arm in the Fascist salute and click his boots together. In the street and in government offices, Matt’s refusal to return the salute often attracted scowls and occasional threats even when he said, “Auslander” (foreigner).
The Star published the first of the German Series under a headline bannered across its front page: “German Citizenry War Mad, Says Halton.” The lead paragraph was characteristically portentous. “During the last month in Germany,” Matt wrote, “I have seen and studied the most fanatical, thorough-going and savage philosophy of war ever imposed on any nation . . . Germany is literally becoming a laboratory and breeding ground for war, unless I am deaf, dumb and blind.”
At this stage, in the autumn of 1933, almost no politicians and very few commentators were making that kind of sweeping judgment. Even the great American journalist Walter Lippmann praised Hitler at the time as “the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people.” Matt conceded that “in the German towns and cities through which I am wandering, everything on the surface is sunshine, energy, resurgence.” But it wouldn’t take more than 24 hours, he added, for anyone who could read or hear in Germany to see beyond the façade.
It was at a theatrically staged rally in Berlin that Matt had his first opportunity to listen to and evaluate Hitler in person. A large band thumped out triumphalist marches until the Führer walked onto the platform in the glare of a searchlight. Matt described him as “unprepossessing, even absurd” with mannered gestures and a ridiculous Charlie Chaplin moustache. But his severest scorn was levelled at the content of the speech and its harping on Germany’s treatment after World War One:
Using all the tricks of oratory with the most patent disingenuousness, the little Austrian housepainter in his ugly brown uniform described the “degradation” of Germany in searing phrases and a thundering voice that turned his hearers into maddened, moaning fanatics. And what did he say? He says what he always says . . . the words that have forged the revolution which is the most amazing phenomenon of our times. He told of Germany’s “wrongs.” His voice alternating between the zenith of high-pitched hysteria and the nadir of whispering solemnity, he told how Germany, surrounded by an iron ring of foes and fighting against an embattled world, had won tremendous victories in every sphere of war. And then been stabbed in the back. “Who stabbed us in the back?” he shrieked.
The waiting multitude, every member of which knew well what he would say, sat breathless, absolutely silent except for an occasional sound that can only be likened to a moan. The little man clenched both fists and held them before him. He contorted his face . . . He repeated, his voice now a roar: “Who stabbed us in the back? The Jews!” The crowds went berserk with fury and applause, and I know that my feeling was suddenly horror, for I was hearing a mob clamoring for “revenge.”
Der Führer (the Leader) spoke again, his voice low and passionate . . . “Why was the face of the Fatherland scarred with the iron fist of France? Why, why, why? Because of the Jews.”
“Warum? Die Juden!” I can hear those words today.
Matt later went to Berchtesgaden in the hope of seeing Hitler at his weekend retreat. Hitler didn’t show up, leaving Matt to settle in with Jean at a small country inn, talk to the villagers, and write, “I think I
In the autumn of 1933, almost no politicians and very few commentators were making that kind of sweeping judgment. Even the great American journalist Walter Lippmann praised Hitler at the time as “the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people.”
DAVID HALTON IN DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT
know that Hitler will destroy Germany." Matt admitted to being perplexed by the astonishing speed with which the mineral