Hot Type: Murderers Don't Want Peace

Columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to a Berlin diary published in 1941 to warn that history shows you can’t appease, capitulate, or treaty your way out of war with fascists

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Photomontage: The Presidential Office of Ukraine/Alamy

American foreign correspondent William Shirer, in his 1941 Berlin Diary, documents at first hand the geopolitical events that led to World War II from his vantage point reporting in the 1930s from all key European cities. He calls Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini the ‘Two Caesars’, and describes “Musso” as a smirking vulgarian “having grown fat”. He notes Hitler’s “ugly black patches under his eyes” and refers to him as a “Tepichfresser”, or carpet eater. Shirer learned that when Hitler went on his rampages, he’d fling himself to the floor and chew the edges of the carpet, which earned him the nickname.

He also describes Hitler’s “very curious walk”.

“In the first place, it was very ladylike. Dainty little steps. In the second place, every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so.”

The date of this post was September 22, 1938, and Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the German Fürher were meeting to discuss the withdrawal of the Czechs from Sudetenland — an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German population — and “an international guarantee for what is left of Czechoslovakia”.

‘An Unmitigated Defeat’

In speech after speech, Hitler lobbed the word ‘peace’ in between his gnashing teeth, and after final negotiations, where an agreement was made allowing Sudetenland to be annexed to Germany — Chamberlain who was trying to avoid war, would boast from a balcony of ‘peace with honour’ and ‘peace for our time’.

Winston Churchill was in the minority, calling the appeasement “a total, unmitigated defeat”. Another Cabinet member, in his resignation speech, said the Prime Minister believed in “addressing Herr Hitler with the language of sweet reasonableness” when he required the language of a “mailed fist”.

Throughout Shirer’s diary posts and dispatches from the 1930s, he is continually hopeful that France, Britain, America, Austria, the Poles, and the Czechs will pull themselves together and fight Nazi aggression. He is increasingly glum after each missed opportunity to stop the Germans before they were fully re-militarized, and there were many missed opportunities.

“Phoned Ed Murrow in London. He as depressed as I am,” writes Shirer on September 30, 1938. Both Shirer and Murrow pioneered war reporting using live radio dispatches, and their gloominess was accelerating as they could see Hitler outmaneuvering Western leaders, as both men believed Poland lay next on the horizon.

They weren’t wrong.