donderdag 1 maart 2012

William L. Shirer -- 2 maart 1938

Vienna, March 2
Tess and the baby doing well considering everything. I spending most of my time at the hospital. Tension growing here daily. Hear Schuschnigg is now negotiating with the workers, whom his colleague Dollfuss shot down so cold-bloodedly just four years ago. They are asking for little, but the negotiations with these stupid reactionaries go slowly. Still the workers prefer what they can undoubtedly get now from Schuschnigg to the Nazis. I feel a little empty, being here on the scene but doing no actual reporting. Curious radio doesn't want a first-hand report. But New York hasn't asked for anything, being chiefly concerned with an educational broadcast I must do from Ljubljana in a few days — a chorus of schoolchildren or something! Goring made a nice gentle speech yesterday, according to the local press. He said : "We [the German air force] will be the terror of our enemies. . . . I want in this army iron men with a will to action. . . . When the Führer in his Reichstag speech said that we would no longer tolerate the suppression of ten million German comrades beyond our borders, then you know as soldiers of the air force that, if it is to be, you must back these words of the Führer to the limit. We are burning to prove our invincibility."


* Berlin Diary. The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941
* William L. Shirer (1904-1993)

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