GERMANY: Special Jokes Dept.

Not many Germans noticed a two-line announcement in their papers one day last week that the Berlin radio station, which usually starts broadcasting at 6 a. m., would not be on the air until 12:30 that day. No reason was given, and under Nazi rule the people have learned not to ask or reason why, but the six-and-a-half-hour official radio shutdown—presumably for repairs—was seized upon by Germany’s Freedom Station, a portable radio transmitter run by daring anti-Nazis who at the risk of their lives keep one jump ahead of the Gestapo or secret police. With supreme audacity the Freedom Station opened up in the early morning, broadcast as a straight news bulletin that the Allies had just agreed to an 18-day armistice, that the “Chamberlain-Churchill Cabinet” had resigned, that King George VI had abdicated and that the Duke of Windsor was back on the throne of Great Britain.

Not many Berliners heard the relatively feeble Freedom Station, but in a delirium of joy they promptly spread the news by word of mouth. Vegetable and flower sellers, arriving to open their stalls in Berlin markets, promptly pooled their pfennigs to buy cheap brandy and new cider. French Premier Edouard Daladier was supposed by the jubilant Germans to have secured the “Armistice,” and in Berlin’s huckster-jammed Wittenberg Platz a tipsy citizen, balancing on a chair with glass in hand, bellowed a toast: “Daladier is smarter than we thought.”

Taxi and bus drivers were soon shouting the “news,” Berlin postmen relayed it to housewives tearful with delight. Berlin telephone girls rang up subscribers with the glad news that “Der Krieg ist aus!” (“The war is over!”)

In Berlin’s swank West End shopping section, the proprietress of a bakery whose husband is at the front celebrated by giving away all her bread and cake—not only free but without presentation of ration cards. Two hundred fellow office workers were treated to free beer by a Berliner who has two sons and a son-in-law at the front—the beer cost him a month’s salary. Meanwhile at least one group of the Hitler Youth, after holding a special meeting to celebrate the Führer’s latest triumph, rang doorbells and spread the news.

Ponderous is German bureaucracy. State officials were soon being called on the phone by hundreds of people. Apparently no one woke up to the fact that the Reich’s war-will was being rapidly undermined. Finally, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop rushed to the Führer. It was not until 12:30, the hour when the Berlin station had been scheduled to goback on the air anyhow, that an official denial was broadcast from the Reich Chancellery itself—that is, from Adolf Hitler’s own headquarters, which never before had stooped to deny a public rumor.

“The report was a shameless, frivolous trick of the British Ministry of lies and the British Secret Service,” cracked the Chancellery’s angry denial, which all Berlin afternoon papers repeated under big black headlines. “It was intended only to plunge the peoples of the world into anxiety, as everyone will immediately realize, so that the campaign of lies of the English warmongers would find it easier to accomplish its dark plans.” This plunged Germans into visible gloom, some weeping openly in the streets of Berlin. Thus in no uncertain fashion did the anti-Nazi Freedom Station show Adolf Hitler how jumpy were the nerves of his people, how desperate their longing for peace in spite of their great victory over Poland. The phenomenon of joy and grief also provided a fresh explanation for the Nazis’ strange reluctance, if German arms are as formidable as they say they are, to get on with the war.

In London the Berlin Chancellery’s charge that British agents launched the armistice hoax was called “fantastic” at the British Foreign Office, where an official spokesman cracked: “The allegations should be dealt with in the special jokes department.” Nevertheless, it was a pretty compliment, and an eminently justifiable one, to the potent British espionage-propaganda system which, by the tearful post-war testimony of Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, did more to undermine German resistance in 1918 than all the Allies’ guns.