[The following is in relation to the American correspondent William Shirer attempting to flee Vienna, Austria, with his wife (who was recovering from a recent corrective surgery following a caesarian section that almost killed her during the birth of their first daughter). They were attempting to flee to Switzerland in the immediate wake of the German annexation of Austria.]
On June 10, the Shirers packed up their Vienna apartment under the watchful eye of the Gestapo, who went through Shirer’s belongings looking for anything he should not be allowed to take to Geneva. Tess [Bill’s wife] was weak and in poor condition from her recent operation. At the airport, more Gestapo went through all the belongings again, as well as wallets and pockets, looking for currency violations. In his diary, Shirer said a “Nazi spy” he identified as “X” greeted him at the offices of a shipping company and that for a moment Shirer feared he was about to be arrested.
In the airport terminal, Shirer helped a very weak Tess to a bench, where she lay down while a nurse held the baby. Another Gestapo officer demanded that she sit up so she could answer his questions. “I tried to hold her up,” Shirer wrote in his diary.
Then a police official led me away… In a little room two police officials went through my pocketbook and my pockets. Everything was in order. They led me into a side room. “Wait here,” they said. I said I wanted to go back to help with the baggage inspection, that my wife was in a critical state; but they shut the door. I heard the lock turn. I was locked in. Five, then, fifteen minutes. Pacing the floor. Time for the airplane to leave. Past time. Then I heard Tess shout: “Bill, they’re taking me away to strip me!” I had spoken with the Gestapo chief about that, explained that she was heavily bandaged, the danger of infection… I pounded on the door. No result.
Through the window I could hear and see the Swiss racing the two motors of their Douglas plane, impatient to get away. After a half-hour I was led out to a corridor connecting the waiting room with the airfield. I tried to get into the waiting room, but the door was locked. Finally Tess came, the nurse supporting her with one arm and holding the baby in the other.
”Hurry, there,” snapped an official. “You’ve kept the plane waiting a half hour.” I held my tongue and grabbed Tess.
She was gritting her teeth, as angry as I’ve ever seen her. “They stripped me,” she kept saying… We hurried across the runway to the plane. I wondered what could happen in the next seconds before we were in the plane and safe. Maybe X would come running out and demand my arrest. Then we were in the plane and it was racing across the field.
The airplane rose sharply to clear the mountains and was lost in storm clouds. Airsick passengers heaved into bags. “Then there was Zurich down there, Switzerland, sanity, civilization again.”
Shirer summed up the horrors of the trip out of Vienna in a letter written to Valeries Fuhrmann, who owned the apartment the Shirers rented in Vienna. “We had a very bad time at the airport the day we left. They locked me in a the waiting room while they took all the clothes off my wife and searched her… Even though we had a very stormy flight in the fog most of the way to Zurich, we felt very good at setting our feet on free soil again.”
Source:
Wick, Steve. “Clearing the Mountains.” The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 124-25. Print.
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