My name is Charlie Acker and I have lived in Elk for the last forty-six years. My work as the manager of the Elk and Irish Beach water districts puts me and my wife Rosi, who is the secretary of the Elk District, right in the middle of the community we love. My mother moved up here in the mid-1990s and ended up writing a book about my uncle, her brother, Dana Adams Schmidt, who was a journalist sent to Germany as the Second World War loomed. In looking at today’s rise of fascism and dictatorships throughout the world, I feel that publishing her book and his story could not be more fitting as a cautionary tale for this dangerous moment, a warning about protecting democracy with everything we’ve got.
It Started with the Titanic
Margaret Adams, my grandmother, had tickets on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912 for a trip crossing from Europe to the United States. She was twenty-one and was returning to Cleveland after a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. Due to last-minute circumstances, her plans changed, and she booked her return home, fortuitously, on the next ship out. During the voyage she met her future husband, Edward Schmidt, my grandfather, who was traveling to America to start a new life. A year later they were married in Cleveland.
Their two children were Elizabeth Schmidt, born in 1913 and Dana Adams Schmidt, born in 1915. They are the author and the subject, respectively, of the book Elizabeth (who was my mother) wrote about her brother’s life as a very young journalist sent to Berlin at the beginning of the Second World War after Hitler rose to power: Letters Home 80 Years Later.
Elizabeth wrote about her early life, her brother, and their family in vivid detail, introducing Dana’s family background thus:
“When Dana was six, and I eight [in the early 1920s], we moved from Ohio to Vienna where Father had business. Soon after World War One, many wealthy and noble families were impoverished, partly by the rampant inflation that left apartments available that wouldn’t have been otherwise.
“[Our] apartment was in the center of Vienna, two or three blocks from the Opera House and it overlooked the Karlsplatz. The many political parties assembled there for demonstrations, usually on holidays. Often there was fighting and sometimes shooting. Dana and I didn’t understand the seriousness of these events and liked to watch from our apartment windows, high above the square.
“We walked to school with our governess and were told not to speak English on the street, as this would single us out as Americans who were hated in post-World War One Vienna. We soon learned German and liked to practice with each other at night after we were put to bed.
“After two years in Vienna, we returned to the United States and Cleveland for a year. Then my father’s work took us to Hamburg, Germany. Mother was happy to return to Europe and Dana and I liked it too. We went to German schools there, as in Vienna.
“Dana and I were beginning to forget English and so it was decided that we should go to English schools. Dana, after two years, was sent back to the United States to Western Reserve Academy at Hudson, Ohio, for his junior and senior years of high school. It was this educational background that gave Dana perfect command of the German language that would serve him well throughout his career.
“Due to a car accident that left my grandmother a paraplegic, our family moved to [join her in] Los Angeles. Dana attended and graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, east of Los Angeles. He had his sights set on a career in journalism.”
Waiting for Hitler’s arrival at the Turnverein [Gymnastics Club] 1941. Photo by Dana Schmidt.
Moving from Los Angeles to Elk at the Age of Eighty-Five
In 1996, my mother, Elizabeth Schmidt Crahan, picked up her life and moved from her home in Los Angeles to Elk to be near me and my family. It was a huge life adjustment, which she accomplished with grace and incredible energy. She had been trained as an architect at the University of California in 1938 and she and her husband, Kenneth Acker, my father, were both active in the 1950s Modern Architecture Movement, so in 1997 she started to build her dream home here in this beautiful, tiny village perched on the edge of the continent. Yes, at the age of eighty-five.
My friend Howard Sinclair had just started the Alder Moving Company in Fort Bragg and we hired him to help us get my mother’s belongings moved up from Los Angeles; I accompanied him on the long trek south. While packing things up from the basement of her LA home, we were amazed to discover many boxes filled with letters and news clippings from Dana’s war years in the late 1930s and early 1940s and beyond. Elizabeth described the moment like this:
“‘Do you want us to pack up those cartons of old papers in the basement?” asked one of the men loading the moving van to take me to Mendocino. The dusty cartons had been put in the basement when my mother died, and I had never examined them. On opening a few, I found a treasure—my brother’s papers.”
This tremendous find of over a thousand of Dana’s letters home initiated my mother’s decision to put together a book about her brother’s exploits and accomplishments at that remarkable historic moment.
Promises Kept
The letters were addressed to his mother, Margaret Adams Schmidt, who was the matriarch and dominant ruler of the family. “I’ll let you go abroad under one condition,” she admonished him. “You will write a letter home every week!” This he did, and all the letters were saved, to become the basis of the book, eighty years on. The letters serve as much of the narrative and are interwoven with and supported by hundreds of articles he wrote throughout the war for United Press, The Associated Press, and later The New York Times, many of which were front-page stories.
Letters Home 80 Years Later was an enormous task. My mother enlisted help from Anna Marie Stenberg, a friend from Fort Bragg who described her years working on this project with Elizabeth:
“Initially she just had a lot of boxes—of papers, articles, letters, not in any particular order. We put two big folding tables in her massive living room and it took about six months to get it all organized enough for her to start looking at it.
“She was an incredible woman. What was so amazing about Elizabeth was that, here she is in her nineties, and anything she’s reading about [in Dana’s papers], whether a trip, or an event, or something Dana was reporting on, she would go to Google and read all about it before writing anything. She had only one eye that worked, but she was meticulous in her writing, as in absolutely everything. I got to know her so well and I was really honored. It changed me to work for her.”
My brother Steve Acker also helped with scanning and layout, and the painstaking work proceeded over the ensuing years.
As my mother approached her hundredth birthday, her strength had waned and progress on the book had come to a halt. Elizabeth Schmidt Crahan died at the age of one hundred years and six months, in June 2014. Of course, the book was still unfinished.
Some years later her house in Elk was sold and I with my siblings took on finishing the book project, which involved doing a lot of editing and preparing the many illustrations and photos, dealing with thorny copyright issues, writing the epilogue and appendix, and finding a publisher. My wife Rosi and I were grateful when Canadian friends of ours who have a publishing business—Nprint Press—agreed to take the book on. When I held the first printed copy in my hands, my publisher friend told me, “Now you’re in charge of marketing it!” Something outside my area of interest, but here we are!
After attending Western Reserve College, my uncle Dana enrolled at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. In order to get to New York, he found a job on a Union Oil Company tanker, the S.S. Cathwood, working his way as a “wiper” (the most junior rate in the engine room of a ship, which consisted of cleaning the engine spaces and machinery) via the Panama Canal, from San Pedro to the East Coast.
While at Columbia he found outside jobs to supplement a fifteen-hundred-dollar prize he got from winning a Bank of America essay contest for his piece titled The World Thirty Years from Now. He also got a hundred-fifty-dollar faculty scholarship at the end of the first semester. To make ends meet, he tutored students in various subjects including German and English. One day he received a request to teach skiing to four children, a boy and three girls aged eleven to about nineteen. This was a particularly welcome job because he adored skiing, but aside from the opportunities to be on the slopes, he was eager to meet the children’s father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, editor of The New York Times. When that did happen, Dana wrote: “I was very much taken by his friendly personality.” Little could he have predicted that he eventually would be a reporter for the Times for nearly three decades.
A Fateful Decision
At the end of the second semester at Columbia, Dana was awarded a Pulitzer traveling fellowship. Accepting the fellowship meant spending a year traveling in Europe, and if he were to turn down this honor and opportunity, he would have been the first ever to do so. After much debating and consultation with faculty members as well as his parents and grandfather, he made the fateful decision to accept the fellowship, though it was a tough choice because it meant giving up on a good deal of work he had already put in to fulfill his dream of establishing his own newspaper in Las Vegas.
On August 25, 1938, Dana sailed from San Pedro on a Black Diamond freighter, Black Tern, to Antwerp and made his way to London. There, Dana went to the United Press office with a letter of introduction to Mr. Clem Randau, the news organization’s vice president. Mr. Randau suggested that Dana talk with Virgil Pinkley, Editor and General Manager of United Press London. Pinkley was glad to see a fellow Californian and they talked about San Bernardino, Pinkley’s hometown. It developed that the Berlin office was very short handed and Pinkley asked Dana, with his fluency in German, to go to Berlin immediately, which he did. Here is a letter Dana wrote to his mother on September 9, 1938:
“Here I was immediately set to learning the intricacies of relaying messages from all central European capitals to London and Amsterdam, running the teletype, translating articles, and reading the file of dispatches for the past two weeks (to get me properly informed and initiate me into the language of ‘cablese’)…There is a good chance that as soon as I have mastered the office routine here I will be sent to some point of interest in the southeast. But I am not yet officially an employee of United Press, although Pinkley thought he could make me one in about two weeks.”
The young journalist (he was twenty-three years old) was highly enthusiastic about his first job in Europe and relished the competition between the two preeminent news organizations, United Press and The Associated Press. He wrote in a letter home:
“There is probably no spot on earth more important right now than Berlin. And U.P. probably is getting the best information of any press service in the world, been beating A.P. all along. There is no time for anything but United Press for me now…Of course there is tremendous tension—everyone talking politics, by contrast with England—and convinced Hitler will have his way. In Berlin, Hitler youth swarm everywhere.”
“The center of town is all torn up for Hitler’s beautification plans (temporarily halted because most workers are shipped to the western front to work on new fortifications).
“You can tell our job-hunting friends that there is no such thing in Deutschland now. In every department there is acute labor shortage. The papers carry pages of ‘Men Wanted’ ads to keep up with the Reich’s ambitious construction plans. The old ‘anti-female workers’ [policy] has been forgotten in the scramble, too.
“Incidentally these want ads are about the only thing worth reading in the press here, unless you are bent on finding out what the Propaganda Ministry has to say. There are lots of very amusing things about America; of course they’re no more one-sided and naïve than the stuff Americans print about Germany…”
Dana’s eyes were opening to most Germans’ full acceptance and cult-like deification of Hitler and embrace of the Nazi agenda:
“Last night’s speech [by Hitler] was an obvious demonstration of the Germans’ spontaneous, ‘Begeisterung’ [wild enthusiasm] for the regime, but rather shocking to anyone who believes in individual judgment and restraint. ‘Führer befehle, wir folgen. Treue um Treue.’ [Jump in the river and we’ll jump too.]
“In my first assignment I became the ‘Jewish specialist.’ I fell heir to this task presumably because I was the ‘junior’ member of the staff, and because no one else was eager to come closely to grips with this depressing and frightening subject. One bleak day in the winter of 1938-1939, I went to the Juedische Gemeinderate [Jewish Community Council.] Here I discovered a number of gentle, intelligent, delightful, but miserable people who had been obliged by the Nazis to organize their own people to most effectively carry out the German Government’s orders. As an American, and neutral, I was able to maintain these contacts with impunity.”
From these people Dana heard of their attempts to emigrate almost anywhere—North or South America, Africa, Australia, Western Europe, and finally Palestine—to escape the increasingly terrifying persecution and the transports forcing Jews out of Germany.
Dana had scarcely been in Berlin for a month when the United Press asked him to accompany the German army as it occupied the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia. On October 1,1938, Dana set out for Dresden to join journalists from other papers who were also embedded to observe the occupation during a five-day junket.
The Sudetenland annexation was Hitler’s first invasion of foreign territory, and foreshadowed his much more ambitious aggressions to come. In a news article about a year later, Dana wrote:
“The Chancellery and the Foreign Office met at the Adlon Hotel on March 15,1939: At the all-night meeting it became clear that the occupation of Sudetenland was just a step for Hitler in taking over all of Czechoslovakia, indeed his army was already in Prague.”
And in a letter home, he wrote:
“…Of course, the forceful methods Hitler used to gain his end are, to say the least, morally questionable. The German press at the same time has been waging the most fiendish atrocity campaign against the Czechs you can imagine…”
Another letter home indicates that he is already awake to and repulsed by Hitler and Germany’s move toward fascism, although the full enormity of the atrocities that had already started against the Jews remained a secret carefully guarded by the authorities.
“As far as this week’s work is concerned, I can only think of Jews, of course I mean the expulsion of Poles from Germany, most of whom are Jews. Two of our men have been arrested during the past two days, Hottelet and Kidd, both at the border covering the expulsions. Surely there is no Pole, let alone a Jew, who will not be a mortal enemy of this country from now on. And of course, the effect on the newspapermen arrested is not likely to be endearing, although it does provide them with a good story. Hottelet seems to have fallen into the hands of a singularly arrogant, stupid, and inhuman bunch of officials.
“The value of human life has fallen pretty low when it is possible to…root out a whole segment of the population of a country and push them across the border. I begin to appreciate what the Bill of Rights means. People talk about our ‘liberty,’ as ‘liberty to starve’ which is regrettably true; but it also means liberty to live and go where you please, without reporting to the authorities every time you turn around, without the danger of being kicked around like a sack of potatoes.”
Kristallnacht
When Dana returned to Berlin from the Sudetenland, he was tired of staying in hotels and thought he might find a German family with whom he could live and further improve his German. One of Dana’s contacts had heard that an English economist whom he knew, Robert Crozier Long, had died, leaving his “very blue-blooded Russian wife and Americanized daughter, a divorcée, without overly much cash.” Mr. Long had been correspondent and expert for The New York Times and London’s The Economist. Dana talked to Mrs. Long and found that she would be pleased to spare a few rooms in her spacious apartment.
“The apartment is filled with the best of books. All the German papers come daily, also the London Times and other English papers, and The New York Times once a week.”
Shortly after he settled into the Longs’ apartment, the unprecedented violence of Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night” or “the Night of the Broken Glass”) generated international outrage. Nazi mobs throughout Germany and the parts of Austria and Czechoslovakia that had been recently occupied by German troops, shattered the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, plundered their wares, burned synagogues, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, and killed untold numbers of Jews. In 1974, in Dana’s book Armageddon in the Middle East, he described what he had observed the morning after the devastating brutality:
“I walked down Kurfuerstendamm, the great main artery of West Berlin, one morning [November 10, 1938] just after the storm troopers had, under cover of darkness, smashed the windows of hundreds of Jewish shops, systematically, from one end of the city to the other—but with a special fury in the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm. The windows of Jewish shops were broken, their doors and pavements smeared with such inscriptions in paint or tar as, ‘Out with the Jews,’ ‘Jewish swine,’ ‘Germans don’t buy from Jews.’ The Nazis were lashing themselves into a racist trance, during which they would commit one of the most incredible crimes in history—the murder of six million Jews. I was no longer in Germany when this crime was being committed, but I saw how it started.”
War Begins
World War Two officially began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany brought Great Britain and France into the war. Poland surrendered in less than a month. Dana, at the UP office in Berlin, filed a story that began, “The City of Warsaw capitulated unconditionally today, the Nazi high command said, on the twentieth day of bombardment, fire, and starvation.” One hundred thousand Polish fighters surrendered to the Germans, said the article.
During the crisis Dana practically lived at the Berlin United Press office. He wrote in a letter that he and the UP staff were to “bring a change of clothes and a toothbrush in a bag so we can go to a nearby hotel for a few hours’ sleep if necessary.”
Reporters were not allowed to enter Poland at this time. Dana had been told by a “very special source,” that the Jews in Poland were being forced to wear yellow armbands and were being shot by the Nazis. In March 1940, still based in Berlin, Dana wrote in a letter home,
“You know my political slant and how I feel about the war. Tragic as its continuance is, it will be even more tragic if the Nazis win it. I try to keep the corrupt Nazis and [the] Germans separate, difficult as it is, when all that is non-Nazi is necessarily mute. And then there are the numerous unhappy souls who hate the regime’s cruelties and perversions of patriotism, of religion, art, literature, not to mention journalism and all the rest of it, but who nevertheless feel they must support their country.”
Soon, after much trouble obtaining an exit visa from Germany, Dana flew to the UP bureau in Stockholm for a three-week stint “to help out the staff, which is groaning from overwork and under-sleeping.” From there he reported on the Germans’ simultaneous invasions of Denmark and Norway, which commenced on April 9, 1940.
On May 10, Germany launched its invasion of France, which included attacks on Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands and, at the end of May, forced 250,000 British and French combatants to evacuate the Continent from the beaches of Dunkirk.
France surrendered on June 22, and six weeks later Dana and several other correspondents were hosted by the German air force on a flight up the English channel. In his UP article about the trip, he described the scene below.
“We circled low over La Panne and over Dunkerque, where the wreckage of a hundred or more British freighters, destroyers and other small craft jutted out of the water…ghostly reminders of the British retreat. Thousands of automobiles and tanks of the defeated British Expeditionary Force still choked the roads around Dunkerque and were strewn all along the beach there.”
In December, 1940, United Press transferred Dana to Istanbul, “to replace our previous correspondent, who was asked to leave as a result of some misunderstandings with the Turkish press authorities.” He was finished with Berlin and from his base in Turkey and for the next three years covered some of the most momentous events during the European war. He was assigned to General Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers and covered invasions of Sicily, Salerno, Corsica, and Southern France. He reported from North Africa, the Balkans, and in the Middle East. While in Italy, he filed eye-witness reports about the huge, decisive battle between the German and American armies for the strategic Monte Cassino Abbey.
After six years with United Press, covering some of the most tumultuous events of the Twentieth Century, Dana left the wire service to take a job with The New York Times. On April 27, 1945, Dana wrote in a letter that he was being reassigned from The New York Times’ office in Paris to its London bureau. “The war is evolving fast and there is no telling what that may lead to.”
He was right about the war “evolving fast.” Two weeks earlier, U.S. President Roosevelt had died and been replaced by the vice president, Harry Truman. On April 21 the Soviet army had occupied Berlin. On April 28 Mussolini was executed by Italian patriots. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, having the day before appointed Admiral Karl Donitz to succeed him. Donitz now proclaimed, “The war against the Western allies has become meaningless.” Four days after Hitler’s death Germany surrendered to the Allies.
After the war, while covering the Nuremberg Trials, Dana again came face-to-face with the Nazi mentality that had led to the deaths of at least sixty million people worldwide (according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans), including six million Jews during the Holocaust. His writing about Nazi atrocities was expressed in his articles about the various trials. Verdicts and sentences were pronounced on Hermann Goering and his twenty-one co-defendants by the International Military Tribunal. The Tribunal declared certain groups of the Nazi regime—the Leadership Corps, the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo—to be criminal. The basic verdict against their conspiracy of aggressive warfare was deemed the “supreme crime.”
The Aftermath
Dana wrote about the situation in Berlin after the end of the war, too, noting the jarring contrasts in living there:
“Most of Berlin was nothing but rubble. [A] half-million apartments have been destroyed, and less than three million of the city’s original population of over four million still live in the city. The city is divided into four sectors and administered by the occupying powers, the US, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union.
“The desperate situation of murder, rape, robbery, and starvation is contrasted by an elite segment of the population who live a high society lifestyle of fine foods, high-fashion balls, and live jazz music.”
After the war, he continued to work for The New York Times until 1972, for which he covered important stories in his deeply researched, beautifully written style. Over the years Dana was based in the Middle East, but was assigned to hot spots around the globe: Paris, Frankfurt, Athens, Beirut, Jerusalem, Cairo, Vienna, Prague, London, and Israel. He wrote four books: Anatomy of a Satellite (1952), Journey Among Brave Men (1964), Yemen: The Unknown War (1968), and Armageddon in the Middle East (1974).
Dana Schmidt died on August 25, 1994, so of course didn’t know his sister and family were to take on this labor of love, this epic volume about his life and contributions to journalism during one of the world’s most consequential historical episodes, a volume which issued from the unlikeliest locale, our exquisite, peaceful hamlet perched above the Pacific Ocean: Elk, California.
Letters from Home 80 Years Later is available at Gallery Bookshop, 319 Kasten Street, Mendocino, Ca 95460, 707.937.2665 and online at gallerybookshop.com. Look for information about a special event that is being planned for a presentation of the book by Charlie Acker, the author’s son.
