The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 61 a German, presumably a Nazi in mufti, livid with rage threw an empty wine bottle at Earle. “This sudden, vicious, unprovoked attack irritated me considerably,” Earle, a rugged 220-pounder told the press. “So I smashed him in the face, knocking him down, causing his face to bleed.” Shades of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the 1942 hit “Casablanca.” Earle would report that from King Boris on down, Bulgarians regretted having war with the U.S. forced upon them. Opéra bouffe? “The United States should pay no attention to any of these declarations … against us by puppet governments,” FDR wrote to Secretary Hull. Reciprocal U.S. declarations of war did not come until June 5, 1942. b On Sunday, Dec. 14, Chargé Morris, First Secretary Kennan and others arrived, luggage in hand, fromU.S. Embassy Berlin at Potsdamer Station to board a special train for the spa town of Bad Nauheim. The party of 130—men, women and children, as well as several journalists—would remain in the Jeschke’s Grand Hotel for months under the Gestapo’s watchful eyes. Isolation, boredom and meager diets took a toll. “Particularly disillusioning were the endless complaints about food which I was compelled to receive,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs. One embassy staff member, Herbert John Burgman, an American-born but locally engaged clerk, failed to appear at the station. He subsequently became an anti-American propagandist/ broadcaster for the Nazi regime. In 1949 a U.S. court convicted Burgman of treason, a dubious distinction for a one-time State Department employee. Invidious comparisons were often made between the spartan conditions at Bad Nauheim and the treatment Thomsen and the German diplomats received while interned at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. American diplomats in Italy experienced a more civilized confinement. Allowed to stay in Rome, each American was shad- owed by so-called “guardians” in plain clothes and permitted considerable freedom as long as they followed what Second Sec- retary Elbridge Durbrow described as the “rules of internment”: no social contact, movies, restaurants, golf or tennis; plenty of walking and sightseeing. Minister Earle and staff escaped internment in Bulgaria, safely arriving in Istanbul in late December. Hungarians also treated Minister Pell well. After closing the U.S. mission in Hungary, the Pells occupied a suite in the Ritz, vacated temporarily by Pell and his wife when von Ribbentrop descended on Budapest. Following a friendly send-off, Pell’s party reached neutral Portugal in January 1942 after promising not to leave the continent until such time as Hungarian diplomats arrived there from the U.S. Last to leave were the American diplomat refugees camped at Bad Nauheim. Traveling through Germany, Occupied France, Vichy France and Spain, they did not reach Lisbon until May 16. Kennan confessed in his memoirs that after months on the receiv- ing end of food complaints, as the only American allowed to leave the train at the Portuguese border, he took “final revenge upon In a single day, a Pacific war became a global war with cascading consequences for grand strategy and statecraft. The German chargé d’affaires, Herr Hans Thomsen, and his wife, Frau Hans Thomsen, depart the German embassy in Washington, D.C., for a White House diplomatic reception on Dec. 14, 1939, soon after war was waged in Europe. U.S.LIBRARYOFCONGRESS