‘Murderers Don’t Want Peace’ — My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline
For this week’s Hot Type column in Byline, I turn to a Berlin diary published in 1941 to warn that history shows you can’t appease, capitulate, or treaty your way out of war with fascists
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“At our stage of the fight, we don’t care why the Italians brought Mussolini to power. We care how they came to string him up on a meat hook.”—Dr. Michael MacKay, geopolitical analyst, for Hot Type
Thank to a tip from Mo’, I’ve been devouring William Shire’s Berlin Diary, and use it as the foundation for this week’s Hot Type column in Byline Supplement:
I will have a full report for the Bette community on the 1941 book of firsthand reporting of the lead up to World War II, but in the meantime please read today’s column.
As always, thank you to everyone who supports the work we do at Byline Supplement — it means a great deal to those of us on the frontline of independent investigative reporting. If you are not yet a member of Byline, and you would like to read any of my paywalled columns in full, please reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail.
Below, is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Type column:
Hot Type: Murderers Don’t Want Peace
Columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda turns to a Berlin diary published in 1941 to warn that history shows you can’t appease, capitulate, or treaty your way out of war with fascists
American foreign correspondent William Shirer, in his 1941 Berlin Diary, documents at first hand the geopolitical events that led to World War II from his vantage point reporting in the 1930s from all key European cities. He calls Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini the ‘Two Caesars’, and describes “Musso” as a smirking vulgarian “having grown fat”. He notes Hitler’s “ugly black patches under his eyes” and refers to him as a “Tepichfresser”, or carpet eater. Shirer learned that when Hitler went on his rampages, he’d fling himself to the floor and chew the edges of the carpet, which earned him the nickname.
He also describes Hitler’s “very curious walk”.
“In the first place, it was very ladylike. Dainty little steps. In the second place, every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so.”
The date of this post was September 22, 1938, and Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the German Fürher were meeting to discuss the withdrawal of the Czechs from Sudetenland — an area of Czechoslovakia with a large German population — and “an international guarantee for what is left of Czechoslovakia”.
‘An Unmitigated Defeat’
In speech after speech, Hitler lobbed the word ‘peace’ in between his gnashing teeth, and after final negotiations, where an agreement was made allowing Sudetenland to be annexed to Germany — Chamberlain who was trying to avoid war, would boast from a balcony of ‘peace with honour’ and ‘peace for our time’.
Winston Churchill was in the minority, calling the appeasement “a total, unmitigated defeat”. Another Cabinet member, in his resignation speech, said the Prime Minister believed in “addressing Herr Hitler with the language of sweet reasonableness” when he required the language of a “mailed fist”.
Throughout Shirer’s diary posts and dispatches from the 1930s, he is continually hopeful that France, Britain, America, Austria, the Poles, and the Czechs will pull themselves together and fight Nazi aggression. He is increasingly glum after each missed opportunity to stop the Germans before they were fully re-militarized, and there were many missed opportunities.
“Phoned Ed Murrow in London. He as depressed as I am,” writes Shirer on September 30, 1938. Both Shirer and Murrow pioneered war reporting using live radio dispatches, and their gloominess was accelerating as they could see Hitler outmaneuvering Western leaders, as both men believed Poland lay next on the horizon.
They weren’t wrong.
As Shirer’s reporting continues — the Nazis’ brutality and looting escalating — it’s clear that there is no appeasing, capitulating, or negotiating a ‘peace’ treaty with murderers.
All this is fresh in my mind as I watch the Two Caesars of today — Putin and Trump — stage more hokum. Trump is making play dates with Putin under the guise of ‘peace’ and ‘ceasefires’. That they are scheduled to meet in Alaska reminds me of the Polish aphorism that just “when you find yourself at the very bottom, you hear knocking from below”.
And like Mussolini and Hitler, they’re weirdos. Freezer face Putin and bizarre-shaded Trump, mugging for the cameras while setting out to destroy the democratic world.
Putin is a murderer with no interest in peace, carrying out active measures against every remaining democracy.
If we look to history, we find Hitler had already proven himself to be a murderer, as the Night of the Long Knives evidenced. On June 30, 1934, executions began of political enemies, including members of his own party, to consolidate ultimate power. How any leader of a democratic nation could witness that purge in conjunction with the Nazis overt threats to Jewish people and find room for reasonableness is nothing short of madness.
‘The Road to War’
And eight decades later, we find ourselves on a similar precipice. As Putin’s regime wages war in Ukraine, they are now advertising an online catalog of stolen Ukrainian children. While an arrest warrant was issued for Putin, charged by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and child trafficking, Trump is making play dates with him under the guise of ‘peace’ and ‘ceasefires’.
All the while, the road to war is paved with broken treaties and words of peace, when all that these brutal men understand is force.
Shirer sums up living in Berlin in the mid-1930s as being under the “shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war”. He writes that it “has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears”.
A fair description of life under the modern Two Caesars.
As I turn the pages of Berlin Diary, I can hear Shirer calling out from the grave: “Do something!'“
As geopolitical analyst Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Supplement, the sun is already setting on any hopes for pre-emptive strikes to stop Putin’s aggression and Trump’s enabling of that aggression.
“I’ve read Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and I appreciated the insights of an American journalist who was able to remain in Germany after British journalists all left in 1939,” said MacKay, who has documented the war in Ukraine daily on Twitter/X since 2014. “But I’m afraid the message from history is ‘it’s too late for any of this’. We’re in a war, and we have to engage in it until victory.
“At our stage of the fight, we don’t care why the Italians brought Mussolini to power. We care how they came to string him up on a meat hook.”
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The above excerpt of my weekly Hot Type column was originally published Saturday, August 9, 2025, in Byline Supplement.
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Below, Neville Chamberlain, after appeasing Hitler. How’d that work out…
This is the story I have been watching for months. Trump seemed to adopt the pattern laid out in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in every detail—and it is a long book. Having studied Russia and Poland all my adult life, and with an additional focus on WWII, our destination and what it meant was clear.