Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

by Julia Boyd

The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles treaty and other potent ingredients.’31 In other words, exactly the conditions required by the National Socialists to convince voters that Hitler’s own brew of dictatorship, hatred and perverted patriotism offered their only hope of national renewal.

Later that day violence erupted on to the streets. Deeply shocked, Rumbold described to his son how groups of young Nazis had smashed the windows of Jewish shops, among them the famous department stores Wertheim and Tietz.

As their books were committed to the flames, the guilty authors were named: ‘Sigmund Freud – for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures’, Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) – ‘for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic idea’; the list seemed endless. In addition to Jewish writers, figures such as Thomas Mann (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929), Helen Keller

and Jack London were among the damned. Papers and books ransacked from Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science were pitched on to the fire with particular fervour. Then came the climax when at midnight Goebbels mounted a rostrum and declared, ‘Jewish intellectualism is dead … the German soul can again express itself.’ As bonfires burned all over the country, Birchall finished his piece for the New York Times: ‘There is going up in smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘A lot of the old German liberalism – if any was left – was burned tonight.’29 Hitler had been in power exactly one hundred days.

The German press was quick to note the unsegregated presence of thirty African-American ministers at the Congress. One of them, Michael King Sr, was so inspired by his visit to Germany – and in particular by the reforming example of Martin Luther – that on returning to Atlanta he changed both his and his son’s name to Martin Luther King.

Nearly every German we have met excuses the rape of Czechoslovakia because its existence was a menace to Germany who must have ‘security’. They are so living in the grievances of the past twenty years that they ignore the sufferings of other nations. You simply can’t get them to look at things from a European viewpoint. They are really suffering from a resentment and inferiority complex. As one hardminded German said to me ‘my nation is at the moment mentally ill, they can’t see straight’.

The truth is that many foreign visitors were similarly bewildered. Newspaper attacks on the Nazis from the earliest months of the regime, anecdotal evidence of street violence and repression, the opening of Dachau just a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor and, above all, the book burning, in May 1933, should have alerted all would-be travellers to the reality of the new Germany.