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

by Julia Boyd

Such anti-French bias is a recurring theme in accounts of travel in Germany between the wars, and one repeated by commentators of every class and political hue.

Shared anti french sentiment between americans, brits and gernans

‘Doughboys were quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been strolling down Main Street in Des Moines,’ he wrote.

US troops popular wit public in postwar Germanu

After the terms of the Versailles treaty became public in May 1919, Franck noticed even more vitriolic posters. He kept one bearing a typical message: END OF MILITARISM BEGINNING OF JEW RULE! Fifty months have we stood at the Front honourably and undefeated. Now we have returned home, ignominiously betrayed by deserters and mutineers! We hoped to find a free Germany, with a government of the people. What is offered us? A GOVERNMENT OF JEWS! The participation of the Jews in the fights at the Front was almost nil. Their participation in the new government has already reached 80 percent! Yet the percentage of Jewish population in Germany is only 1½ percent! OPEN YOUR EYES! COMRADES, YOU KNOW THE BLOODSUCKERS! COMRADES, WHO WENT TO THE FRONT AS VOLUNTEERS? WHO SAT OUT THERE MOSTLY IN THE MUD? WE! WHO CROWDED INTO THE WAR SERVICES AT HOME? THE JEWS! WHO SAT COMFORTABLY AND SAFELY IN CANTEENS AND OFFICES? WHICH PHYSICIANS PROTECTED THEIR FELLOW-RACE FROM THE TRENCHES? WHO ALWAYS REPORTED US ‘FIT FOR DUTY’ THOUGH WE WERE ALL SHOT TO PIECES? Comrades, we wish as a free people to decide for ourselves and be ruled by men of OUR race! The National Assembly must bring into the government only men of OUR blood and OUR opinions! Our motto must be GERMANY FOR GERMANS! DOWN WITH JEWRY!

Virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism in early 1920s Germany

Because the Allies wanted to keep an arm lock on the Germans until the peace treaty was signed, the blockade imposed since 1914 remained rigorously in place – a cause of deep bitterness throughout the country. When Franck first crossed the border, he had witnessed the skill with which Dutch officials ferreted out foodstuffs no matter how meagre or ingeniously hidden. One woman even had her modest lunch confiscated. As she sat hunched in a corner of the compartment, silently weeping, two men, once safely into Germany, retrieved their respective contraband. The first drew a sausage out of a trouser leg while the second produced a tiny package of paper-soap leaves each no bigger than a visiting card. ‘He pressed three or four of them upon his companion. The latter protested that he could not accept so serious a sacrifice. The other insisted, and the grateful recipient bowed low and raised his hat twice in thanks before he stowed the precious leaves away among his private papers.’27

Hunger biggest problem in Germany as allied blockade remained in place.

Such was the general sensitivity to food, or rather lack of it, that meals could no longer be enacted on the stage as ‘the pretence of one was sure to turn the most uproarious comedy into a tear-provoking melodrama’.

Discussion of food in art was taboo.

But many people found the most degrading demand of all (in the event it was never met) the provision that the Kaiser and 1,000 prominent figures should be handed over to the Allies and tried for war crimes.

Most upsetting aspect of T of V was planned arrest of Kaiser,etc for war crimes.

The conversations Franck and Fry held with their fellow rail passengers that summer were especially revealing. One old lady explained to Joan that, although she had felt no hatred during the war, the peace treaty aroused intense resentment: ‘To be treated as outcasts, as individuals with whom no relations are possible, is even worse than hunger or constant anxiety.’ Another woman stated how much in normal times she would have enjoyed speaking English, ‘but now a broken people does not want to hear it’.3 The women, Franck noted, were the most vitriolic against the Treaty in general while the old men minded most about the loss of colonies: ‘We would rather pay any amount of indemnity than lose territory … The Allies are trying to Balkanise us … they want to vernichten us, to destroy us completely … we believed in Wilson and he betrayed us.’ More ominously, others expressed their dread of the future: ‘Now we must drill hatred into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when the time is ripe….’4

Wide tract of society felt betrayed by Wilson and already wanted future revenge. More hatred in peace than in war.

It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and brutal warriors in modern history.10

Hard to assimilate the popular stereotype of Germans during WW1 with the experiences of post-war visitors.

Lord D’Abernon, Britain’s first post-war ambassador to Germany, had been en poste since October 1920. Over six foot tall and Olympian in manner, he looked every inch an ambassador. His job may have been difficult but it was a good deal easier than that of the French ambassador, Pierre de Margerie, who, along with his fellow countrymen, faced social ostracism after the occupation of the Ruhr.

Invasion of Ruhr increased anti-French sentiment.

She was not a sentimental woman and for the most part remained unmoved by German pleadings of hardship. Joan Fry failed to impress her. ‘Miss Fry is all self-sacrifice and burning enthusiasm,’ she noted, ‘but her compassion seems to be reserved almost exclusively for Germans. She shys [sic] away from any allusion to suffering and privations in Great Britain.’18 Nor did Lady D’Abernon leave Violet Bonham Carter in any doubt as to the true state of affairs in Germany: ‘Believe me,’ she told her, ‘the Germans are not suffering as they say. There is no great poverty here. 95% are living in plenty, 5% are starving.’ After visiting Berlin’s poorest district herself, Violet tended to agree, having seen ‘nothing one could compare to our slums.

British socialite observes that poverty was exaggerated and life was good in Germany.

Princess Margaret’s correspondence makes plain just how short of cash they were: ‘Many, many thanks for the letters, also for the hairnets,’ she wrote to Lady Corkran* in 1924. ‘£2 does indeed seem too little for the tables so perhaps we had better wait for a better opportunity. Would you send me a cheque for the white one? I am so grateful to you for getting as much as you did for it although more would have been welcome.’

Former Aristocracy and social elites struggling in 1920s.

When Stewart Roddie visited Friedrichshof, he had been outraged ‘to find the place over-run by black troops’. Indeed, France’s deployment of colonial soldiers provoked a chorus of criticism – and not just from Germans. In those unashamedly racist times, many British observers saw it as a conscious attempt by France to heap yet further humiliation on Germany.

Black colonial troops occupying Ruhr seen by Brits and Americans as France unacceptably seeking to humiliate Germany.

Two days later back came the response. According to the British source, there was nothing to be alarmed about. The National Socialist Party was just a fire in the straw that would vanish as quickly as it had materialised. The men involved were Bavarian separatists of no significance and with no possibility of influencing events outside Bavaria. In fact, Hitler might even be worth encouraging since he wanted to claim independence for Bavaria, which might lead to the reinstatement of the Wittelsbach monarchy and possibly even the break-up of the German Reich. ‘And by the way,’ the message continued, ‘Hitler’s first name is Adolf – not Aloysius.’

British dismissal of NSDAP in 1922.

Horace Finlayson, financial adviser to the British Embassy, kept a daily record of the exchange rate. His first entry, on 15 August 1923, records 12,369,000 marks to the pound, then on 9 November (the day of Hitler’s failed putsch) 2.8 billion and five weeks later a dizzying 18 billion.1

Excellent source for demonstrating hyper inflation

Numa Tétaz – a Swiss studying engineering in Munich – lived through the crisis: Almost everyone is into dealing. What is bought today for a million can be sold tomorrow for a billion. The key is always to find someone who thinks more slowly than the seller. Everyone knows it can’t go on like this but no one has any idea what to do. You swim in a dirty and deceptive stream. Everyone lives in dread but somehow carries on. We don’t talk much politics in our group. I only realised the next day that the putsch had happened.2

Stunning source for reflecting life in 1923 and irrelevance of Munich putsch.

The historian John Wheeler-Bennett, who lived in Weimar Germany for several years and knew everyone worth knowing, described Stresemann as ‘one of the most unlovely-looking men’ he had ever seen. ‘Porcine of feature, his little eyes set close together, his hair cropped close over a nearly bald pink skull and the inevitable roll of flesh behind the neck.’5 His wife, on the other hand, so Lady D’Abernon noted, was one of the best-looking women she had met in Germany, though, she added, ‘it is not forgotten in Berlin that Frau Stresemann is of Hebrew origin’.6

Physical description of Stresemann

The sometime poet and critic – more often drunk and embittered – Brian Howard made his feelings quite clear when he wrote to a friend from the Hospiz der Berliner in October 1927: I am very depressed and very lonely. I hate Berlin so much that I am coming home almost immediately. It is unbearably ugly, and quite quite awful … I don’t know where anything is, I have no money and this hotel is appalling … When I arrived they were singing hymns. No one speaks and my smoking is considered an outrage … The Unter den Linden is awful. Everything is noisy, vulgar, overcrowded and commercialised. The buses go at 50 mph and are veritable death traps … The homosexual life of Berlin is fantastic from a psychologist’s point of view but very dreary from the point of view of a human being. God how alone I feel.30

Criticism of culture and nightlife in Berlin 1927

However, on closer inspection these youthful cartels were not quite as innocent as they seemed. Cicely Hamilton sounded a note of caution. ‘There is danger in the Youth Movement,’ she wrote, ‘which may be summed up in the one word – Politics.’ She had been quick to notice that the majority of these groups were junior branches of existing church societies or political parties intent on indoctrinating the young with their own particular brand of sectarianism. ‘Some of these young people’, Hamilton noted, ‘are taking to their politics early and taking to them vigorously.’ On her weekend rambles she would often meet ‘parties of imps – little creatures who, as yet, should know nothing of politics – trudging out into the woods, in crocodile formation, with the Red Flag marching at their head.’ Nor was it only young communists who made her uneasy. ‘The Brown Shirts are the most striking example of youth trained to partisan thinking,’ she observed, adding, ‘They are not an unfavourable example. Their doctrines may be dangerous and their methods provocative but the lads themselves – so far as I have seen them – are of clean, upstanding type.’ She went on to inform her readers that ‘the young Brown Shirts were a branch of the National-Socialist-German-Workers-Party’, a title, as she points out, that is much too long for everyday use so ‘has mercifully been shortened to – Nazi’.47

Politicisation of youth movements in Weimar Germany

‘Germany is very ahead of us in its adoption of the modern’, a view confirmed by a visit to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Formerly a Prussian parade ground, by 1930 it had become the largest airport in the world, with some fifty aeroplanes landing each day from all parts of Europe. The airport ranked high on Berlin’s list of tourist attractions, where, for a small entry fee, any member of the public could enter and stay as long as they liked. ‘Great crowds gather out there to sit at small tables and eat and drink to the tune of the motors,’1 Emily observed. Cicely Hamilton was also smitten. ‘There is always something happening, or about to happen; a new and lovely monster rushing out to meet the wind, an arrival swooping down from heaven knows where!’2

Tempelhof a symbol of modernity and progress of Germany.

19

For the intellectually adventurous, plays by the likes of Hauptmann, Wedekind, Bronnen and (the ‘degenerate looking’20) Brecht were on offer, as well as the latest works by Schoenberg, Hindemith or Richard Strauss. Bauhaus architecture, Expressionism, Dada and the searing caricatures of George Grosz disturbed and stimulated. As Mowrer put it, ‘You felt so intensely alive in Germany.’

culture in WG summed up

Many French visitors, however, were sceptical, believing the Germans were yet again using an economic crisis as an excuse to avoid paying reparations. ‘Frenchmen returning from Berlin are full of the incredible extravagance and manifest luxury which exist there,’ the writer André Gide told Harry Kessler.29 And Emily Pollard, dining at Goslar in the summer of 1930, was able to enjoy ‘a regular feast for the gods’ that included among its six courses green turtle soup and dressed crab.

french believed germany exag

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. Sir Horace clearly saw no contradiction between his very real distress at such conduct and the casual anti-Semitism in which he, like so many of his class and generation, regularly indulged. ‘I am appalled by the number of Jews in this place,’ he had written to his predecessor, Sir Ronald Lindsay, shortly after arriving in Berlin. ‘One cannot get away from them. I am thinking of having a ham-bone amulet made “to keep off the evil nose”, but I am afraid that even that would not be a deterrent.’

endemic antisemitism in society

Cicely Hamilton, a thoughtful traveller and certainly not a Nazi supporter, reflected the views of many of her fellow countrymen when she attempted to justify German anti-Semitism. She identified envy as the prime cause of Judenhetze [hatred of Jews]: A people that has suffered and is bitterly poor sees a race that climbs and flourishes upon the ruin of its own fortunes. Small wonder if envy does stir in its heart and it snarls accusations of profiteering against all who belong to the race. Is it not because he has fattened on the miseries of others that Israel today dwells lordly in the Kurfüstendamm which was once the aristocratic quarter, the Mayfair of imperial Berlin?39

a/s in 1930 explained

Lewis was present at ‘a monster meeting’ in the Sportpalast where Hermann Göring, newly elected to the Reichstag, and propaganda genius, Joseph Goebbels, addressed a crowd of twenty thousand. ‘There was something like the physical pressure of one immense indignant thought,’ he observed.42 Lilian and Edgar Mowrer attended a similar gathering: ‘Long before we reached the Potsdamerstrasse, our taxi was halted by outposts of brown-shirted stalwarts, who allowed us to pass only after examining our invitation card,’ Lilian recorded. Finally they were allowed into the hall, its walls painted in brilliant futuristic colours. Not only was every one of the twenty thousand seats taken, she noted, but the corridors between the seats were also crammed with spectators. Yet more were massed at the back ‘like a great choir’. Lines of uniformed men, with leather boots and peaked caps, kept order. ‘They stood to attention in the stiffest manner, but were ready to dart into action at the slightest attempt at heckling. Their attitude was challenging, defiant, warlike; their expression most aggressive. The atmosphere of the whole place was as highly charged as a powder factory.’43

account of nazi rally

No one has any money, the price of bread does not fall, unemployment remains high … People do not see how they are going to come through the winter. They seem to themselves to have nothing to lose and nothing to hope for … it is the lack of any hope which makes the situation seem to them so depressing and makes it difficult for Brüning [the chancellor]* to keep them in hand.

summary of impact of depression

A few weeks later, on 9 March 1931, Charlie Chaplin arrived in Berlin to promote his last and most successful silent movie – City Lights. ‘Your mother wouldn’t rest until she got hold of him,’ Rumbold wrote to Constantia, ‘and he is coming to dine and do a play with us tonight. We shall attract a lot of attention.’6 He was right. The Pathé News clip reporting Chaplin’s arrival in Berlin bore the caption: ‘Kings might almost envy reception delirious crowds gave famous screen comedian.’ Thousands of people lined the streets all the way from Friedrichstrasse station to the Adlon Hotel, where he stayed in the royal suite as a guest of honour. However, not all those greeting him were friendly. In the mistaken belief that Chaplin was Jewish, Nazis gathered outside the Adlon to yell abuse at him, while a group of communists threatened to smash the Adlon’s windows if he didn’t receive their delegation.7 The Nazi rhetoric was echoed in the National Socialist newspaper, Der Angriff, edited by Goebbels, which called him the ‘Jew Chaplin’ whose ‘typically Jewish screen figure was leading German youth away from the heroic ideal of the manly German Siegfried’, thus ‘undermining the future of the German race’.8 Such was the virulence of the Nazi campaign that Chaplin left Berlin early, missing the premiere of his film.

Nazis incorrectly label Charlie Chaplin as Jewish and he is driven out of Germany.

Thanks to the lasting political chaos and public discontent, it was now plain that the Weimar Republic’s days were numbered. As Spender later wrote, they had entered the ‘Weimardämmerung [twilight in Weimar]’. ‘Tugged by forces within and without, by foreign powers and foreign money-lenders, industrialist plotters, embittered generals, impoverished landed gentry, potential dictators, refugees from Eastern Europe, the government reeled from crisis to crisis, within a permanent crisis.’

description of why weimar doomed by 1932

They take for granted we are on their side against the French and feel we could and should take a firmer stand with them. They have no idea about conditions in England. They imagine we have hardly suffered and have forgotten the war. Very insensitive as a nation. No doubt Hitler’s party has saved Germany from a Socialist/Communist government by splitting the people up. Nearly all the young are Hitlerites. Germans all assume we shall be on their side in the next war.

germans believe gb on their side vs fr

Walking by herself one Sunday from the Embassy to the Schloss, Lady Rumbold rounded a corner to see a ‘whole band of Nazis rushing after one miserable Communist, whom they proceeded to batter. There are lorries full of police who go tearing up and down the Linden. So far no shooting, and people seem to be enjoying it. It certainly adds to the amusement of walking out.’

blase attitude to street violence

When, even after his July election success, Hitler had still not been offered the chancellorship, Hindenburg famously remarked, ‘That man for Chancellor? I’ll make him a postmaster and he can lick the stamps with my head on them.’

When, even after his July election success, Hitler had still not been offered the chancellorship, Hindenburg famously remarked, ‘That man for Chancellor? I’ll make him a postmaster and he can lick the stamps with my head on them.’

If his elevation to chancellor did not technically bring an end to the Weimar Republic, the oath he uttered that day was to prove its death rattle.

If his elevation to chancellor did not technically bring an end to the Weimar Republic, the oath he uttered that day was to prove its death rattle.

Indeed, Nazi brutality so effectively silenced all opposition that one British resident, forced to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, reported in The Nineteenth Century and After that it had been left to foreign journalists, mostly American and English, to offer any protest.* ‘Hostile criticism from a German’, he wrote, ‘was suicide – more often economic, sometimes physical.’6 Yet even those most obviously at risk were totally unprepared for the Nazi onslaught. Abraham Plotkin, an American left-wing activist of Russian-Jewish origins, was astonished by the complacency of his German colleagues. After meeting a number of wealthy Jews in Berlin on 6 February, he wrote in his diary, ‘Strange as it may seem and it seemed strange to me, they were not concerned very much now that Hitler has come to the front. Their attitude is that it was bound to come … and that it is best perhaps that the Hitler fire run its course.’

Criticism of Nazi regime considered 'suicide' for German citizens

The following weekend Plotkin and a Dutch trade unionist walked for hours through the woods near Berlin with the president of the German Clothing Workers Union trying hard to convince him of the danger facing the trade unions: I asked a dozen alternative questions – what would happen if Hitler did this or did that – to all of which he smiled and said that every one of the questions I raised had been fully discussed and the possibilities weighed … Hindenburg would not tolerate any dictatorship that was established either through sheer terror or through unconstitutional means … Nothing we could and did say disturbed his placid calm.8

Complacency of German liberals.

Four days later, at five past nine on the evening of 27 February, Denis Sefton Delmer, now back in Berlin, received a telephone call from a garage attendant with the startling news that the Reichstag was on fire. Running the mile and a half from his office, he was one of the first to arrive at the burning building, where flames were funnelling up through the great glass dome in a pillar of fire and smoke. ‘Every minute fresh trains of fire engines were arriving, their bells clanging as they raced through the streets.’ Lady Rumbold and Constantia were driving home after a Beethoven concert conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Seeing the commotion they parked and joined the watching crowds. Delmer, ducking under ropes, managed to reach one of the Reichstag entrances just as Hitler leapt from his car and, followed by Goebbels and his bodyguard, ‘dashed up the steps two at a time, the tails of his trench coat flying, his floppy black artist’s hat pulled down over his head’. Inside they found Göring – more massive than ever in a camel-hair coat, his legs astride ‘like some Frederician guardsman in a UFA film’. He informed Hitler that communists had started the fire and that an arrest had already been made. Delmer followed Hitler and his party into the building: ‘Across pools of water, charred debris, and through clouds of evil smelling smoke we made our way through rooms and corridors. Someone opened a yellow, varnished door, and for a moment we peeped into the blazing furnace of ...

Reichstag fire

Hitler’s success at the poll on 5 March came as no surprise. Tweedy listened to the results on the wireless in the crowded lobby of the hotel. ‘There was no real excitement and no applause. Hitler won all along and that was that.’ A week later Tweedy was expressing astonishment at the breath-taking change in so short a time. ‘The election has completely altered Germany both outwardly and inwardly so much that it is hard to realise that we are in the same country that we entered a month ago. The Nazis are out-fascismising Fascismo.’ Two days later they left Berlin, thankful to escape the post-election turmoil.

Speed of change under Hitler

By now Tweedy, like many other foreigners, was thoroughly confused. There was much to dislike about this uncouth new society yet was he being too critical? After all, Hitler was ‘not a bad man’. True, he had a streak of ‘hysterical madness’, but hadn’t every great movement been the inspiration of an eccentric? In the preceding weeks, Tweedy had conducted countless interviews with people from every conceivable background. Many were hostile to Hitler but many more were seduced by the new ‘faith’. It was ‘buoyant, exciting and alive. It was not patronising. It broke down social barriers, provided pageantry and stimulus.’ It was, in a nutshell, a new gospel. Furthermore, wrote Tweedy, ‘the police are quite charming’.

Foreign confusion over how to react to Nazi regime.

Soon the boy bars began to disappear. The more intelligent boys went to ground while ‘the silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms’.15 As it was common knowledge that the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, was homosexual, the more optimistic in the gay community must have felt that their time had come. But within weeks hundreds were murdered or incarcerated – ‘for their own protection’ – in the newly opened concentration camp at Dachau.

Persecution of homosexuals

The persecution of homosexuals was, however, a sideshow compared with that of the Jews. On the morning of 1 April, storm troopers all over Germany took up positions in front of Jewish shops, blocking their entrances. They held placards exclaiming ‘Deutschland erwache: die Juden sind unser Unglück [Germans awake: the Jews are our disaster]’. The previous day, while filling his Morris with petrol near Leipzig, Tweedy had noticed a lorry crammed with household goods at the adjacent pump. Talking to the owner, he discovered that he and his wife were ‘Jews on the flit’. After months of intimidation they had decided to cut their losses, shut up shop and head for Switzerland. Their story, soon to become so commonplace, struck Tweedy at the time as ‘odd but eloquent’. By now he had experienced quite enough of Nazi Germany to realise that ‘the Jews are for it’. After listening to a broadcast detailing the meticulously planned boycott, he wrote, ‘This is one of the few occasions when I have sympathy with Jewry.’ Less than a month since the election, Tweedy had learned enough about Hitler’s Germany to make sure that before submitting his luggage to examination by the border police he had obliterated the names of all the people recorded in his diary.

Jewish experience in early months of regime.

At the entrance he recognised a boy from the Cosy Corner, now a brown-shirted storm trooper. It soon became clear to foreigners that many of their German acquaintances, whatever their former political views, were signing up with the Nazis, simply to survive. In May, just before he left Berlin for good, Isherwood wrote of his landlady: Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about ‘Der Führer’ to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.17

German people towing the nazi line to protect themselves.

James Grover McDonald, chairman of the Foreign Policy Association and soon to become the League of Nations Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany, arrived in Berlin from America a couple of days after the boycott. Tall and fair, McDonald recorded in his diary how the Nazis regarded him as an ideal specimen of Nordic superiority. Why, then, they repeatedly asked, did he not share their racial beliefs? ‘But surely you, a perfect Aryan, could not be unsympathetic to our views?’ remarked one economist. Germany, it was explained, was ‘fighting the battle of the white race’ and doing so without any help from the decadent French, who were ‘becoming Negroid’, or from the Americans whose own need of purification was so obvious. McDonald was urged to attend a Nazi funeral so that he might see for himself the new morality in action. No one any longer took notice of the ‘drooling’ priest but when the Nazi official snapped to attention, saluted and spoke, a thrill went through the crowd. ‘That is spiritual leadership.’18 On 7 April Hitler told McDonald in a private interview, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’19

Nazi belief in aryan supremacy

Although condemning unreservedly the regime’s treatment of Jews, he tried to put it in context. On returning to England in April, he reported that many of his German friends were convinced that their government’s anti-Semitism would soon pass. They had been keen to remind Wrench that Germany had just undergone an almost bloodless revolution and, naturally at such times, ‘as you English know from history’, regrettable things happened.

Jews expected antisemitism to pass.

The anti-Jewish campaign, he concluded, was caused by a widespread (and, by inference, a not unreasonable) sense that, at a time of high unemployment and economic hardship, ‘the Jew has got a disproportionate share of the “plums”’. Despite having heard in Berlin youths cry out ‘Juden verrecke [death to the Jews]’, Wrench returned to England convinced that the German government was on the brink of dropping its anti-Semitic crusade. ‘The best service we can do the Jews in Germany’, he argued, ‘is to try and maintain an impartial attitude towards Germany and show that we are really desirous of understanding German aspirations.’24

Wrench (editor of Spectator) on British noninterference

Naturally, Lady Rumbold and Constantia were there, on this occasion escorted by three stalwart young diplomats. Constantia described how the students threw their flaming torches on to the pyre as they filed past. Soon it was a roaring blaze with huge tongues of flame shooting up into the sky. Lady Rumbold, who thought the students quite demented and ‘wanting in a sense of humour’, wondered why, as they were destroying Jewish literature so enthusiastically, they did not burn the Bible as well – ‘it would be logical’.28 They listened to the students’ president, in full Nazi regalia, urging his fellow students to protect the purity of German literature. 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 fo...

Book burning after 100 days.

As for reports of people taken from their homes in the middle of the night, of torture and intimidation, many foreigners simply looked the other way, hoping that if they focused on the positive in National Socialism, the nastier aspects might soon disappear. It was much harder to ignore the persecution of Jews. But then many foreign visitors to Germany in 1933 were themselves anti-Semitic, if only casually. To them, the discomfiture of a few Jews seemed a small price for the restoration of a great nation – a nation, moreover, that was Europe’s chief bulwark against communism.

Eagerness of people to want to see the best in the nazis

For a socialist Germany beyond the Rhine was like exploring a city in ruins after an earthquake. Here only a short time ago was the headquarters of a political party, a trade union, a newspaper, over there was a workers’ bookstore. Today enormous swastika banners hang from these buildings. This used to be a Red street; they knew how to fight here. Today one meets only silent men, their gazes sad and worried, while the children shatter your eardrums with their ‘Heil Hitlers!’1

French socialist journalist bleak warning.

It was a theory bluntly rejected by Sir Eric Phipps, Rumbold’s successor as British ambassador. He maintained that Hitler had vastly overplayed the communist card but had done so to great effect. The Nazis knew perfectly well that the threat had in fact been minimal, but by harping on it ad nauseam had succeeded not only in brainwashing the German public but convincing many foreigners that the Führer had single-handedly prevented the ‘red tide’ from sweeping across Germany and the West.4

Phipps - hitler had exaggerated threat of communism.

The willingness of the middle class to accept the extra burdens imposed on them by the Nazis surprised him. Women too seemed happy to give up the freedoms that they had so recently won under Weimar. Not only were they now discouraged from working, but they were also heavily censured if they smoked in public or wore makeup.

Women acceptance of loss of independence

No foreign traveller in Germany in 1933, however unobservant, could fail to notice the extraordinary extent to which the young were caught up in the Nazi movement, whether signed up with the SA, SS, Hitler Youth or voluntary labour. After closely observing them for three weeks, Hankey felt he better understood French paranoia since it seemed impossible that these ardent, disciplined youths would not demand weapons at the first sign of trouble. And, given the speed with which this could be accomplished, there was no doubt in his mind that ‘Hitler had sown the dragon’s teeth’.7

Legitimate for French to fear Nazi control over young