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

by Julia Boyd

Burn reproduced a letter written to his mother from Nuremberg in 1935, when he was a young journalist working for the Gloucester Citizen: The Party Rally finished this morning. I cannot really think coherently after this week. It has been wonderful to see what Hitler has brought this country back to and taught to look forward to. I heard him make a speech yesterday at the end of it all which I don’t think I shall ever forget and am going to have translated. Please send me a Bible.2 It was for anyone, even an outsider, impossible to react objectively to the Nuremberg rallies. The spectator was either, like Burn, swept up in an orgy of emotion or, as in the case of the writer Robert Byron, utterly repelled. ‘There can be no compromise with these people,’ Byron wrote from Berlin after attending the 1938 rally. ‘There is no room in the world for them and me, and one has got to go.’3 Whether thrilled or appalled, no visitor from overseas could fail to be bowled over by the sheer scale of the pageantry. The incessant marching and beating of drums, the sweeping searchlights, flaming torches, and thousands upon thousands of gigantic red and black swastikas flapping in the breeze, were all skilfully deployed to pay homage to the one supreme chieftain, the demi-god pre-ordained to lead his tribe out of darkness to its rightful place in the sun.

Impact of Nuremberg rallies on foreigners was either admiration or revulsion.