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

by Julia Boyd

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.