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

by Julia Boyd

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