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

by Julia Boyd

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