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

by Julia Boyd

Nothing could have been more in contrast to the colour and cacophony of that occasion than the dark, dank tunnel under the Elbe in Hamburg, which Guérin visited with his communist comrades several weeks later. Guérin also visited the slums where the men lived in ‘worm-eaten wooden houses’ and where on the walls could be seen defiant graffiti – ‘Death to Hitler’ and ‘Long Live the Revolution’.9 There were apparently still some places left in Germany where even the Nazis did not venture.

Resistance to Hitler in Hamburg

Mary Goodland wanted to improve her German before going up to Oxford University in the autumn of 1933, so arranged to spend a few weeks staying with a family in Düsseldorf. She recalled, with perfect clarity at the age of 100, how unaware she had been then of the momentous changes taking place in Germany. But so indeed were her hosts. It was only when the elegant art nouveau windows of Tietz, the local Jewish department store, were shattered (at 4 a.m. on 1 April) that Frau and Herr Troost, after much earnest discussion, decided that they had better follow their neighbours’ example and put up some Nazi posters. By the same token, Herr Troost thought it might be politic to take part in the next SA torchlight parade. Not an energetic man, he went by taxi. When he returned, also by taxi, it was not Germany’s resurgence, the iniquities of Versailles or hatred of the Jews that he wished to discuss, but the enormous mosquito bites on his ankles acquired during the march.19

People realising importance of appearing supportive of the regime

Although his trip was so short, the Dean felt that he had grasped the situation well enough to be able to report with confidence to the Council. He had learned that even those suffering under the new regime continued to support Hitler because they regarded the Nazis as the only alternative to Bolshevism. Christ had now become more important as a leader in the fight against communism than as the saviour from sin. ‘They really believe, many of them,’ the Dean wrote, ‘that Hitler is sent by God, and that the success of his movement after such small beginnings and after ten years of struggle, is plain evidence that God has worked a miracle.’ The big question was what, if anything, should the Church of England be doing? Having interviewed many clergy on the front line, it was a point on which the Dean was quite clear – any expression of sympathy with the persecuted by the Church of England would be regarded as ‘absolutely disastrous’.

belief hitler sent by god

Konrad Warner, a Swiss journalist who was present at the 1935 festival, was struck by the extraordinary tension in the air, the palpable expectancy of this immense crowd as it surged over the hill, everyone looking for somewhere to stand or squat until the sacred moment when their Führer would come among them. At long last his motorcade could be seen in the distance on the plain below. ‘As it drew closer,’ Warner wrote, ‘the uninterrupted “Heil” of thousands and thousands of voices rolled like a hurricane from the hillside down towards the man who had cast his spell on the German people.’

obsessive love of hitler

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.

One of the first decisions any traveller had to make when crossing the border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to ‘Heil Hitler’. By 1934, when Unity first moved to Munich, the Nazi salute was so pervasive that it had become impossible to duck the issue.

Dilemma over whether to Heil Hitler

Everyone who passed the Feldherrnhalle – whether on wheels or on foot – was required to salute the monument. Eighteen-year-old Tim Marten, who had just left Winchester College and was studying for the Foreign Office, thought it hilarious when he spotted a fat man falling off his bicycle while trying to heil and steer at the same time.

Funny anecdote about hitler salute

Wall’s account of their holiday is full of vivid images: the white sandy road winding through a dark, mysterious pine forest, the group of factory workers delighted by King George V’s birthday greetings to Hitler and the cigarette cards depicting French military police brutalising German civilians in the Ruhr. Der Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will], watched in a smoky cinema ‘chock full and terribly overheated’, was as unpleasant as the stuffy opera where old ladies hissed at a fidgeting Iremonger to have more ‘Rücksicht [consideration]’ for others. They warmed to the burly Bavarian policemen in their ‘blue blue tunics’ and shiny black helmets adorned with pointed silver knobs, but feared for a recklessly outspoken anti-Nazi bookseller in Aachen. One impression stood out from all the others – the extraordinary profusion of signs proclaiming a single message: ‘Juden sind nicht erwünscht [Jews not wanted]’.

Variety of experiences but antisemitism dominates

The students were fascinated by the contrast between French and German women. In France, noted Shi Min, ‘they wore clothes of a hundred colours and different types of shoes – you would never find two dressed identically’. But German women wore ‘flat shoes on their big feet and clump along the street like camels’. Their clothes looked as if ‘they had been borrowed from an aunt’. There was another striking difference. At the countless sports facilities in and around Berlin, women were as active as the men. ‘Wearing shorts and singlets with bare legs and spiked shoes they did sports like boys, forgetting that they were young ladies. If there is a war, they could all participate unlike in France or China.’

Difference in German women

There was no weapon training as such, although Cox excelled at a game in which ‘you sprinted a hundred yards, crawled another ten, and then threw long-handled dummy grenades towards a bull’s eye traced in the dust’. When he suggested that this was military training, his fellow workers were pained. Did he not know that it was merely a schoolboy sport played in every German school?

Military drills in schools withouut kids realising

Although his camp comrades enjoyed the militaristic side of their camp life – many preferred to drill than to play football in the afternoons – none were ardent Nazis. Cox summed up his camp experience in an article in The Spectator. He did not on the whole think that the Labour Service in Germany could be accused of advocating war, but it was certainly making sure that if war came ‘the youth of Germany would be ready both in body and mind to face the field of battle’.

German youth being prepped for war.

Truman Smith, who thirteen years earlier had been the first American official to interview Hitler, was now military attaché at the US Embassy. He believed that ‘Germany is still not of one mind’, but agreed with Kirkpatrick that popular criticism was directed against the Party – not the Führer. Hitler’s biggest problem, in his view, was the wretchedly poor quality of the Nazi leaders who had emerged out of the ‘desperadoes and riffraff’ flung to the surface after the Great War. Although these semi-thugs, now parading as Gauleiters [heads of regional branches of the Nazi Party] and government ministers, were deeply unpopular, curiously, as Smith observed, people’s resentment rarely seemed to spill over to affect the Führer himself. ‘Germans, irrespective of class,’ he wrote, ‘adore and revere this strange man and the qualities they attribute to him of selflessness, lack of ostentation and participation in the joys and sorrows of the German people.’

Nazis unpopular but Hitler adored.

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become since he was last there. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934 while ‘lipstick so beloved of Jewesses’ had been deemed un-German and relegated to the dustbin.4 When Truman Smith’s eleven-year-old daughter drew a picture in class of her American grandmother with bright red lips, her teacher responded with horror, ‘Oh Kätchen, grandmothers don’t use lipstick!’

Traditional female stereotypes becamd the norm

They spent several hours with the inmates – ‘No definite type, all sorts,’ wrote Domvile, who of course had no idea that the ‘prisoners’ were actually prison guards in disguise. ‘A lot of crimes against small girls, a murderer or two … went into one room full of buggers.’ Both men praised the comfort and good order of the camp, agreeing how splendid it was of the Nazis to give these ‘dregs of humanity’ a fresh start. The group left Dachau (with souvenir wooden beer mugs made by the real prisoners) much impressed by all they had seen. ‘The English press have been disgraceful lately with their lies about Germany,’ Domvile wrote that night in his diary.

British visitors tricked over labour camps

The truth was that Hitler’s brutal suppression of all opposition had been so swift and so total that anyone wanting to set their face against the Party was left with the stark choice of exile or martyrdom. Otherwise they were doomed to an agonising compromise. One young schoolmaster told Buller that many of his colleagues would have preferred concentration camp to the daily torture of teaching Nazi doctrine were it not for the fact that their dependents would also be made to suffer.

Opponents of Nazis afraid to challenge the regime

My daughter is 18 and the leader of a group of young girls who she has to manage twice a week for gymnastics and political culture. She also has to make sure they do relief work for the poor and visit them when they are sick – another means of control as everything is reported back to the Party. With all that we hardly ever see her anymore so how can parents maintain their authority? The Party comes before everything. We are only civilians to our children. They feel that they are soldiers … Naturally they are delighted. They feel free because liberty for a teenager is when you don’t have to be with your family.

There were more surprises in store. Herman Goldberg, a Jewish baseball player from Brooklyn, wanted to know what lay beyond a certain door in his Olympic village quarters. He opened it to find another door and behind that a chain. Unloosing the chain he went down to the basement where he found himself in a huge cavernous area built of reinforced concrete, fifteen inches thick. ‘I didn’t know what it was for but I sure found out … Panzer tanks.’ Then a caretaker appeared shouting, ‘Raus raus raus, get out of there, get out of there.’15 Wildman, equally inquisitive, wanted to know more about the gliders he saw everywhere. ‘From what we understood, they’d just have to yank the front nosepiece off, hook a motor on it and turn it into a fighter plane.’ The same went for the buses that ferried them between the Olympic village and Berlin. Wildman noticed brackets round the top of the bus. After persistently asking the bus driver what they were for, he eventually got the answer – ‘Well that’s where the machine guns go.’ It was a shock to realise that an ordinary-looking bus could within minutes be transformed into an armoured vehicle.16 Such sinister discoveries, coupled with the fact that, when the Americans travelled to and from Berlin, they would often see young men crawling on their bellies through the woods with rifles and full packs, gave gymnast Kenneth Griffin ‘a sort of eerie feeling that Germany really was preparing for war’.

During the second week of the Olympics, the Vansittarts, along with the rich and glamorous from all over Europe and America, attended one extravagant entertainment after another. ‘Orchids have been sold out in Berlin for two days,’ proclaimed the Chicago Tribune, ‘and new flowers are being rushed up to the capital from outlying cities because women attending the official parties given by the German government in honour of the Olympic Games have bought every flower available.’43 As the French ambassador pointed out, Hitler was always keen that high-ranking foreigners should attend such events. He wanted them of course to be dazzled by Nazi style and panache, but he also wanted his public to know that they were being dazzled. ‘The German people, like their master,’ wrote François-Poncet, ‘combined an inferiority complex with a sense of pride.’44

Splendid though it was, the Ribbentrop party was to be eclipsed only two days later. Not content with having already hosted one magnificent occasion, Göring held another on the lawns of his brand new Air Ministry – then the largest office building in Europe. The far end of the garden, shrouded in darkness, was suddenly illuminated to reveal an eighteenth-century village complete with schuhplattling [traditional folk dancing] peasants, inn, post office, bakery, donkeys and merry-go-round. Göring himself, reported the French ambassador, rode the carousel until he was breathless.47 Vast women distributed pretzels and beer among the revellers. ‘There has never been anything like this since the days of Louis Quatorze,’ a fellow guest remarked to Channon. ‘Not since Nero,’ retorted Channon, adding that both Goebbels and Ribbentrop were ‘in despair with jealousy’.

Not everyone left Berlin immediately after the Games. Basketball player Frank J. Lubin spent a further week in the city before travelling on to his native Lithuania. It was a week that was to leave him with a very different picture of the city. Despite the atrocious facilities offered his sport (Hitler was not interested in basketball and there was no German team), the Olympic experience had, in his words, ‘all seemed so beautiful’. Now the scales fell from his eyes. When he and his wife chose a particular restaurant, their companion pointed out the Star of David in the window and led them quickly away. Then they went swimming, entering the baths under a large board inscribed ‘Juden verboten’. Lubin was puzzled, remarking that none of these signs had been there a few days before. ‘No,’ came the response, ‘but now the Olympic Games are over.’ Three months earlier, the Evening Post had reported a jingle doing the rounds in Berlin: When the Olympic Games are done Then with Jews we’ll have some fun

Ji never publicly discussed politics, although he noted how the Germans worshipped Hitler wildly ‘like lunatics’, and was shocked when a pretty young girl told him that to have Hitler’s baby would be the greatest glory she could imagine.

In 1934 a Frankfurt court ruled that bailiffs were no longer permitted to seize radios because they had become such indispensable items in the new Germany. ‘It is of the utmost importance for the education of the citizen and for the struggle for the unity of the German people,’ quoted the Manchester Guardian from a Nazi source.

One of them was twenty-year-old Rhys Jones,* whose unpublished diary gives such a vivid impression that it is worth quoting at length: Sunday 8th August 1937: Arrived Koblenz 12.15 pm First impression – a sense of the massive and solid. People’s physique definitely better than ours. Fitness put before personal looks. Girls often too fat by English standards. Hillsides covered in cabbages. No hedges. Dress: Quite unassuming except for black shorts, peculiar plus fours etc. White shoes a novelty. Germans do not dress according to the weather. Absence of open cricket shirt. Berets unpopular – French! Language: vigorous, almost militant. Perturbed by thought of being taken for a Jew given my slightly aquiline features. Discovered Woolworths. Smell peculiar to each country (except our own). That of Germany a scented tobaccy [sic] smell mingled with fish. Men walk upright, military fashion, keeping knees almost stiff. Impression of walking on heels and overbalancing. Nearly all close-shaven or glassily bald. Very large families. Children clean and tidy if a little old-fashioned (frills etc.). Shop windows full of prams. Fewness [sic] of cars. Germans too poor to buy more than a bicycle. Women terribly plain. Carry packs in blazing sun. Would try any man! Little use of corsets. Best proof of poverty found in cinemas. Only cheapest seats full. Solemnity would put many of our churches to shame. No smoking! No sweets! No whispering! No clapping. Strong silence. People like oysters. ...

best life in g source ever

In his book Just Back from Germany (1938), British writer J. A. Cole reflected a widespread view when he wrote, ‘Some of the works I liked, some left me indifferent and some I was frankly unable to understand.’ Everywhere, he noted, were labels, exclamations and question marks deriding the exhibits. ‘It was almost as though the Nazis feared the visitors would not jeer enough.’ The middle-aged man he spotted egging on visitors to poke fun at the art was almost certainly one of the actors hired by the gallery to do exactly that. In fact most people, Cole observed, showed no reaction at all. ‘They just walked through dumbly, looking stolidly at pictures as they might have done in any art gallery on a wet Sunday afternoon, and then went out again.’ Although Cole was not himself particularly avant-garde, halfway round the exhibition he experienced an odd exhilaration. ‘The audacity of these pictures was infectious,’ he wrote. ‘It was like walking into a lunatic asylum and realizing that one had been trying to become a lunatic for years.’

That left Klaus outside, but he hopped through a pantry window while everybody else was busy heiling Herr Streicher as he entered. So there we both were in the gigantic smoke-and-noise filled hall. The speech which followed was the first of its kind I’ve ever heard in my life. I knew it was going to make me furious of course but I didn’t quite realise that I’d be literally shaking with anger so that I didn’t think I could stand up. First of all, he is a superb demagogue, who absolutely fascinates his audience. He knows just when to make them laugh and when to get sentimental, and how to fan the flames of race prejudice until the hearers are slavering for a Jew to attack. He told a long series of unbelievable lies: that there’s no such thing as a decent Jew in the world, that they all have a certain bacillus in their blood which gives diseases to ‘white’ people; that they caused the world war, the downfall of Rome and heaven knows what else. He retailed gruesome stories of German girls defiled by marriage with Jews, and made every point clear with some vulgar joke. I really looked desperately around the room for one sane person who wasn’t believing it all – but with the exception of Klaus, who, although a National Socialist, was also disgusted, they were all hanging on his words. Of course they were a very unintelligent, common crowd; the respectable people don’t go to hear Streicher because they know what a devil he is – but if a few more of them did go, they might have a ...

Since Hitler first came to power, he had monitored the effect of National Socialism on his business colleagues with increasing pessimism. He noted how his boss, once a cultivated man with many Jewish friends, had transformed himself into a dedicated Nazi. He warned Tétaz that it would no longer be good enough for the Swiss just to keep his head down. From now on everyone must be seen actively supporting the Führer. By 1938 half the management and a quarter of the firm’s workforce had joined the Party.

That September a number of the firm’s employees were conscripted, including the accountant. ‘He left looking troubled,’ observed Tétaz. ‘Things did not look good. He would have much preferred to stay at home nurturing his National Socialist ideals rather than have to defend them at the front with a gun in his hand.’

Later Tétaz had supper with friends who, although profoundly anti-Hitler, were also happy and excited because peace now seemed certain. Their disgust with the regime did not extend to wanting a war in order to destroy it. Then came the extraordinary news that Germany’s demands regarding Czechoslovakia had been met in full. In Munich there was indescribable joy. Huge crowds gathered outside Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s hotels calling again and again for the statesmen to appear on their balconies. Tétaz went with his friends to the Oktoberfest celebrations. He had been often before but to none like this. Beer flowed endlessly, while in vast marquees happy, carefree people linked arms to form long lines that swayed all night to the music of brass bands. Hitler had achieved a Reich for his people without fighting, triumphed over the hated peace treaty, eliminated unemployment and turned yesterday’s enemies into friends.

On the night of 9 November Jewish shops across Germany were smashed to pieces, a hundred Jews murdered and countless more beaten and humiliated. Thousands were subsequently rounded up and sent to concentration camps. For foreigners who had put their money on Hitler’s Germany, Kristallnacht came as a shocking revelation. It destroyed any residual argument for appeasement and made plain that the Munich agreement – signed only six weeks earlier – had been a mirage.

Tétaz first became aware of the horror when, on 10 November, he drove past a burnt-out synagogue in Bayreuth. A happy, excited crowd looked on as firemen extracted charred furniture from the smouldering ruins. He had spent the previous night with Jewish friends in Nuremberg. It had been a civilised occasion, with music and wine. His elderly host had lost an eye and a leg in the Great War and been awarded the Iron Cross classes I and II. Worried about his friends, Tétaz turned his car around and drove straight back to Nuremberg. When he reached their house on the northern outskirts of the city, a scene of utter destruction confronted him. Doors torn off their hinges, furniture strewn all over the garden and taps left running. The magnificent Steinway that Tétaz had played only hours earlier had been smashed to pieces with an axe. Every painting had been slashed. The wife emerged covered in bruises. Her husband had been taken to hospital but died the next day.

On another occasion, a retired professor of physics at Bonn University made plain to Clark his strong disapproval of the recent pogrom but asked not to be quoted. He was convinced that Hitler had nothing to do with it. Had the Führer known about it beforehand, he would never have allowed it to happen. ‘This was the first time I realised’, noted Clark, ‘that the person of Hitler was sacrosanct. He was never connected in any way with instances that were doubtful or likely to prove unpopular. It was always Göring or Goebbels. Hitler’s reputation is unblemished and for the normal German there is a halo of infallibility around his head.’

In attempting to summarise all the impressions and experiences recorded in these pages, it is easy to sympathise with W. E. B. Du Bois. After months of travelling around the Third Reich in 1936, he wrote: ‘It is extremely difficult to express an opinion about Germany today which is true in all respects without numerous modifications and explanations.’

The truth is that many foreign visitors were similarly bewildered. Newspaper attacks on the Nazis from the earliest months of the regime, anecdotal evidence of street violence and repression, the opening of Dachau just a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor and, above all, the book burning, in May 1933, should have alerted all would-be travellers to the reality of the new Germany. But once they were actually there, the propaganda was so pervasive and truth so distorted that many found themselves uncertain about what to believe. In addition, there were at this early stage respectable reasons for giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt – belief that his revolution would evolve into responsible government, guilt over the Treaty of Versailles or simply the memory of a good German holiday. Many foreign visitors felt that it was not their business to comment on Germany’s internal affairs, while many more were simply not interested.

But while it is nevertheless hard to find an entirely satisfactory explanation for the numbers of young British and Americans roaming around Germany right up to the eve of the Second World War, it is much easier to understand why First World War veterans put their money on Hitler. Many travelled repeatedly to Germany in their efforts, as they saw it, to prevent another war. What is less clear is why a significant number of these often much-decorated patriots became right-wing extremists. Certainly, having survived such a horrific war, many of them felt let down by the peace. In comparison with the orderly discipline and purposefulness they saw in Nazi Germany, their own democratic governments appeared hopelessly feeble and inadequate.