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

by Julia Boyd

For all the foreigners, mainly journalists, who tried in the first months of the Third Reich to expose the true nature of the Nazi revolution, there were plenty of others ready to praise

A British academic, Philip Conwell-Evans, was among the regime’s earliest apologists, although, as Karina Urbach points out in her book Go-Betweens for Hitler, it is even now not clear whether Conwell-Evans was a genuine Nazi supporter or working for British intelligence.21

The anti-Jewish campaign, he concluded, was caused by a widespread (and, by inference, a not unreasonable) sense that, at a time of high unemployment and economic hardship, ‘the Jew has got a disproportionate share of the “plums”’. Despite having heard in Berlin youths cry out ‘Juden verrecke [death to the Jews]’, Wrench returned to England convinced that the German government was on the brink of dropping its anti-Semitic crusade. ‘The best service we can do the Jews in Germany’, he argued, ‘is to try and maintain an impartial attitude towards Germany and show that we are really desirous of understanding German aspirations.’

‘Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen [Where they burn books, they will end by burning people].’

Then came the climax when at midnight Goebbels mounted a rostrum and declared, ‘Jewish intellectualism is dead … the German soul can again express itself.’

Ffree speech in uk and us say sam thing

‘There is going up in smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘A lot of the old German liberalism – if any was left – was burned tonight.’29 Hitler had been in power exactly one hundred days.

As for reports of people taken from their homes in the middle of the night, of torture and intimidation, many foreigners simply looked the other way, hoping that if they focused on the positive in National Socialism, the nastier aspects might soon disappear.

For a socialist Germany beyond the Rhine was like exploring a city in ruins after an earthquake. Here only a short time ago was the headquarters of a political party, a trade union, a newspaper, over there was a workers’ bookstore. Today enormous swastika banners hang from these buildings. This used to be a Red street; they knew how to fight here. Today one meets only silent men, their gazes sad and worried, while the children shatter your eardrums with their ‘Heil Hitlers!’

‘When you sing in chorus you don’t feel hunger; you aren’t tempted to seek out the how and why of things. You must be right since there are fifty of you side by side, crying out the same refrain.’

He maintained that Hitler had vastly overplayed the communist card but had done so to great effect. The Nazis knew perfectly well that the threat had in fact been minimal, but by harping on it ad nauseam had succeeded not only in brainwashing the German public but convincing many foreigners that the Führer had single-handedly prevented the ‘red tide’ from sweeping across Germany and the West.4

Dresden, with its stubbornly ‘Red’ reputation, was another city where support for Hitler was far from universal.

Women too seemed happy to give up the freedoms that they had so recently won under Weimar. Not only were they now discouraged from working, but they were also heavily censured if they smoked in public or wore makeup.

After closely observing them for three weeks, Hankey felt he better understood French paranoia since it seemed impossible that these ardent, disciplined youths would not demand weapons at the first sign of trouble. And, given the speed with which this could be accomplished, there was no doubt in his mind that ‘Hitler had sown the dragon’s teeth’.

The parades, ceremonies, bands and saluting used so effectively to prime young Aryans, no longer took place only on the great Nazi festivals like the National Day of Labour (with which Hitler had replaced May Day), but were re-enacted every Sunday in every city, every town and every village. This weekly ‘collective madness’, as Guérin described it, began at 7 a.m. with loudspeakers blaring out the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel’ song, and continued until the inevitable torchlight parade, close to midnight.

Guérin noticed the ecstasy with which the girls around him reacted to the first faint sounds of tramping boots signalling the approach of further SA troops – a reminder of the disturbing eroticism underlying Nazism. ‘Without boots, without the aroma of leather, without the rigid and severe stride of a warrior,’ he wrote, ‘it’s impossible today to conquer these Brunhildes.’

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.

He was perplexed as to why his modest Morris Eight should arouse such interest until he realised that it was simply because it was British.

On arriving in the quietness of Spa in Belgium my wife and I both had an astonishing sense of having come back to civilization. All the shouting and noise and singing of the Nazis; all the excitement and stimulation had vanished. We felt we were among normal people in a country living under normal conditions and never have I felt so much the steady solidity of England as since my return from Germany.10

Although the Nazis hated internationalism, they well understood the importance of tourism as a propaganda tool.

Foreign tourists must be given such a memorable experience in the Third Reich that once back home they would spontaneously sing its praises.

Travel brochures showing picturesque villages, colourful costumes and friendly policemen were sent abroad stripped of anti-Jewish virulence – now reserved only for the domestic market.

Once at sea, he noticed ‘there is [sic] a lot of Jews and Germans on board. I imagine these are glad to be out of Germany. I see a man with a Yarmulke on now. I am getting sleepy.’16

An idealist, he hoped that with his founding of the International Youth Hostel Federation in 1932, young people from differing backgrounds would come to understand one another better and promote world peace.

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.

They worked very hard all through the sausage course, each in turn saying his piece in the manner of a gramophone record. It was impossible to interrupt. When at first I ventured to argue a point or bring my own views into the conversation, I found that it threw them out of gear completely. They looked at me with complete uncomprehending stares. There would be a pause followed by a bout of toasting in beer then the gramophone record would start again. I gave it up.20

Years later ‘a prominent German’ told her that Ribbentrop had become a Nazi only because of wounded pride. Scorned by the Grafs and Junkers as an upstart wine salesman with no quarterings, his application to join Germany’s most prestigious club had been rejected. It was at this point that he had turned to the Nazis.21

However, he came away convinced that on balance Hitler was speaking the truth when he had told him that, as a Catholic, he had no wish to be mixed up in Protestant affairs or to interfere with the Church’s freedom.

The new religion emphatically rejected constitutional government, Parliament and free discussion. Chieftains would govern the people under one supreme chief whose word would be law. And, in the manner of the old deities, he would be half god and half warrior. National boundaries would no longer exist because, in this system, blood called to blood.

The ultimate goal was a loose confederation of Germanic tribes whose roots lay deep in the primeval forest. Scandinavian groups in Poland, Hungary and Russia would be allowed to join as they too sprang from the German forest. The old gods were not dead. They were only sleeping. They had been dispossessed by the Christian myth, which, hostile to instinct and nature, had weakened the German spirit, devitalising and dehumanising it. Now strength, courage and vitality would again stand as the true virtues of manhood, casting aside introspection, intellectualism and morbid consciousness. The pagan gods, the pagan spirit, would stride back into life.

The Kaiser was so enraptured that he exclaimed to Chamberlain: ‘God has sent the German people your book.’2 For Hitler, the work was to become a sacred text and its author, who in 1908 married one of Wagner’s daughters, his favourite prophet.

He made no mention of Hitler on that occasion but fifteen years later, in an article for a London literary magazine, recalled his impressions: ‘I thought him fearfully ill educated and quite tenth-rate,’ he wrote. ‘When Winnie Wagner said he would be the saviour of the world, I just laughed … I thought him silly, brave and shabby.’6

‘The great intermixing of Nordic blood in northern Italy’, he wrote in a local newspaper, ‘has often been stressed even in our own day by race researchers.’12 So, to everyone’s relief, Parma-born Toscanini was an Aryan after all.

He was not, he declared, prepared ‘to make Wagner’s genius amenable to Hitler propaganda’.

The whole event was a brilliantly orchestrated sop to the farmers on whose ‘pure blood, simple strength, and freedom from debt’ the Nazis promised, they intended to build the new Germany.

‘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.’

the Times correspondent reported, the Nazis’ hitherto immaculate organisation unravelled the moment everyone started for home. For miles around the roads became so jammed that thousands of people were forced to sleep in the open. ‘Never’, he concluded, ‘had the town of Hamelin seen such a concourse since the days of the Pied Piper.’26

Many foreign visitors like American writer and suffragist, Ida Tarbell, believed that the intensity of the villagers’ involvement with the Passion Play set them apart from ordinary mortals: ‘Whatever they do seems to be simple, direct, honest, coming from within, and still untouched by imitation, greed or trickery.’

Another commentator staying in the pension owned by Alois Lang, who played Christ in 1930 and 1934 and was a committed Nazi, noticed how his American guests would ask him to bless their children.

it is many years, I should say, since he did any woodwork.’ He conceded that the play was finely produced but was sceptical that it was entirely the work of ‘so called’ peasants. ‘The structure of the theatre’, he observed, ‘indicates a large amount of capital and is as far removed from one’s conception of village life as anything could be.’ In fact, he went on, ‘The thing taken together is a huge fraud and the embodiment of humbug.’

It is noticeable how enthusiasts like Tifft Fuller conspicuously failed to mention Oberammergau’s bad fairy – anti-Semitism. From the start, the Passion Play had portrayed the ‘murderers of Christ’ with a virulence that made it a propaganda gift to the Nazis.

Germany since the war. Hitler was a keen advocate of the Passion Play, believing that it should be performed all over Germany. What better way to demonstrate the threat posed by the Jews to Aryan blood? Such views provoked fears in the foreign press that the 1934 production might be transformed into a Nazi extravaganza complete with Nordic Christ and Teutonic scenery. But although a number of villagers were seen in Nazi uniform, ‘looking very ill with their long hair’,36 to the relief of foreign enthusiasts the play’s text remained ‘pure’.

Covert glances in Hitler’s direction revealed him reading his text and looking through opera glasses ‘just like anybody else’. At the end of the play he left without fuss. ‘But the fact of his presence’, Russell wrote, ‘so persistently assailed and vexed the mind that in order to give to the Passion Play the attention it deserved it was necessary to go again.’

even the famous book burning of the previous year met with the American Baptists’ approval since ‘The New Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish Communistic libraries.’41

The German press was quick to note the unsegregated presence of thirty African-American ministers at the Congress. One of them, Michael King Sr, was so inspired by his visit to Germany – and in particular by the reforming example of Martin Luther – that on returning to Atlanta he changed both his and his son’s name to Martin Luther King.

Sir Eric Phipps, present along with the rest of the diplomatic corps, reported that Hitler’s last words at the funeral were to consign the great man to Valhalla or as Phipps put it, ‘that abode of false and dreary Wagnerian gods where no civilised being would wish to spend a weekend’.

With Hindenburg gone, there was nothing to stop Hitler combining the offices of chancellor and president. In a plebiscite held twelve days later, the country gave him an overwhelming mandate making his dictatorship even more unassailable.

It was, however, made clear that non-Germans were not automatically to be excluded: ‘If foreigners with good Nordic blood ascend this mountain,’ Streicher told the gathered thousands, ‘they will all descend it again purified and capable of understanding Germany. They will feel the power which has welded Germany into a community.’47

On 23 June 1935, twenty-year-old Unity Mitford stood on the podium next to Streicher, thrust out her gauntleted arm in a Hitler salute and addressed the crowd of 200,000.

It was for anyone, even an outsider, impossible to react objectively to the Nuremberg rallies.

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