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

by Julia Boyd

‘one long apotheosis of the Caesar spirit in which Herr Hitler plays the role of Caesar and the troops play Roman slaves’. He

Feeling conspicuous in his open Magna MG, he played safe by heiling everyone in sight:

I prayed for a device like a direction indicator, which would flap aloft a metal hand while I got on with the job of driving.

But the fun faded when, as he watched the tiny swastika beat ‘proudly’ in the wind, he experienced a ‘sudden awe’. For a moment the flag seemed to him ‘much more than something to be waved and draped from windows. It was a fighting banner which went before and men followed after.’

He went on to describe how Austria was now organised into secret lodges. Runners from Germany were sent across the mountains every day to pass on Nazi propaganda to Austrian villages.

Heygate admitted that even he was carrying copies of the forbidden Nazi paper (given him by the exiled head of the Austrian Nazi party in Munich), which he was distributing clandestinely. The underground fight for Nazism in Austria, he told his friend, was a fascinating story.

Given Cox’s robust views, it was as well that he did not visit the Feldherrnhalle [Field Marshals’ Hall] in Munich – the Nazis’ most sacred monument. Here, at the site of Hitler’s abortive putsch, two temples of white stone had been erected to house the massive lead-coloured coffins of the sixteen ‘martyrs’ who had died

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.

Then, ‘like an offensive bit of rhubarb’, she had stood – arms rigidly at her side – refusing to salute. Within seconds ‘several squat and ugly Brown Shirts came galloping up, shouting ferociously and windmilling their arms’ until ‘Helmut stamped over with his ankle-length overcoat swirling, shouting even louder at them that I was an Engländer’.17

discovered how hard life could be for those on the wrong side of the regime. Herr Schlauch, a Lutheran pastor, had recently served a short term in prison for having preached against the worship of Teutonic pagan deities. A Nazi minder in the congregation – there was one now present to vet every sermon in every church – had denounced him. Since his release, the blacklisted Schlauch had been unable to find a job.

Frau Schlauch, despite her husband’s predicament, was full of praise for the Nazis for having banned Jewish novelists – ‘thereby cutting much unhealthy sexual literature out of circulation’.21

One impression stood out from all the others – the extraordinary profusion of signs proclaiming a single message: ‘Juden sind nicht erwünscht [Jews not wanted]’.

Some way to the north-east of the lake, Sinclair-Loutit and Dummett had a few months earlier been nearing Munich when fifteen miles short of the city Dummett suddenly insisted that they pedal a long stretch without pause. Only afterwards did he give his reasons. On examining the map, he had noticed how close they were to Dachau,

Nazis’ method of dealing with ‘wasters, idlers, social undesirables, Jewish profiteers and riffraff’ by re-educating them through work.

by the mid-1930s Dachau had become something of a tourist attraction for American and British visitors, particularly politicians and journalists.

Victor Cazalet MP thought the camp ‘not very interesting though quite well run’. In his diary he noted, ‘adjutant says most prisoners Communist. If that is the case, then they can stay there for all I care.’

The many articles he produced as a result were published in Walks and Talks Abroad (1939). In

During the past three months I have watched Young Germany at work and at play in every part of the country. I admire the intense energy evoked by the National Socialist Movement. I respect the patriotic ardour of German youth. I recognize, I almost envy, the depth and earnestness of the search for national unity which inspires your schools and colleges: because it is wholly unselfish, it is wholly good.26

Why, he wondered years later, had he not, as a reporter for the Gloucester Citizen, demanded to know what kind of trial or defence the prisoners had been allowed; or how the Nazis could morally justify incarcerating an individual simply for criticising the government? Equally shocking to the older, wiser Burn was his hypocrisy in subsequently convincing himself (and the wider world) how traumatised he had been by Dachau.

Sarah Norton was acutely conscious of the ‘atmosphere of fear’ haunting the city. Hating the Nazis, she would go with like-minded friends to the Carlton tearooms where they would sit as close as possible to Hitler’s table and pull faces at him. ‘It was a pretty senseless occupation,’ she later recalled, ‘because I do not think they noticed us but it gave us vicarious pleasure.’

They have no influence in any government organisation. They don’t have power to defend themselves, yet they are rich. The police gentlemen frequently deal with them impudently. Fill in a form today, fill in a receipt tomorrow; they cannot move freely. All they can do is obediently follow the ‘Regulations for Jews’, and live like a daughter-in-law.

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’.

It was, of course, pure Boy’s Own fantasy, its futility underlined by Toynbee detailing their plans in his diary. Such naïveté might be endearing were it not for the danger to which he exposed them all – particularly as he lived with a pro-Nazi family.

‘The last part of the evening we spent in a very disreputable but interesting Lokal in a rather low part of town. There were crowds of Jewesses there, that profession being one of the few that are still open to non-Aryans in Germany.’

In Biddy Barlow’s case it seems that it was largely a matter of pragmatism. Her family hated Hitler, dreaded him beginning another world war and despised the idea of a master race, ‘but the exchange rate was good’.

The result was that, despite the deteriorating political scene, young people continued to explore Nazi Germany right up until the eve of the Second World War.

‘Commandant’ Mary Allen was not, of course, an ‘old soldier’ but she always behaved as if she were. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any individual further removed from the Nazi ideal of German womanhood than Mary. Not only did she have no interest in Kinder, Küche, Kirche [children, kitchen, church], but her immaculate uniform, jackboots, cropped hair and enormous ego were a blatant challenge to male authority.

That men who had fought in the trenches should do everything possible to prevent such a war happening again is easy to understand but does not entirely explain why a number of them became so obsessed with fascism.

Pitt-Rivers was soon having regular meetings with the likes of Professor Karl Astel, chairman of the Hereditary Health Supreme Court – the court in Weimar that decided who was to be forcibly sterilised. ‘Our mission’, Astel wrote to Himmler, ‘is ceaselessly to promote a nobler, sounder, healthier life in conformity with the species.’

Crosfield, whose response to losing a leg in the First World War had been promptly to join the RAF, came from an old Quaker family and was no fascist. Indeed, by his own admission he went to Germany deeply prejudiced against Hitler. But then he met him:

We came away deeply impressed with his simplicity, sincerity, fanatical devotion to his country, and feeling convinced that he was genuinely anxious to avoid another world war.27

What they could not have known was that the ‘degenerate criminals’ paraded before them were in fact camp guards in disguise, and that numerous other foreigners had been similarly duped.

Eric Fenn remembered ‘the stupefaction of the Nazis at the spectacle of Mrs Pakenham – a good looking mother of six children and yet an Oxford graduate, a Labour councillor and an author who knew a good deal about economics’.29 In other words, a woman light years away from the Kinder, Küche, Kirche version so beloved by the regime.

and who should never have been allowed to come.’ 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.

As part of this skilful wedge-driving exercise, the maharaja no doubt understood exactly what he was doing when he asked the young diplomat Baron Dietrich von Mirbach for the name of a good German lawyer capable of writing a new constitution for Patiala.* It was a request that, in the light of the British government’s continued reluctance to deal more closely with Hitler, would have been keenly noted by von Mirbach’s superiors.

The question that thoroughly decent men like Crosfield should have been asking after a visit to Hitler’s Germany is why, if government by brutal suppression, corrupt law and the merciless persecution of all opposition was unacceptable in Britain, should it have been any less so in the Third Reich? The tragedy is that, by turning a blind eye to such searing issues, these gallant soldiers only succeeded in bringing closer the very conflict that they so desperately sought to avert.

From the moment he set foot in the country, the naturalist and novelist became an ardent advocate for the regime, soaking up its propaganda, never questioning its claims. He was particularly attracted by the Führer’s vision (‘an improved version of Lenin’s’), ‘based on every man owning, in a trustee-to-nation sense, his own bit of land and fulfilling himself in living a natural life’.

The Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament, had a catchphrase – ‘God Control’. Buchman’s big idea was that world peace would come only through ‘God-controlled nations’ created by ‘God-controlled personalities’.

‘There are those who feel that internationalism is not enough,’ he told his audience. ‘Nationalism can make a nation. Super-nationalism can make a world. God-controlled nationalism seems to be the only sure foundation for world peace.’

But if the emotional and psychological thrust of his novels inspired the literary avant-garde, paradoxically Hamsun also struck a deep chord with the Nazis. Indeed, he achieved the remarkable feat of being cited as a favourite writer by both Hermann Hesse and Joseph Goebbels.

Cecilia you are living in a great and wonderful country. You mustn’t go writing to the maid about this or that person committing suicide, they will think it is awful in Germany. Write about the things Hitler and his government are achieving, despite the whole world’s hatred and hostility. You and I and everybody will thank and bless Germany. It is the country of the future.

‘I opened a door and was immediately greeted by such a slough of filth and fetid odors, and stupid and corrupted faces that my heart recoiled. An old man all hair and eyes and yellowed whiskers … was sitting at one of the tables, slobbing up some mess out of a plate on to his whiskers.’19 But this unlovely scene was for Wolfe an aberration that bore little relation to the real Germany.

Although friends like Martha Dodd did their best to open Wolfe’s eyes, he was as reluctant to let go his German idyll as he was to be influenced by the views of others. But, although on that occasion he returned to America his illusions largely intact, seeds of doubt had begun to take root.

trembling with murderous and incomprehensible anger. I wanted to smash that fat neck with the creases in it, I wanted to pound that inflamed and blunted face into a jelly. I wanted to kick square and hard, bury my foot, dead center in the obscene fleshiness of those clumsy buttocks. And I knew that I was helpless, that all of us were … I felt impotent, shackled, unable to stir against the walls of an obscene but unshakable authority.22

In October 1935 the Swiss literary and cultural philosopher Denis de Rougemont took up a post at Frankfurt University teaching literature. His academic friends in Paris were astonished but, as he explained, he believed that it was important to study Hitler in his own setting through the eyes of both his followers and his victims.

meticulously catalogued in Journal d’Allemagne.

What unsettled him was the fact that those who stood most naturally on the right – lawyers, doctors, industrialists and so on – were the very ones who most bitterly denounced National Socialism.

They were taxed disproportionately, their family life had been irreparably harmed, parental authority sapped, religion stripped and education eliminated.

where she interviewed dozens of middle-class professionals. In her book Darkness over Germany (1943) she vividly records the torment so many experienced in trying to decide how best to resist the Nazis. 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.

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.