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by
Julia Boyd
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June 29 - August 5, 2018
the distinction between National Socialism and communism. Many foreigners wondered how it was possible that two such violently opposed political movements could share so much common ground.
‘But Rochus, what then is the difference between National Socialism and Communism? The German threw up his hands in horror, “Psst Katie, das darf man nicht sagen [Hush, one must not say that].”’
Sitting one afternoon in a crowded hall listening to a lengthy Nazi harangue, she rose to her feet and with her very English accent asked the speaker if he would be so good as to explain to her the difference between National Socialism and communism. There was a shocked silence. When, with some pride, Joan later recounted this episode to her landlady, the Baronin turned white, terrified that her young lodger’s faux pas might rebound on her.
We want work and our cup of café au lait in the morning … that is enough. Politics don’t interest the workers when they have food and work.
I will tell you one thing: if they abandon him, all these fat pigs who are around him … I will go and fight for him! He at least is a sincere man; he is the only one.30
foreigners travelling or living in the Third Reich, liked to emphasise the difference between the ‘liberal European’ type and the ‘vulgar, arrogant’ Jew who, by implication, always emanated from Eastern Europe. In making this distinction, such people displayed their own latent (and often unconscious) anti-Semitism.
his view, were the real source of the problem. ‘Paunchy and ringed, a cigar in the middle of the mouth’, they justified the worst of Hitler’s propaganda. ‘No need to resort to openly false documents like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’
Nevertheless he took with him protection in the form of a letter signed by Prince Bismarck, then a diplomat at the German Embassy in London.
For it was quite obvious to everyone that no one possessing such ‘a dear little thing’ could possibly be a Jew.35
Her novel Hotel Amerika (1930) is an exposé, as she saw it, of the American dream. In another of her books, Elisabeth, Ein Hitlermädchen (1937), she laid bare the extent to which the Nazis had kidnapped German youth – a theme endlessly reiterated by despairing parents to de Rougemont. ‘Every evening my two children are taken over by the Party,’ the wife of a lawyer complained to him:
Naturally they are delighted. They feel free because liberty for a teenager is when you don’t have to be with your family.36
As Leitner points out, villages like this played a key role in the Nazis’ rise to power. Before Hitler, the farmers had been largely apolitical but in the early days of National Socialism they had sat in their pubs (the one in this village, she noted, had shining glaciers and gentians painted on its stained black walls) listening to and believing everything the Nazis promised them.
all the disturbing pieces that she wrote from Nazi Germany, arguably the most striking is Die Stummen von Höchst [The Dumb Ones of Höchst].
One old man sitting on a bench by the factory told her that there had never before been such a smell in Höchst, and he was now seventy-two. He went on in a whisper: ‘No one may talk about what they are brewing up, but they must have discovered a most deadly poison.’
But Heine was Jewish and the room in the library that contained his books, his bust – even his stuffed parrot – had for many years been locked and forgotten.
For a few precious minutes she was allowed to commune with the poet’s books in their frayed bindings. ‘Then we are out. The key rasps again.’
Then, a few weeks after his arrival, an explicit order was sent out to art galleries and museums to strip their walls of ‘degenerate’ modern pictures. Across the country thousands of masterpieces by the likes of Klee, Nolde and Munch were cast into darkness. Sometimes Beckett was permitted to view them in the cellars, where many ended up, but as often his requests met with blank refusal.
It was the inconsequential details of human experience that most absorbed him – the ‘straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths’ because, he argued, this was all that he could really know.43 Any attempt to make sense of human chaos, whether on an individual or historical scale, was futile.
‘Beckett liked chronologies, loved tiny, verifiable details of individual human lives and had no time for broad sweeping analyses of motives or movements.’
In order to prevent Rassenschande [racial impurity], no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked a Herr Levi’s Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him, she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five.
Right from the outset of his trip, Beckett had recognised that ‘Germany must fight soon (or burst)’.52 As he boarded the aeroplane for England on 1 April 1937, he was convinced that he would never return.53
When Shirer organised a lunch party for the American Embassy’s commercial attaché to brief visiting businessmen on the true state of affairs, the diplomat’s words fell on deaf ears.7 His audience believed the propaganda because they wanted to.
Part of the way down they came to a large pine tree lying across the trail. ‘Dr Votsch pulled a little whistle out of his pocket and blew one blast.’ Two minutes later ten Nazi soldiers emerged from the forest skiing in single file and singing in close harmony. At a word of command they removed the tree and disappeared back into the forest – still singing.
In common with many of the American athletes who took part in both winter and summer Olympics, there was little in Brown’s modest rural background to prepare him for his European adventure let alone a studied appraisal of German politics.
But he had to admit that all traces of anti-Semitism had disappeared. The familiar signs forbidding Jews to enter this or that had been systematically removed. Despite Nazi thoroughness, Pegler noted that copies of Der Stürmer (Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic tabloid) were occasionally smuggled into Garmisch and shown to incredulous foreigners.
washed the snowy hills in artificial moonlight as the batteries of 3 inch guns banged away in a concealed position halfway up the slope, reminding us all that the beautiful Olympic flame, which was now dying slowly on the tower, was only a light after all and didn’t mean a thing.
‘Learn that Lord Londonderry was here around the first of the month … He is an all-out pro-Nazi. Fear he has not been up to any good.’
It was a warm day. The doors to the balcony were open. I was standing nearby when I saw Remondeau [French military attaché] take von Pappenheim [a senior officer on the German General Staff] by the arm and draw him out on the balcony. I edged nearer, my back to the balcony and them. I heard Remondeau ask: ‘Are you going to reoccupy the Rhineland?’… Pappenheim was taken by surprise. He turned red and began to stammer … ‘No surely not.’ ‘Do you swear on your honour?’ ‘Ich schwöre.’ … I could scarcely wait to tell Truman that the reoccupation was certain!
She recalled how Hitler, after his usual tirade, dropped his voice to a more normal pitch before announcing that German troops were at that very moment crossing the Rhine Bridge. ‘Then we heard the bells of Cologne cathedral ring out.’
no bombers appeared. Nor did they the next day, nor in the weeks to follow. Hitler’s great gamble had paid off.
‘From the moment when, as the German papers put it, “the English boys began to thaw”, we felt ourselves true ambassadors of peace and goodwill. We felt that if international relations depended on Charterhouse hockey teams wars and rumours of wars would cease forever.’
The Lindberghs’ visit was a gift to the Nazis – especially coming as it did one week before the opening of the Berlin Olympics.
‘You think so?’ His eyes sharpened for a second as he looked quickly at me. It was one of those glances that are like a crack of light, letting one see through to a vista beyond. He showed in that glance, pleasure, eagerness, hope, vulnerability, held under check behind that quick taken-by-surprise ‘You think so?’ He can’t make conversation about it. They are so eager for it. That sense of vulnerability…
The doors were flung open and in bounded a young lion … He was much startled by seeing so many people and not too happy. Göring placed himself in a large armchair. ‘I want you to see how nice my Augie is. Come here Augie.’ The lion bounded across the room and sprang into his lap. He put his paws on Göring’s shoulders and began licking his face. I stood behind, a large table between us at a safe distance. Suddenly an aide laughed. The startled lion let loose a flood of yellow urine all over the snow white uniform! A wave of red flowed up Göring’s neck. He tossed the lion from him with a wave of
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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.’
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.
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’.
When asked if she would like to meet Hitler, she famously said, ‘No.’
‘When I came home, somebody asked me “How did those dirty Nazis treat you?” I replied that I didn’t see any dirty Nazis, just a lot of nice German people. And I didn’t have to ride in the back of the bus.’
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.’
When the Olympic Games are done Then with Jews we’ll have some fun
‘the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction’.
When asked by a journalist, after his return to America, whether he thought the Germans were happy, he replied, ‘Happy no, but full of hope.’
There had been no tragedy in modern times to equal this hounding of the Jews. ‘It is an attack on civilization,’ he wrote, ‘comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.’
It was impossible, he maintained, to compare the situation of the ‘Negroes’ in America with that of the Jews in Germany because ‘what is happening in Germany is happening in a lawful way and openly, even if it is cruel and unjust. But in the US, the Negro is persecuted and repressed secretly in flagrant violation of the laws.’
this did not, as he explained to his readers, ‘mean that I have not enjoyed my five months in Germany. I have. I have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration.’ Then, echoing comments made by the black Olympic athletes, he wrote: ‘It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent, cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.’
was not at all deceived by the attitude of Germans towards me and the very few Negroes who happened to be visiting them,’ he wrote to the secretary of the Jewish American Committee. ‘Theoretically their attitude towards Negroes is just as bad as towards Jews, and if there were any number of Negroes in Germany, would be expressed in the same way.’
‘Nothing in France’, de Rougemont wrote, ‘can give any idea of the demagogic violence of these articles … their offensiveness, the determination to chase the opposition and beat them down to the very last resort, even to their deepest inner life. They are no longer content with even an exemplary submission. Anyone who does not demonstrate a joyful ardour in the service of the Party is denounced.’ To make his point, he quoted a Nazi litany published in Frankfurt University’s party newspaper: I have followed my course with zeal, I have shone in the seminar, I have given half a sou to the
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Now students wore drab SA uniforms and spent their evenings discussing ‘Germany’s Racial Destiny’, ‘Nordic Science’ or ‘The Place of Woman in the National Socialistic State’.17 These were the students who on the evening of 27 June lined the streets, forming a barrier with the leather straps that were normally slung across their shoulders as part of their uniform. Sybil noticed how young they were and how they broke their line ‘with great good humour’ whenever she and her friend wanted to cross a road.
Torrents of soot began to rain down on everyone covering their heads, faces and clothes with black.’ It was, she might have added, a perfect metaphor for the Third Reich.
