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

by Julia Boyd

Every institution of higher learning throughout Germany, Herr Rust intoned, must shape itself in harmony with the Reich’s social, political and racial ideals. ‘We were frankly told’, wrote Remy, ‘that for men who cannot conform to this requirement there was no place on the staff of a German university and that the dismissal of certain professors was therefore necessary and justified.’

Heidegger, who liked to lecture in Nazi uniform at Freiburg University (where he had been rector, 1933–1934), had been personally involved in the expulsion of Jews from his university.

Later, when she read newspaper accounts of the day’s proceedings, she was disappointed to find no mention of any speech made by a foreigner. She soon discovered why: overseas delegates had been allotted only five minutes each. It was, as the New York Times reported, perfectly obvious that the festivities were entirely controlled by the Nazis from start to finish. Indeed, a special Propaganda Ministry office had been established in the town to run each event down to the last detail.

‘How charming and polite they were!’ Moving on to the Black Forest, the girls seem to have been quite unperturbed when they saw ‘what looked like a section of the woodland moving towards us, but what turned out to be soldiers with well camouflaged armoured tanks’. Making light of this encounter with the Nazi war machine, they laughingly agreed that now they knew how Macbeth felt.

had a most intriguing discussion with him about Jews and Communists. At first he wouldn’t even let me mention them, but finally we got around to the fact that there really were some nice Jews and he even went so far as to say that in theory Communism had some good ideas.

After supper, the family would sit round the wireless, ‘quite a luxury’, Lisa observed, chatting, sewing and reading. In fact, the radio had become such a vital propaganda tool that it was not as rare as Lisa had supposed. 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.

There were of course professors like Tansill who genuinely sympathised with Nazi ideology and eagerly sought to identify with the regime. But many other academics chose to travel in the Third Reich because Germany’s cultural heritage was simply too precious to renounce for politics, however unpleasant those politics might be. They allowed their reverence for the past to warp their judgement of the present. As a result they wilfully ignored the realities of a dictatorship that by 1936 – despite the Olympic mirage – was unashamedly parading itself so prominently in all its unspeakable colours.

‘his music is immortal, and will continue to be played in all civilised countries with the exception of Germany where it is strictly forbidden. The whole cultural world of Germany thinks and feels as I do … It includes in its daily prayers the cry for help and freedom.’

‘If the War had been won by the Allies,’ Hitler said quietly, ‘it was not in the first place the soldiers to whom victory was due, but to one great statesman and that is yourself Mr Lloyd George.’ With ‘a tear in his throat’,13 the elderly politician replied that he was deeply touched by the Führer’s personal tribute and was particularly proud to hear it paid him by ‘the greatest German of the age’.

Back in England, Lloyd George’s praise of Hitler verged on the ecstatic, as his notorious interview with the Daily Express makes clear. ‘He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart … He is the George Washington of Germany – the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors.’ Even more to the point, Hitler was unquestionably a man of peace.

by the middle of 1937, a new coolness had entered Anglo-German relations. From the German side, the decline in approval was the result of Britain’s persistent failure to go into partnership with the Nazis, Germany’s increasing strength and the hostility of the British press.

Ji Xianlin, studying Sanskrit in Göttingen, recorded in his diary on 20 September that it was the first day of air-raid practice. ‘No light allowed anywhere. All windows pasted with black paper. It lasts all week.’

Yet despite the new frost in relations with Britain, despite air-raid week, despite the persistent cry of ‘guns before butter’ and despite Hitler’s relentless push for a free hand in Eastern Europe, one distinguished foreigner after another returned home from Germany convinced that war was the last thing on the Führer’s mind.

Forwood was probably right when he maintained that the Duke of Windsor’s chief purpose in going to Germany was to make the Duchess feel like a queen. For what better way of doing that than by giving her a ‘state’ visit?

‘As I looked out of the car window,’ Halifax recorded in his diary, ‘I saw … a pair of black trousered legs, finishing up in silk socks and pumps. I assumed this was a footman who had come down to help me out of the car … when I heard a hoarse whisper in my ear of “Der Führer, Der Führer”; and then it dawned upon me that the legs were not the legs of a footman, but of Hitler.’

‘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.’

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 slightly more realistic view of the regime. Klaus hasn’t been half so ardent since.

Anybody that talks about a social system where the state is all-powerful and thinks it will be paradise, had better keep still and thank the lord that nothing like that has happened to us yet. He just doesn’t know his onions.7

It would seem that even those travellers fundamentally hostile to the Nazis instinctively looked beyond the regime to what they imagined to be the real Germany; a country that, despite everything, maintained its enduring power to beguile and entrance.

On 12 March 1938 Hitler annexed Austria – the Anschluss.

Trains to the frontier were packed mostly with Jews but also with a large number of English visitors from the winter sports resorts around Innsbruck who thought it better to leave Austria. The Jews were taken en masse to police headquarters in Innsbruck and searched to the skin for contraband currency. English visitors to the winter sports resorts were allowed to keep the money they had with them.

By mid-1937 the number of British Nazi supporters had already diminished significantly, but of those now remaining, none was more fervent than Pitt-Rivers. The Anschluss, in his view, was a splendid achievement. On returning from one of his many trips to Germany, he wrote to congratulate the Führer: ‘Allow me, an old British officer and sincere friend of Germany … to express my sentiments of profound thankfulness that the Anschluss with Austria has been accomplished under your leadership without bloodshed and with the rejoicing of all the German and Austrian peoples.’

on 8 August, 300 miles to the south at Linz, Hitler’s hometown, the new Mauthausen concentration camp was being built. Intended for the Reich’s most incorrigible enemies – many of them drawn from the intelligentsia – the plan was to exterminate them through slave labour in the local quarries, mines and munitions factories.

It was on this same day that it became mandatory for Jews with non-Jewish names to identify themselves as ‘Israel’ if male and ‘Sarah’ if female.

Almost exactly one year later, on 18 September 1939, Lieutenant Viktor von Ratibor, hereditary Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, was burned alive in his tank at the battle of Brochów, forty miles west of Warsaw.

In her haste to leave Rauden, Joan had forgotten that she needed a re-entry visa for Austria. The guard slowly turned the pages of her passport, carefully examining each one. As he handed it back to her, he told her she must get off the train and go to Prague in order to obtain the correct visa before she would be allowed to enter Austria.

in order to avoid joining the army or Hitler Youth, many Austrians had simply fled to the mountains. Foreigners had stopped coming and the best hotels were now forced to take KdF tourists at half the normal price.

Almost exactly a year later, on 31 August 1939, the so-called ‘Gleiwitz incident’ occurred. Contrived by the Nazis, it provided Hitler with the pretext to invade Poland the following day, 1 September.

Minister President Chamberlain [sic] of England had asked Hitler to receive him at the Berghof and that he was ready to fly to him the next day. I looked around at the many attachés and German officers at the surrounding tables. All were dumbfounded. Care was written on the face of many a foreigner and happiness on the faces of all the Germans. It was as if the fatal hour for Europe had struck.

Chamberlain told Hitler that he was personally in favour of breaking up Czechoslovakia, but that he did not have the approval of his Cabinet or the French government and would have to return to London first … On Sunday the 18th the British Cabinet approved Chamberlain’s plan that the German districts of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany

Numa Tétaz was still working in Bavaria. His book Ich war dabei, 20 Jahre Nationalsozialismus 1923–43 [I Was There, 20 Years of National Socialism] is a compelling read. But because it was published in 1944,

pseudonym of René Juvet. 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

‘I cannot remember’, wrote Tétaz, ‘ever hearing a more sensational piece of news than the announcement of Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.’ ‘You’ll see,’ one colleague said to him, ‘peace will be preserved and Hitler will achieve his goal without violence. If Germany and England were not already fundamentally united, old Chamberlain wouldn’t have risked going to Berchtesgaden and becoming the scapegoat had the meeting failed.’ The Nazi was triumphant.

between the two Germanic master-races – Germany and England – would, he claimed, give Germany Lebensraum in Europe and allow Britain to go on ruling the waves. Germany would at last get back its colonies, although that was now a less pressing concern since it would soon gain enough land in the East to keep its citizens going for generations.

Because a Nazi spy had been planted among them, several had been sent off to concentration camps.

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.’

Wherever the British prime minister turned up in Munich he was cheered by jubilant crowds. Unusually, so the Swiss noted, Nazi propaganda was based on a genuinely spontaneous public response.

Their disgust with the regime did not extend to wanting a war in order to destroy it. Then

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.

The firm’s locksmith did not join the celebrations. Although by no means the only individual in Germany to be unmoved by all the excitement, he knew that on that day above all others it would have been suicidal to express his true feelings.4

By the middle of October life in Germany had more or less returned to normal.

His wife wrote, ‘The change from imminent war to peace was overwhelming … I was dazed and others with me. Bombs were not going to fall within the next half hour! It was incredible.’

three weeks after Truman Smith’s letter, came the catastrophic news of Kristallnacht. 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.

they broke the windows of all the Jewish shops in retaliation, and as a future warning, for the death of Ernst vom Rath who was murdered in Paris at the German Embassy by a [German-born] Polish Jew.’

she settled into an inexpensive hotel opposite a clothes shop. Displayed in the window was a scarlet frock she longed to buy. But not knowing how much her treatment would cost, she dared not. However, after two painful injections, she found to her great delight that she had just enough money left over to purchase it the next day before returning to England. She slept heavily that night but was dimly aware of a good deal of shouting and the sound of splintering glass. The next morning she rose early, eager to buy the dress. But when she drew back her bedroom curtains she saw the shop smashed to pieces and the dress gone.

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.

He told the Swiss how relieved he was that he had not been in Nuremberg that night, as he would have hated the violence. Tétaz then asked him whether, if he had been there, he would have taken part. ‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘Orders are orders.’

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.’

Worried that starvation would follow the violence, their first concern was how to provide enough food for the Jews. Those present at the meeting were oppressed by a sense of déjà-vu. Was it really possible that another Quaker feeding programme was required in Germany only twenty years after the last? They held a number of ‘quiet’ conversations before deciding to send a small delegation to Germany

Matter is no doubt stubborn, but nothing in the universe is so utterly unconquerable as a mind possessed by a set of ideas that have become entrenched and sacred … Whether we can influence minds or soften hearts or make spiritual forces seem real – that remains to be seen. We shall do our best and wisest and we shall go in the strength of God.