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

by Julia Boyd

Although he gave nothing away, the next day sensational headlines announced that three Quakers were to intercede with Hitler on behalf of the Jews. Picked up in London, the story soon reached Germany, prompting Goebbels to write a scathing article – ‘The Coming of the “Three Wise Men” to “save” Germany’.17 The little delegation had not even reached Europe and its mission was already in deep trouble.

The Quakers’ first attempt to contact the authorities was made at the German Foreign Office. But when the German ambassador to the United States (recalled to Berlin) spotted them in a corridor, he fled. ‘We

Raymond Geist, who made the breakthrough. ‘If ever there was a good man, he was one,’ noted Jones. After failing repeatedly to reach Gestapo headquarters on the telephone, Geist ‘seized his hat’ and disappeared into the worst storm and coldest temperatures recorded in Berlin for eighty years.

George Walton described the leading actors in the ensuing scene. ‘Rufus, clear, positive, brief, daring: Geist, crusty, clever direct, a magic open sesame: Lischka, tall, quick earnest, responsive, partly bald, punctilious.’19 Jones handed the ‘granite-faced’ men a statement that he had already prepared. It was a reminder of the warm relationship the Germans had enjoyed with the Friends after the Great War; and of how the Quakers had fed over 2 million children a day, importing hundreds of cows to supply milk to children in hospital, and coal to keep the hospitals heated. The document emphasised the fact that the Friends did not represent any government, international organisation, political party or sect. Nor did they have any interest in propaganda.

To their astonishment, Heydrich agreed to everything in their plan. But when Jones asked for written confirmation, he was informed that, while the Gestapo never gave its decisions in writing, every word of their discussion had been taped. ‘We were glad then’, Jones wrote, ‘that we had kept the period of hush and quiet and had uttered no words for the record.’

Certainly Jones continued to believe that they had touched the hearts of their cruel interlocutors. ‘The gentleness of the men at the end of our meeting, the fact they went and got our coats and helped us put them on and shook our hands with goodbye wishes and with a touch of gentleness made me feel then and now in retrospect, that something unique had happened in their inside selves.’ It was as well that Jones, who died in 1948, never knew that it was Lischka himself who, in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, led the operation to incarcerate 30,000 Jews.

Gilbert also commented on the behaviour of his fellow diplomats, post-Kristallnacht. No longer did they accept invitations from the likes of Rosenberg and Goebbels. And, at those parties they did attend, they hardly spoke to the Germans, preferring to cluster together and discuss the latest excesses against the Jews.

gave a harrowing account of his recent imprisonment in Dachau. Clark noted how their ‘tragic position’ was intensified by fear of their servant. ‘Every few minutes his wife walked to the door to see whether she was listening to our conversation.’

Six weeks later, as German tanks rolled into Prague, Ji Xianlin was awoken in Göttingen by the national anthem blaring out of the radio. ‘Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia,’ his landlady announced. She then kept repeating, ‘Hitler only wants peace, the Czechs were tyrannising the Germans – it’s all the Jews’ fault, just like the papers say.’ ‘I was so angry,’ wrote Ji Xianlin, ‘I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry … the ordinary German bastards believe all this. I’ll die unhappy if I don’t see this whole German edifice collapse and them all reduced to slavery.’

They really believed, Jamieson informed his patron, that the Czech government had voluntarily sought Hitler’s protection, and ‘that they would all starve if they do not get this living room [Lebensraum] they talk about, and colonies.

Despite the fact that the professor (an authority on Shakespeare) regularly read The Times and listened each night to the BBC, he too was utterly convinced that Germany was encircled by hostile countries and would starve if prevented from expanding to the East.

engineering inspectors headquartered in Essen. One of them related how he had been physically thrown out of a Polish post office the moment he started speaking German, although he had always spoken it there on previous trips. It seems extraordinary that these inspectors were able to travel all over Europe checking materials for foreign buyers until just a few weeks before the outbreak of war.

with Stuart it was loyalty to the Republican cause and a longing for a new world order. In Hitler he saw ‘a kind of blind Samson who was pulling down the pillars of Western Society as we knew it, which I still believed had to come about before any new world could arise’.15

He was not noticeably moved by the Jewish situation. ‘I have heard something of the Jewish activities prior to 1933 here and in cooperation with the communists,’

Stuart was invited to return later in the year to teach English and Irish literature at Berlin University. His decision to accept the job was to have far-reaching consequences from which neither he nor his reputation would ever be entirely free.

there were some, like opera fans Ida and Louise Cook, who were equally determined to get in.

From that time until just two weeks before the outbreak of war, the sisters travelled regularly to Germany helping Jews to organise their emigration documents, and smuggling their valuables back to England.

(she was to publish over a hundred novels with Mills & Boon under the pseudonym of Mary Burchell) provided ample funds for their heroic venture.

This was vital because on the outward journey they dressed simply, wearing not a single item of jewellery – not even a wristwatch. On the return trip, however, these ordinary-looking women were transformed into fur-clad ‘overdressed English girls with a taste for slightly too much jewellery’.26 As neither of the sisters had pierced ears, they never carried that type of earring, knowing that this was precisely the sort of discrepancy the German officials had been trained to spot.

By New Year’s Eve the family was back in Berlin where, close to midnight, Flannery was preparing a broadcast in the press office. William and Margaret Joyce, better known as Lord and Lady Haw-Haw, were also in the building and invited Flannery to join them in a bottle of champagne:

Flannery interviewed a German pilot who had flown some twenty raids over London. The pilot’s flawless English surprised Flannery until the young man admitted that his mother was British, and that his grandparents lived in London. The American asked him if he had ever bombed their area. ‘Yes, I have,’ he replied. ‘I try not to think about

Certainly where bombing and food were concerned, life in the countryside was vastly better than in the cities. As Ji Xianlin put it, ‘If anyone had contact with a peasant, others would drool with envy.’

Exactly one month after Easter, at 5.45 on the evening of 10 May, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess climbed into his Messerschmitt and flew to Scotland. His futile attempt to open peace negotiations with Britain, through the Duke of Hamilton, came as a great shock to the German public.

only six weeks later, Hess’s act of derring-do paled into insignificance compared with the events of 22 June. On that day, as Ji learned from his landlady, Germany invaded Russia.

The sight of the bedraggled slave workers dressed in rags confirmed everything the young women had been told about the Poles being sub-human. After several attempts to enlighten them, Biddy gave up the task as hopeless.

He saw them as ‘a new Germanic creation’, but one drawn from an ancient past. He likened them to an order of ‘militant monks’, as they wandered through the streets, tall and elegant in their uniforms. ‘They live ingenuously,’ he wrote, ‘in total self-denial … they do not seem to feel sorrow, or fear, or hunger, or desire: they are the angels of war come down for a moment from the heaven of Niflheim* to help people perform a task that is too difficult for them.’

Tétaz noticed that the French enjoyed greater freedom than other foreigners. They had, in consequence, taken over many of the better jobs vacated by Germans. To his surprise, rather than stoke their traditional enmity, this new contact had made the two nationalities realise how much they had in common.

‘I know of nobody, Herr Reichsminister,’ he wrote in an accompanying note, ‘who has unstintingly, year after year written and spoken on Europe’s and humanity’s behalf as idealistically as yourself. I ask your forgiveness for sending you my medal. It is of no use to you whatsoever, but I have nothing else to offer.’

Hitler, no doubt briefed by Goebbels on Hamsun’s genius, wanted to talk only about writing, Hamsun only about politics. The eighty-four-year-old (who had recently suffered a stroke and was deaf) refused to be deflected, even committing the gross sin of interrupting the Führer. At one point the old man wept openly as he unburdened his pain. ‘The Reichskommissar’s methods do not suit our country,’ he told Hitler. ‘His Prussian ways are intolerable. And then all the executions. We can’t take any more.’ Furious, Hitler responded by throwing up his arms in disgust and walking out on to the terrace.13 For Hamsun, it was a disastrous outcome. Yet, as his biographer observes, he returned to Norway still believing in the Führer and the sacred mission of the Third Reich to create a new and better world.

Every now and then Biddy would go upstairs to her balcony to cook potatoes in a broken pail with wood collected from bombed buildings. Suddenly they heard soldiers running in the street. ‘Then someone rattled at the cellar door and it opened. We all sat as if we had been turned to stone.’ A Russian soldier entered the cellar and sat down to bandage his finger. He gave Gerda a sweet and left a message on a postcard that Biddy later had translated. ‘Now you are all safe and you will have democracy and the little girl will learn Russian.’ A week of chaos followed, in which, Biddy, along with the whole street, went looting. Then, at last, the miracle happened. The barrage ceased.

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.

By the mid-1930s most visitors, even before they arrived, had made up their minds as to which camp they belonged. It is easy enough to see why those on the far right were drawn to Nazi Germany and why those on the left stayed away.

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.

In comparison with the orderly discipline and purposefulness they saw in Nazi Germany, their own democratic governments appeared hopelessly feeble and inadequate.

if the witnesses in these pages are to be believed, the great majority of Germans dreaded war just as deeply as those on whom they were about to inflict it.

The similarities in method, for instance, between National Socialism and communism; Jews who were themselves anti-Semitic; the kindness and cruelty, the cosiness and street violence, the raucous singing and reverence for Beethoven … No wonder that Du Bois, along with so many others, found it hard to come up with a comprehensive view.

There is, however, a difference between ‘not seeing’ and ‘not knowing’. And after Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, there could be no possible excuse for any foreign traveller to claim that they ‘did not know’ the Nazis’ true colours.