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

by Julia Boyd

For anyone born after the Second World War, it has always been impossible to view this period with detachment. Images of Nazi atrocities are so powerful that they can never be suppressed or set aside. But what was it like to travel in the Third Reich without the benefit of post-war hindsight? How easy was it then to know what was really going on, to grasp the essence of National Socialism, to remain untouched by the propaganda or predict the Holocaust? And was the experience transformative or did it merely reinforce established prejudices?

According to the American journalist Westbrook Pegler, writing in 1936, the British ‘have an optimistic illusion that the Nazi is a human being under his scales. Their present tolerance is not acceptance of the brute so much as a hope that by encouragement and an appeal to his better nature, he may one day be housebroken.’2 There was much truth in this.

Any derogatory comment regarding the persecution of Jews invited comparison with the United States’ treatment of its black population – an avenue that few ordinary Americans were anxious to explore.

They went to Germany (as indeed they did to Soviet Russia) intent on confirming rather than confronting their expectations. Surprisingly few, it would seem, underwent a change of heart as a direct result of their travels. Those on the right therefore found a hard-working, confident people, shaking off the wrongs they had suffered under Versailles while at the same time protecting the rest of Europe from Bolshevism.

Dread of war was the most important factor in many foreigners’ responses to the Reich but this was especially acute among ex-servicemen. Their longing to believe that Hitler really was a man of peace, that the Nazi revolution would in time calm down and become civilised and that Germany’s intentions were genuinely as benign as its citizens kept promising, resulted in many of them travelling frequently to the new Germany and offering it their support.

very beguiling, but it is the date of the leaflet that makes it so striking. Printed only months after the end of the First World War, it was a brave attempt by Germany’s leading hotels (among them the Hotel Bristol in Berlin and the Englischer Hof in Frankfurt) to stimulate tourism. Naturally its few pages give no hint of the horror that had so recently consumed Europe and for which Germany was widely held responsible.

The youth on the cover may never have experienced a trench or seen his friends blown apart by an exploding shell, but for those who had, and for Germany’s millions of hungry citizens, the brochure’s cheerful propaganda

They had lost faith in their leadership, dreaded communism and, with the wartime blockade still firmly in place, continued to starve. Far from being the alluring holiday destination as promised by the brochure, Germany in 1919 was a bleak and desperate place.

This conviction that the German army remained undefeated was deeply rooted – as foreigners soon discovered.

Indeed, he could not recall a single German ever expressing remorse: ‘They seemed to take the war as a natural, unavoidable thing,’ he wrote, ‘just a part of life, as the gambler takes gambling, with no other regret than it was their bad luck to lose.’

Germans were not allowed to travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph or publish newspapers, without American permission. Nor were they permitted to drink anything stronger than beer or wine, or to gather in a café unless given written consent. Regulations such as the rule compelling householders to keep their windows open at night were a reminder of just how deeply the occupation affected the most intimate details of civilian life.6 And in case anyone in Koblenz still needed reminding who was in charge, a colossal Stars and Stripes could be seen for miles around, floating above the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress

Before the English came we starved. Now there is money in circulation and the shops are filled with foodstuffs and even dairy products brought from England, France and Scandinavia. Many of the English officers and men we have found friendly. I have married one. I had two English officers billeted in my house.

In July 1919 she accompanied her colonel husband on his posting to Cologne. She too was astonished by ‘the civility of these Germans among whom we live as conquerors … how can they, outwardly at least, bear so little grudge against the people who have beaten them?’

‘Gertrude, the cross cook, is a lump of respectability and virtue,’ commented Markham. ‘She hates the English with a complete and deadly hatred, hence a series of feuds with a succession of soldier servants.’16 Gertrude’s views were perhaps more commonly held than the likes of Markham were prepared to acknowledge.

Franck was not the only traveller in Germany during the immediate post-war period to be struck by this outward normality. But, as the defence minister, Gustav Noske (a former master butcher), explained to Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart Roddie, they were deceived in the same way that ‘a hectic flush gives the appearance of health to a patient who is in fact dying of galloping consumption’.

Allied soldiers were able to wander freely about the city unconcerned for their safety. ‘Doughboys were quite as much at home along Unter den Linden as if they had been strolling down Main Street in Des Moines,’ he wrote. However, the anti-communism and anti-Semitism that were to become such hallmarks of Germany’s inter-war years were already much in evidence.

there was really only one issue that mattered to Berliners in 1919, and that was food. Any conversation quickly reverted to this topic, which, with the exception of profiteers and the very rich, permeated every aspect of everyone’s life.

For a woman who until she was forty-five had never left home unchaperoned or even been to the theatre (she was descended from eight generations of Quakers on both sides of her family), Fry appeared remarkably undaunted by their mission: to mitigate the suffering caused by the Allied blockade, and to demonstrate Quaker empathy with an utterly demoralised people.

much larger party of American Quakers also arrived in Berlin to spearhead the ‘Child Feeding’, an aid programme supported by Herbert Hoover that at its peak provided nourishment for some 1.75 million children.

For the few civilian foreigners who, like Joan Fry and Harry Franck, were travelling east of the Rhine during the summer of 1919, the shock and despair felt by ordinary people in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (signed on 28 June) was impossible to ignore. Firm in the belief that they had been honourably defeated and confident that President Wilson would guarantee them fair treatment, most Germans were quite unprepared for the humiliation it imposed on their country.

1923, Violet Bonham Carter, accompanied by her maid, boarded a train at Liverpool Street Station in London. Daughter of Herbert Asquith (British prime minister, 1908–1916) and shortly to be elected chairman of the National Liberal Federation, she was bound for Berlin. Her purpose was to investigate the French occupation of the Ruhr – an act she regarded as one of ‘dangerous insanity’.

marched into Germany’s industrial heartland intent on extracting the coal that their countries had been promised by the Treaty of Versailles but which Germany was failing to deliver. In Bonham Carter’s view, the reparations policy insisted on by France (by 1923 Germany’s debt to the Allies stood at £6.6 billion, the equivalent of £280 billion in 2013) was morally unjust and politically mad. Many in Britain and America agreed, believing that Germany’s economic collapse would only result in victory for the communists.

she enjoyed her chat with an Aberdeen fish merchant on his way to Germany to buy a German boat and to hire a German crew because, he explained, they were so superior to anything he could find at home. ‘I’m pro German now,’ he told her, ‘we

For Violet, as for so many other observers of inflation-ridden Germany, it was the plight of the middle classes that aroused her greatest sympathy. As no one could any longer afford their professional services, and as inflation had destroyed their capital, many were reduced to total penury. Within their neat, clean and respectable homes, Violet was informed, ‘terrible quiet tragedies’ were taking place each day. Having sold their last possessions, many of them, including doctors, lawyers and teachers, preferred to swallow poison rather than suffer the shame of starvation.

When Stewart Roddie visited Friedrichshof, he had been outraged ‘to find the place over-run by black troops’. Indeed, France’s deployment of colonial soldiers provoked a chorus of criticism – and not just from Germans. In those unashamedly racist times, many British observers saw it as a conscious attempt by France to heap yet further humiliation on Germany.

most returned home with an overriding sense of the country’s suffering. Too many Germans, in their experience, were hungry, cold and without

According to the British source, there was nothing to be alarmed about. The National Socialist Party was just a fire in the straw that would vanish as quickly as it had materialised. The men involved were Bavarian separatists of no significance and with no possibility of influencing events outside Bavaria. In fact, Hitler might even be worth encouraging since he wanted to claim independence for Bavaria, which might lead to the reinstatement of the Wittelsbach monarchy

On 10 November 1923, almost exactly a year after Smith’s interview with Hitler, Lady D’Abernon recorded in her diary that her husband had been woken in the middle of the night by a senior German diplomat, anxious for advice on how to deal with an uprising in Munich. The chief agitator, she noted, was ‘a man of low origin’ called Adolf Hitler.

Horace Finlayson, financial adviser to the British Embassy, kept a daily record of the exchange rate. His first entry, on 15 August 1923, records 12,369,000 marks to the pound, then on 9 November (the day of Hitler’s failed putsch) 2.8 billion and five weeks later a dizzying 18 billion.

If hyperinflation and Hitler’s putsch were not challenging enough, the government – itself riven with dissent – had also to deal with separatists in the Rhineland, communist insurrection in Saxony, and an army on whose loyalty it could not depend. Many observers believed that Germany might simply fall apart. Yet for some foreign visitors it was precisely this sense of overwhelming crisis that made it such an absorbing destination.

Nor was this affluence apparent only abroad. Cadbury noted how Hamburg was humming with new investment – ship canals, electric power plants and inland harbours.4 The man credited more than any other with Germany’s recovery was Weimar’s greatest statesman, Gustav Stresemann. Although chancellor for only three months (August–November 1923), he was foreign minister in successive administrations until his death in 1929.

Convinced that the only way forward for Germany was a coalition of the political middle ground, Stresemann struggled to contain extremists on both left and right. Recognising that passive resistance was inflicting more harm on Germany than on France, he ended the strike in September 1923, thereby taking the first step in stabilising the mark. Then, with his introduction of a new currency, the Rentenmark, solidly backed by land and industrial plant, the inflation that had so devastated the country was finally brought under control.

After the treaty and Germany’s entry into the League of Nations in 1926, the recovery gathered pace with such speed that only ten years after the Armistice Germany could claim to be the world’s second-greatest industrial power.

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft [Institute for Sexual Research] – one of the most striking manifestations of Berlin’s newfound modernity. Set up in 1919 by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, this was no hole-in-the-wall operation but a serious attempt to address scientifically a vast range of sexual behaviour. A major part of Hirschfeld’s mission was to persuade the world that homosexuality was neither a disease nor a crime but a perfectly normal part of the human condition.

And it was true that, while at night the capital may have earned its reputation as a modern Sodom, its appearance by day had more in common with a traditional German Hausfrau.

But for all those foreigners lured to Germany by sex, sun and the promise of a brave new world, there were plenty of others who travelled there in search of quaint houses, cobbled streets, brass bands and beer. There is no mention in Emily Pollard’s diary of such avant-garde delights as cross-dressing, jazz or Josephine Baker’s banana dance,

For any foreigner travelling through the countryside in late Weimar Germany, an encounter with the eager young participants of the Jugendbewegung [Youth Movement] was inevitable.

Cicely Hamilton sounded a note of caution. ‘There is danger in the Youth Movement,’ she wrote, ‘which may be summed up in the one word – Politics.’ She had been quick to notice that the majority of these groups were junior branches of existing church societies or political parties intent on indoctrinating the young with their own particular brand of sectarianism.

‘The Brown Shirts are the most striking example of youth trained to partisan thinking,’ she observed, adding, ‘They are not an unfavourable example. Their doctrines may be dangerous and their methods provocative but the lads themselves – so far as I have seen them – are of clean, upstanding type.’ She went on to inform her readers that ‘the young Brown Shirts were a branch of the National-Socialist-German-Workers-Party’, a title, as she points out, that is much too long for everyday use so ‘has mercifully been shortened to – Nazi’.47

Reflecting on the transient nature of empire, the Duke was depressed by what he saw. ‘He thought it dreadfully sad,’ remarked Lady Rumbold, ‘and kept on referring to the fact that in such a short space of time all was completely changed and nobody seemed to care. And it is true. It does seem very cold-blooded. The Hohenzollerns are now just history!’

But this outpouring of joy at a Jewish boy’s genius only briefly masked the persistent drumbeat of anti-Semitism. Although still a peripheral figure in the late 1920s, Hitler now regularly denounced Jewish musicians. For Bruno Walter, conducting the young Yehudi that night, the clock was already ticking.

Then on 24 October 1929 – Black Thursday – the Wall Street stock market crashed and with it Germany’s hopes of sustained prosperity. In fact, even before the financial meltdown there had been signs that the gilt on Weimar’s ‘golden’ years was wearing thin.

the fatal flaw in this ‘carnival of public spending’ was its dependence on short-term American loans so that, when the bubble burst and the debts were called

The general hardship soon intensified. Spender, for instance, noted that it had become impossible to enter a shop in Berlin without being bothered by beggars. Many French visitors, however, were sceptical, believing the Germans were yet again using an economic crisis as an excuse to avoid paying reparations.

When on 26 February 1924 Hitler had stood in a Munich court facing charges of treason after his failed putsch, few doubted that his political career was over. Yet two days later the Manchester Guardian reported, ‘Hitler is the hero of the hour.

Then, on 14 September 1930, the political scene changed dramatically when the Nazis won 107 seats at the federal election. The long period of waiting was over. What is more, Hitler, having learned the lesson from his failed putsch, had achieved his success legally. The press baron Lord Rothermere, in Munich at the time, was delighted, believing that Hitler had opened up a new era for Germany. He urged his fellow countrymen to recognise the advantages German fascism could offer Europe

Deeply shocked, Rumbold described to his son how groups of young Nazis had smashed the windows of Jewish shops, among them the famous department stores Wertheim and Tietz. Sir Horace clearly saw no contradiction between his very real distress at such conduct and the casual anti-Semitism in which he, like so many of his class and generation, regularly indulged. ‘I am appalled by the number of Jews in this place,’ he had written to his predecessor, Sir Ronald Lindsay,

In the wake of their first major electoral success, the Nazis lost no time in demonstrating arrogance and brutality. Yet, to many foreign observers, it seemed that they had also injected a new dynamism into the country. It was not easy, even for a seasoned diplomat like Sir Horace Rumbold, to read the political tealeaves.

Tourism was badly hit, with holiday resorts recording a 30 per cent drop in visitors during the summer of 1930. The Depression caused similar problems across Europe but Germans felt particularly aggrieved since they bore the additional burden of reparations. Furthermore, the increase in private motor travel meant that in places where once visitors had spent a week they now stayed only a few hours.

At the mercy of fluctuating currencies, travellers now frequently found themselves stranded without enough money to get home. Even affluent young men like Tony Rumbold’s Oxford friends would turn up unexpectedly at the Embassy unable to afford a hotel.