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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julia Boyd
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March 4 - April 18, 2024
In that last Weimar summer, Cox, together with congenial fellow students and his landlady’s granddaughter, swam each morning in the river, picnicked, canoed and played tennis. Only the distant factory chimneys of Mannheim reminded them of the outside world where ‘Fascism and Bolshevism and wars and revolutions and crises exist’.
Hitler told Wright that he considered ‘Negroes’ third-class people, destined forever to be slaves of one kind or another, because, Hitler argued, if they had any backbone they would not have allowed the whites to lynch, beat and segregate them without rising up against them. He asked Wright why he wanted ‘a white man’s education’ when he knew that he would never be able to use it like a white man.
When, even after his July election success, Hitler had still not been offered the chancellorship, Hindenburg famously remarked, ‘That man for Chancellor? I’ll make him a postmaster and he can lick the stamps with my head on them.’30 But after six months of political twists and turns, Hindenburg, against his better instincts, was persuaded to change his mind.
Standing before Hindenburg, Hitler swore to uphold the Constitution, to respect the rights of the president and to maintain parliamentary rule. In fact, exactly fifty-two days later, on 23 March, the Enabling Act was passed marking the end of the Weimar Republic. The Act gave Hitler the right to rule without the Reichstag, thus in effect handing him complete power. If his elevation to chancellor did not technically bring an end to the Weimar Republic, the oath he uttered that day was to prove its death rattle.
Yet even those most obviously at risk were totally unprepared for the Nazi onslaught. Abraham Plotkin, an American left-wing activist of Russian-Jewish origins, was astonished by the complacency of his German colleagues. After meeting a number of wealthy Jews in Berlin on 6 February, he wrote in his diary, ‘Strange as it may seem and it seemed strange to me, they were not concerned very much now that Hitler has come to the front. Their attitude is that it was bound to come … and that it is best perhaps that the Hitler fire run its course.’
‘There was no real excitement and no applause. Hitler won all along and that was that.’ A week later Tweedy was expressing astonishment at the breath-taking change in so short a time. ‘The election has completely altered Germany both outwardly and inwardly so much that it is hard to realise that we are in the same country that we entered a month ago. The Nazis are out-fascismising Fascismo.’
Soon the boy bars began to disappear. The more intelligent boys went to ground while ‘the silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms’.15 As it was common knowledge that the SA leader, Ernst Röhm, was homosexual, the more optimistic in the gay community must have felt that their time had come. But within weeks hundreds were murdered or incarcerated – ‘for their own protection’ – in the newly opened concentration camp at Dachau.
The persecution of homosexuals was, however, a sideshow compared with that of the Jews. On the morning of 1 April, storm troopers all over Germany took up positions in front of Jewish shops, blocking their entrances. They held placards exclaiming ‘Deutschland erwache: die Juden sind unser Unglück [Germans awake: the Jews are our disaster]’.
Tall and fair, McDonald recorded in his diary how the Nazis regarded him as an ideal specimen of Nordic superiority. Why, then, they repeatedly asked, did he not share their racial beliefs? ‘But surely you, a perfect Aryan, could not be unsympathetic to our views?’ remarked one economist. Germany,
But, as McDonald soon discovered, anti-Semitism was not confined to National Socialists. Travelling by train from Berlin to Basle, he talked with a fellow passenger he took to be a salesman. Although not a Nazi, the latter’s views were clear: ‘The Jew is the bacillus corrupting the German blood and race. Once a Jew always a Jew, he cannot pass from one kind of animal to another.
For all the foreigners, mainly journalists, who tried in the first months of the Third Reich to expose the true nature of the Nazi revolution, there were plenty of others ready to praise it. To them, Hitler was a visionary; an inspired leader who, at a time when so many other nations languished, was putting his people back to work, creating exciting new infrastructure and, most evident of all, restoring his country’s pride.
On returning to England in April, he reported that many of his German friends were convinced that their government’s anti-Semitism would soon pass. They had been keen to remind Wrench that Germany had just undergone an almost bloodless revolution and, naturally at such times, ‘as you English know from history’, regrettable things happened.
at midnight Goebbels mounted a rostrum and declared, ‘Jewish intellectualism is dead … the German soul can again express itself.’ As bonfires burned all over the country, Birchall finished his piece for the New York Times: ‘There is going up in smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘A lot of the old German liberalism – if any was left – was burned tonight.’29 Hitler had been in power exactly one hundred days.
By the summer of 1933 the confusion surrounding the Nazi revolution had deepened. While those travellers with entrenched political views – right or left – found ample proof to support their respective agendas, many others returned home not knowing what to believe. Was the implementation of socialist principles inspired by idealism or dictatorship? Were voluntary labour camps genuine philanthropy or a front for something more sinister?
‘When you sing in chorus you don’t feel hunger; you aren’t tempted to seek out the how and why of things. You must be right since there are fifty of you side by side, crying out the same refrain.’ When he did challenge one Hitler Youth, the young man’s only response was: ‘Look, haven’t we saved the planet from Bolshevism?’
He soon realised that, despite the intense campaign to ensure that every German citizen, high school, university, government office and institution devoutly embrace Nazi doctrine, enthusiasm for it differed noticeably from one Land [region] to another. The citizens of Baden-Württemberg, for instance, still clung to a liberal tradition that in some respects had more in common with France than Prussia. In towns like Darmstadt, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe the Hankeys spotted many fewer swastikas on the houses and cars. Dresden, with its stubbornly ‘Red’ reputation, was another city where support for
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The willingness of the middle class to accept the extra burdens imposed on them by the Nazis surprised him. Women too seemed happy to give up the freedoms that they had so recently won under Weimar. Not only were they now discouraged from working, but they were also heavily censured if they smoked in public or wore makeup.
No foreign traveller in Germany in 1933, however unobservant, could fail to notice the extraordinary extent to which the young were caught up in the Nazi movement, whether signed up with the SA, SS, Hitler Youth or voluntary labour. After closely observing them for three weeks, Hankey felt he better understood French paranoia since it seemed impossible that these ardent, disciplined youths would not demand weapons at the first sign of trouble.
The parades, ceremonies, bands and saluting used so effectively to prime young Aryans, no longer took place only on the great Nazi festivals like the National Day of Labour (with which Hitler had replaced May Day), but were re-enacted every Sunday in every city, every town and every village.
Hankey was struck by Germany’s isolation. Not only were people unable to travel abroad but their heavily censored newspapers offered few clues regarding what was happening in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the Germans he met were intensely curious about Great Britain.
other foreigners, like the American artist Marsden Hartley, found it possible to live an entirely blinkered existence in Nazi Germany.
Although the Nazis hated internationalism, they well understood the importance of tourism as a propaganda tool. It was essential that their negative image abroad be countered – and not just by Germans. Foreign tourists must be given such a memorable experience in the Third Reich that once back home they would spontaneously sing its praises. Luring them to Germany was therefore a high priority for the Reich Committee for Tourism, founded in June 1933.
Ultimately, the campaign worked. Over the next few years many once hesitant holidaymakers succumbed to Germany’s charms and found the country so delightful that they returned again and again. In the summer of 1933, however, the Reich Committee for Tourism’s propaganda had yet to bear fruit.
The big question was what, if anything, should the Church of England be doing? Having interviewed many clergy on the front line, it was a point on which the Dean was quite clear – any expression of sympathy with the persecuted by the Church of England would be regarded as ‘absolutely disastrous’.
Keenly aware of the power of spectacle to bind people to their regime, the Nazis made sure that festivals and rallies of one kind or another took place regularly throughout the year. In October, it was the turn of the peasants.
Thomas Cook had good reason to play down any bad news coming out of Germany that summer for it marked the tercentenary of the Oberammergau Passion Play. When last performed, in 1930, the play had attracted some 100,000 foreigners, mostly British and American, so expectations were high for this, the anniversary year.
It is noticeable how enthusiasts like Tifft Fuller conspicuously failed to mention Oberammergau’s bad fairy – anti-Semitism. From the start, the Passion Play had portrayed the ‘murderers of Christ’ with a virulence that made it a propaganda gift to the Nazis. Here was a centuries-old peasant drama depicting, in Hitler’s words, ‘the whole mire and muck of Jewry’.
With Hindenburg gone, there was nothing to stop Hitler combining the offices of chancellor and president. In a plebiscite held twelve days later, the country gave him an overwhelming mandate making his dictatorship even more unassailable.
It was for anyone, even an outsider, impossible to react objectively to the Nuremberg rallies. The spectator was either, like Burn, swept up in an orgy of emotion or, as in the case of the writer Robert Byron, utterly repelled. ‘There can be no compromise with these people,’ Byron wrote from Berlin after attending the 1938 rally. ‘There is no room in the world for them and me, and one has got to go.’3 Whether thrilled or appalled, no visitor from overseas could fail to be bowled over by the sheer scale of the pageantry.
There can have been few foreigners who ‘Heiled Hitler’ with more enthusiasm than Unity Valkyrie Mitford. Ever since she first became infatuated with the Führer at the 1933 Nuremberg Rally, her arm would shoot out on every possible occasion. Even Sir Eric and Lady Phipps, all too familiar with distressed upper-class parents whose daughters had fallen in love with ‘dreadful SS types’, were taken aback by Unity’s brisk ‘Heil Hitler’ as she entered their Berlin drawing room.
The story of Unity – the fifth of Lord and Lady Redesdale’s famous brood of seven – is that of an unhappy, not particularly bright young woman finding glamour and purpose in a cult religion. She might have become prey to any number of eccentric beliefs or deities but unfortunately for her, and those around her, she fell for the Führer.
One of the first decisions any traveller had to make when crossing the border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to ‘Heil Hitler’. By 1934, when Unity first moved to Munich, the Nazi salute was so pervasive that it had become impossible to duck the issue.
In fact failure to salute, even for a foreign tourist, became increasingly risky. ‘I had a curious experience the other night,’ Geoffrey Cox informed his brother in New Zealand. ‘A Brown Shirt hit me because I didn’t salute a Nazi flag.’
The German authorities, initially at least, proved so willing to show off their concentration camp to foreigners that by the mid-1930s Dachau had become something of a tourist attraction for American and British visitors, particularly politicians and journalists. Relieved not to have detected any undue misery or discomfort, 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.’
Decades after the war, commando, writer and poet Michael Burn unearthed his account of a visit to Dachau in 1935. He was appalled to discover how indifferent he had been to the more brutal aspects of the camp.* The commandant’s account of the horrific punishments meted out had at the time caused him merely to comment: ‘Those who may shudder will remember that the cat-of-nine-tails is even in England not yet obsolete.’29 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
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Throughout the 1930s a steady stream of ‘nice English girls’ arrived in Munich to be ‘finished’. A number of them attended Baroness Laroche’s school
Ariel Tennant, another teenager in Munich at the time, studying art, was struck by how many people in England refused to believe her accounts of Nazi aggression. When, on a brief visit home, she described some of her more alarming experiences, she was dismissed as being too young to understand.
was a paradox of the thirties that parents with liberal left wing views almost invariably sent their children to Nazi Germany when they wanted their minds broadened by a spell abroad. My sister had studied art in Stuttgart, my brother attended Tübingen University and Erasmus stayed near the Black Forest with a schoolmaster’s family after he left school.
Whatever the wider explanation, it is clear that for many British people there existed a baffling disconnect between their traditional regard for German culture and the realities of National Socialism. 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.
believed that ‘Germany is still not of one mind’, but agreed with Kirkpatrick that popular criticism was directed against the Party – not the Führer. Hitler’s biggest problem, in his view, was the wretchedly poor quality of the Nazi leaders who had emerged out of the ‘desperadoes and riffraff’ flung to the surface after the Great War.
Yencken also recorded more serious matters such as the extensive food shortages, the fact that so many people were only working part time and that the material of which the ‘neatly creased trousers’ were made was not going to keep its wearers warm in winter.
Yencken, who had won an MC in the war, was not unsympathetic to the familiar arguments justifying the mistreatment of Jews. After four years as a diplomat in the Weimar Republic, he shared the opinion – by no means confined to Nazi sympathisers – that Jewish domination of German affairs had been detrimental. He cited the bookstores which ‘throughout Germany were littered with morbidly revolting publications’,
Of the constant stream of visitors passing through the British Embassy during the 1930s, a great many of the men had of course fought in the Great War. As it turned out, a number of the bravest and most decorated former soldiers to sign the Embassy visitors’ book were also enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime.
In an open car at the head of the procession, sits Major Francis Fetherston-Godley smiling broadly, his own arm aloft in an uneasy compromise between friendly wave and fascist salute.24 The major was leading a delegation of five members of the British Legion on a goodwill mission in the hope that the natural comradeship of old soldiers might make a real contribution to world peace.
the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in June 1935. Hitler, believing the treaty to be the first major step towards a formal alliance with Britain, described the day it was signed as the happiest of his life.25 The arrival therefore of the British Legion delegation just one month later was a propaganda dream come true.
Having attended a reception at Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden and lunched with the Görings at their nearby villa, the group was taken on the mandatory tour of Dachau. 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.
A great many former Allied soldiers travelled to the Third Reich during the 1930s and naturally their responses to the Nazis differed widely. While all were united in their determination to prevent any repeat of the trenches, a few, like Captain Pitt-Rivers, became so seduced by Hitler’s dictatorship that they appeared to lose all sense of right and wrong.
Freedom of expression is so fundamental to a writer that it comes as a shock to discover how many celebrated literary figures of the twentieth century were drawn to fascism. The very notion that writers of the stature of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis or Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner, Knut Hamsun, could openly condone a regime that publicly burned books, or tortured and killed people simply for expressing a view, is deeply perplexing.
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’. And as he witnessed the true extent of the Führer’s power that day, magnified by the adoring millions, he must have dreamed of what a ‘God-controlled’ Hitler could achieve for his movement. Here was a leader, a genuine Übermensch, who had already proved himself by defeating the Anti-Christ in the guise of communism.
I Have a Thing to Tell You’ was published in the New Republic a few months after he returned to America. It is a powerful piece that concludes with a touching goodbye. ‘To that old German land with all the measure of its truth, its glory, beauty, magic and its ruin,’ Wolfe wrote, ‘to that dark land, to that old ancient earth that I have loved so long – I said farewell.’
