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by
Julia Boyd
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March 4 - April 18, 2024
In her book Darkness over Germany (1943) she vividly records the torment so many experienced in trying to decide how best to resist the Nazis. The truth was that Hitler’s brutal suppression of all opposition had been so swift and so total that anyone wanting to set their face against the Party was left with the stark choice of exile or martyrdom.
Maria Leitner was in her forties when, in a series of articles published by foreign left-wing newspapers,* she set about relentlessly exposing the dark underbelly of Nazi rule. On her travels through rural Germany, she came across plenty of the Blut und Boden that had so inspired Hamsun and Williamson, but the blood and soil she encountered was far removed from the ‘romantic’ image of peasant life exploited by the Nazis.
Leitner’s most chilling reports, however, centre not on rural poverty but on Germany’s preparations for war. It is a mystery how this distinctly Jewish woman was able to extract so much about secret Nazi projects without attracting suspicion. It is one, however, unlikely to be resolved as Leitner was to perish in uncertain circumstances in 1942 in Marseilles while trying to obtain a visa for America.
by the time he reached Hamburg in September 1936, a great many paintings, as well as art historians, condemned by the Nazis as decadent or impure, had already been removed from the public arena. 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.
The notion that sport and politics can be kept separate has never looked more absurd than in 1936 when Germany hosted both the winter and summer Olympic Games. The Nazi political machine permeated every aspect, from the elaborate opening ceremonies to each team’s breakfast menu.
Pegler described the Games as a ‘great politico-military demonstration conducted by the Nazi State under the nominal auspices of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’.6 He was right, of course, but, as Shirer pointed out, the hundreds of foreign visitors to Garmisch saw only the ‘lavish’ and ‘smooth’ way in which the Nazis had organised everything.
No one, however, could ignore the uniforms. They were everywhere, leading Pegler to comment that the village ‘looked like a little town behind the Western Front during an important troop movement’. He was particularly incensed by the military camouflage-painted vehicles that went ‘tearing through the streets off to the mountains splashing melted slush on to the narrow footway’.
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.
On 7 March 1936, three weeks after the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, and in flagrant breach of the Treaty of Versailles, German troops reoccupied the Rhineland, which had since the war remained a demilitarised zone.
As he had predicted, so eager were the Nazis to impress Lindbergh that they had given him access to aeroplanes and information they would never have granted a mere attaché. The Germans were equally delighted since it was clear they had succeeded in convincing Lindbergh that the Luftwaffe was more powerful than it really was. And of one thing they could be certain. Any intelligence transmitted to Washington and London by Colonel Lindbergh could not fail to impress.
‘No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany.’5 Surprisingly, it was not Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who spoke these words, but the president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage. Having fought off various attempts to boycott ‘Hitler’s Games’, Brundage must have felt profound relief as the opening ceremony – captured so brilliantly on film by Leni Riefenstahl – unfolded before him.
As each nation marched past the Führer, the crowd’s cheers rose or fell depending on whether or not its athletes acknowledged him with a Nazi salute. The latter was so similar to the Olympic salute that there was much confusion among both teams and spectators as to exactly who was doing what.
The story that emerges from the interviews given by the American athletes decades later is a stirring one. Many came from poor backgrounds and, before being chosen to represent their country in Berlin, had never travelled further than their local town. Crossing the Atlantic was in itself a huge adventure.
Many foreigners commented on the extraordinary cleanliness of Berlin during the Games – ‘there wasn’t a vacant lot that had a weed in it’.14 But the few who ventured beyond the Olympic bubble encountered a different story. The American water polo team went to the northern outskirts of Berlin to play a friendly match at Plötzensee – site of the notorious Nazi prison where some 3,000 people were to be executed. They were surprised to find that the ‘swimming pool’ was just a roped off section of a seedy canal.
‘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.16 Such sinister discoveries, coupled with the fact that, 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’.
Archie Williams, the African-American 400 metres gold-medallist, made plain the underlying point in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘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.’
These athletes may not have seen any obvious discrimination against Jewish and black competitors during the Olympics, but their female teammates were unquestionably treated as inferior beings – at least in terms of living standards.
King Boris (who, according to Goebbels, secured an arms deal while in Berlin38) was by no means the only royal in town. Among his fellow guests at the lunch hosted by Hitler on the opening day of the Games were Crown Prince Umberto of Italy and his sister Princess Maria of Savoy, the Crown Prince of Greece, Prince and Princess Philipp of Hesse, Prince and Princess Christoph of Hesse and Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden.
Not everyone left Berlin immediately after the Games. Basketball player Frank J. Lubin spent a further week in the city before travelling on to his native Lithuania. It was a week that was to leave him with a very different picture of the city. Despite the atrocious facilities offered his sport (Hitler was not interested in basketball and there was no German team), the Olympic experience had, in his words, ‘all seemed so beautiful’. Now the scales fell from his eyes.
However, African-American academic W. E. B. Du Bois, who was in Germany during the Olympics, and struggling to make sense of his own impressions, was right when he wrote, ‘the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction’.
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.’ Nevertheless, his trip had convinced him that, in contrast to their attitude to Jews, ordinary Germans were not naturally colour prejudiced.
Union Jack and Tricolore was wishful thinking since all the British and French universities had refused to send delegates. Their boycott was in protest against the sacking – purely on grounds of race, religion or politics – of forty-four Heidelberg professors; and because by destroying the university’s academic freedom, the Nazis had destroyed its very credibility. This blatant denial of the Enlightenment did not deter everyone. No fewer than twenty American colleges and universities sent representatives, among them Harvard and Columbia.
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.’
Du Bois saw things rather differently. He argued that it was entirely because of Hitler that Germany had in fact already ‘lapsed into Bolshevism’. In his view, the Nazi government was copying the Soviet Union to such an extent that there was now almost no difference between their two systems. He cited ‘its ownership and control of industry; its control of money and banking, its steps toward land ownership and control by government; its ordering of work and wages, its building of infrastructure and houses, its youth movement and its one party state at elections’.
Even allowing for hindsight, it is extraordinary that against such a repressive, anti-intellectual background, Professor Grace M. Bacon of Mount Holyoke College (professor of German and a director of the junior year in Munich programme) was able to maintain as late as 1938 that ‘Study in Munich has resulted in a breadth of view, and a tolerance and understanding of another civilization which only direct contact can give.’
the end of 1936, it was difficult for anyone in Britain who was not a recluse, an anti-Semite or a convinced National Socialist to claim ignorance of Nazi brutality. Jewish refugees, countless newspaper articles, surviving inmates of concentration camps and those persecuted for their religion provided ample proof that Hitler’s dictatorship was anything but benign. Nevertheless the optimists – among them many establishment figures – hung on to their belief in the Führer’s ‘sincerity’, arguing that if his more reasonable demands could in due course be met, all would be well.
then suddenly we all found ourselves listening to a talk between Mr Lloyd George and Hitler. It is difficult to describe the atmosphere. It seemed to become all of a sudden almost solemn. One realised that the great War Leader of the British Empire and the great Leader who had restored Germany to her present position were meeting on a common ground. One seemed to be witnessing a symbolic act of reconciliation between the two peoples.
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.’
was clear that, 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.
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In terms of celebrity and sheer inappropriateness, their visit, which also took place that October, was the most spectacular made by any foreigner to Germany in 1937.
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? Above all, Forwood remarked, ‘he wanted to prove to her that he had lost nothing by abdicating’.42 There was only one country where such a visit could be successfully carried off and that of course was Germany.
Although the meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden produced nothing but platitudes, it did untold damage to the Duke’s reputation, firmly fixing in the mind of the British public the perception that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler.
But, although efforts by the good and the great to court Hitler met with increasingly negative results, most ordinary travellers, if fewer in number, continued to roam Germany with unfettered delight. Blinkered and naïve many may have been, but their philosophy, like that of the travel agencies who sent them, was simple – always look on the bright side.
I realise, for the first time, what a devastating effect the Nazi propaganda machine has had on my nerves. Without knowing it, I have succumbed, like thousands of others, to fear of everything. Nevertheless, it is more than propaganda that has driven me to this state. My telephone has been tapped; I have been refused a meal when I went to a restaurant with a Portuguese friend who has Jewish features; all my letters from abroad are censored.
For Jill (a teenager) and her older sister, Germany was paradise – the medieval villages, the lack of traffic, the friendly hotels (which never needed booking in advance) and numerous jolly beer gardens. Best of all were the swimming pools in every village – not to mention the ‘beautiful adolescents’ adorning them. It was quite unlike anything Jill had experienced in England.
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.
12 March 1938 Hitler annexed Austria – the Anschluss. While many foreigners were appalled by the ruthlessness of Hitler’s latest move, others felt it to be a perfectly logical development that could only improve Austria’s long-term prospects.
‘After all, these people, for whom I had quite an affection, and who seemed intelligent and balanced enough, were apparently hoodwinked by all the propaganda. As an onlooker I kept quiet and thought my own thoughts. I very soon ran out of suitable non-committal replies to the eulogies tumbling from their lips.’
When the Germans arrived five months earlier, as she explained to Joan over supper, they had been greeted with great joy – especially in Linz. The Austrians believed that the Germans would make their country prosperous without them having to put in any effort themselves. Now, despite working harder than ever before, they were still poor. As a result, Austria had lost all its gaiety and charm. Above all, Austrians hated to be organised.
‘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. A division of the world 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
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The reaction of the workforce was very different. Many still clung to their Marxist principles. Because a Nazi spy had been planted among them, several had been sent off to concentration camps. They too regarded Chamberlain as a messenger of peace, but one who would liberate the German people from Hitler.
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.
To the casual foreign traveller, Jewish anguish was largely hidden from view in the weeks following Kristallnacht. Not only, as Boettcher pointed out, had cities soon regained their normal physical appearance, but there were now virtually no Jews to be seen on their streets. Restrictions governing their lives were so draconian that it was possible for a foreigner to remain weeks in the Reich without sighting even one of them.
shortly after Kristallnacht, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) met urgently in Philadelphia to consider how best to respond to the shocking news. 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?
Meanwhile in consultation with leading Jews, they learned that the greatest need was not for food but rather to find ways of facilitating emigration. ‘It was soon clear’, he wrote, ‘that only the chiefs of the Gestapo could issue the permission we were seeking.’
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.
The year 1939 was not a good one for Germany’s tourist trade. Naturally Kristallnacht did little to encourage what was still left of it, but then, only four months later, on 15 March, the world was forced to watch Hitler march into Prague – ripping up the Munich agreement as he went. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist; its territory now designated the ‘German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’.
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.’
Stuart falls neatly into the category of those foreigners who allowed personal political prejudice to fog their perception of the Nazis. While in Percival Smith’s case (as with so many other pro-Nazi foreigners) communism was the bogey that justified Hitler’s regime, 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’.
opera fans Ida and Louise Cook, who were equally determined to get in. It was in 1937 that the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss and his wife Viorica Ursuleac (Richard Strauss’s favourite soprano) had first alerted them to the Jewish crisis. 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. It was a costly enterprise since, to remain credible in the eyes of the Nazis, it was essential that they stay in the best hotels.
