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

by Julia Boyd

As August drew to a close, Sylvia Heywood was still studying music in Dresden. Her train ticket to England was dated 3 September but in view of the latest developments, it seemed prudent to bring her journey forward a week. However, not expecting to be away for more than a fortnight (surely there would be another ‘Munich’), she left her two most precious treasures – her fur coat and her violin – in the safekeeping of her landlady. On 1 September German troops entered Poland; two days later Britain declared war on Germany.

this frenetic activity could not, in her view, disguise the fact that Berlin had lost its lustre – ‘like some gorgeous bird in the moulting season’.8 The streets, she noted, ‘were everywhere dirty beyond description’. People walked ‘cautiously’ in last year’s clothes and only the hotel porters looked as if they still belonged among the ‘gold, marble, bronze and glass’ of the Adlon.

The picture of wartime Germany as drawn by anti-Nazi American journalists was naturally in stark contrast to that so fondly depicted by foreign sympathisers. Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, a much-favoured guest of the Reich, was given regular access to Hitler and other leading Nazis.

If London was suffering from bombing, so too was Hamburg. On 13 March Bridget von Bernstorff was staying at the Vier Jahreszeiten – the city’s best hotel. Apparently impervious to the war, it was still, according to Flannery, offering rare wines and real tea to its guests. Each afternoon in the restaurant, an orchestra played American favourites such as ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’ and ‘Chinatown’.

Two months later she was writing to Hugo, ‘In Hamburg one sees so many people in black, it’s very depressing.’ Felix von Schaffgotsche was just one of their many friends who had become a casualty. ‘Felix has been shot in the lung and is lying in a cowshed in South Russia being eaten up by bugs.’

Accounts left by foreigners still able to travel independently in the Reich during the last three years of the war are both horrifying and touching. One theme links them all – bombing. For when it came to being trapped for hours in an overcrowded, stinking and often freezing cellar while the world above exploded into fire and rubble, it mattered little if you were a princess or a communist, a Nazi-lover, Nazi-hater, Russian, Swede, Sanskrit scholar or Irish nationalist.

In fact, several million foreigners from every part of Nazi-controlled Europe were working in Germany – the great majority against their will. Women from the East were put to work in armaments factories while Hungarians and Rumanians serviced hotels and restaurants. The Italians were generally employed clearing debris.1 There were also millions of slave workers, many from Poland and Russia, forced to work under appalling conditions. For the native Aryans, this massive number of hostile aliens living so intimately among them was a source of ever-deepening anxiety.

Block cited food shortages as one of the main reasons why Germans had turned against foreigners.

An ‘excellent’ production of The Taming of the Shrew in Darmstadt was an added treat.9 It is curious that Shakespeare appears to have been such a staple of wartime Germany. Francis Stuart had just emerged from a performance of Antony and Cleopatra when, on 1 March 1943, ‘the worst raid there has yet been on Berlin’ began.

Despite Hamsun’s unswerving loyalty to the Nazis, he desperately sought a meeting with Hitler. The reason was his deep loathing for Josef Terboven, Reichskommissar for Norway. Hamsun maintained that his brutal regime was undermining any hope of persuading Norwegians to accept German supremacy.

But that autumn was not all gloom. Bridget danced on the table at Victor von Plessen’s birthday party, while in Berlin a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony conducted by Furtwängler ‘swamped’ Peg’s soul ‘with sound and emotion’. Then, back again at Wolfsgarten, where, having saved up lots of food, Peg and Lu hosted a house party for a group of close friends

As for Bridget, despite her privileged position, she surely spoke for Everyman when she summed up 1943. ‘Apart from ammunition and children, no one creates anything anymore. Nothing beautiful is made and all the beauty that exists is being destroyed. There is no leisure, no romance.’

despite the grim news, Stuart, like millions of Germans, still hoped for a miracle. ‘While things are certainly bad,’ he wrote on 17 August, ‘they are not, I think, so bad for Germany as they look. There is still a plan, which may be something like this – an offensive against Russia with a new anti-panzer weapon and when, and if, this achieves a limited success then a settlement there and a turning of all forces south and west.’

three years of fighting in the East, of which two had been in continuous retreat, Erik Wallin, a Swedish officer in the Waffen-SS, reached the outskirts of Berlin on 21 April. His company, relentlessly pushed back by Russian troops, was part of the 11th SS Volunteer Division Panzergrenadier Nordland, a division composed of foreign recruits, many of them from Scandinavia. He noticed how the forest gradually thinned until they found themselves fighting among the ‘grocery shops, newsstands, post offices, cinemas and gardens’ of Berlin’s outlying suburbs.

week of chaos followed, in which, Biddy, along with the whole street, went looting. Then, at last, the miracle happened. The barrage ceased. ‘We didn’t really know what had happened. There were no newspapers and I didn’t have a wireless,’51 she wrote. But one thing was clear – the war had ended. Never again would anyone travel in the Third Reich.

Many travellers were astonished by the degree of idealism and patriotic devotion expressed by ordinary Germans, unmatched by anything they could cite in their own countries. It was this sense of purpose that many foreigners found inspirational – especially when they remembered the unemployed youths loitering aimlessly on street corners back home.

Foreign visitors who concerned themselves with the plight of the Jews – and the majority did not – had to deal with an unanswerable question. How was it possible for these warm-hearted, genial people, noted for their work ethic and devotion to family values, to treat so many of their fellow Germans with such contempt and cruelty? Any foreigner who travelled to the Third Reich determined to get beneath its surface was confronted by such contradictions at every turn.

To add to the confusion, there are surely few totalitarian states that welcome their foreign visitors with as much friendliness and enthusiasm as did Nazi Germany. Cruising on the Rhine, drinking beer in a sunlit garden or walking alongside a happy band of singing schoolchildren made it all too easy to forget tales of torture, repression and rearmament.