Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

by Julia Boyd

To many it seemed that National Socialism had displaced Christianity as the national religion. Aryan supremacy underpinned by Blut und Boden [blood and soil] was now the people’s gospel, the Führer their saviour.

Pitted against each other were, on the one hand, the Spartacists (their name derived from the rebel gladiator, Spartacus), who soon formed themselves into the German Communist Party, and, on the other hand, the Freikorps, right-wing militias intent on destroying Bolshevism. The Spartacists (led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) stood little chance against the well-disciplined paramilitary bands of demobilised soldiers and by August 1919 the revolt was crushed, its leaders dead.

This conviction that the German army remained undefeated was deeply rooted – as foreigners soon discovered. Before Franck set out on his own travels, he had served as an officer with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) on the Rhine at Koblenz. His duties involved interviewing scores of German soldiers who, to a man, he reported, believed that in terms of military prestige they were unquestionably the victors. It was only the treacherous politicians in Berlin who had stabbed them in the back, together with the lack of food caused by the cowardly Allied blockade that had forced Germany to surrender. Franck heard this argument repeatedly, as well as from his cousins in the northern city of Schwerin. ‘England starved us otherwise she would never have won,’ they told him. ‘Our brave soldiers at the front never gave way. They would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.’3 Franck

could detect no sense of guilt. 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.’4

Franck’s German roots made him particularly sensitive to the humiliations imposed on civilians by the milita...

He recorded that 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.

But he was soon describing the Germans as ‘Sphinx-like and proud’, observing how quickly they had reverted to their traditional industriousness despite their lack of proper tools. Smith also noted that, although they seemed to accept the American occupation without question,

The unexpected human warmth puzzled this writer until a German woman living in the British sector in Cologne offered an explanation: 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. They invited some others to spend the evening and I made some punch. One of the guests tasted the punch and said he would not leave Cologne until I agreed to marry him. It was just like that.12

At the outbreak of war around 8 million Americans had German parents or grandparents. Although these young soldiers had been willing to fight the German state, they had no quarrel with its people.

Nor could she understand the ‘Boche’ habit of turning up in large numbers to every military event held by the English on the Domplatz, from which, she noted, the cathedral rose ‘grim and protesting’ above a sea of Allied khaki. ‘Can we imagine’, she wondered, ‘a German parade held in front of Buckingham Palace to which the inhabitants of London would flock?’

In a letter to her friend Vera Brittain, she described Cologne as ‘a heart-breaking city’ where Tommies march up and down, looking very gay, friendly and irresponsible. Their canteens are in the best hotels, and a lovely building down by the Rhine. Outside are great notices “No Germans allowed.” The money for their food is all paid from German taxes, and the German children crowd round their brightly lit windows, watching them gobble up beefsteaks. It is one of the most vulgar things that I have ever seen.17

I think that the vast majority of American soldiers are leaving France hating and despising her. It is a fact that they dislike the French attitude to monetary matters and they have been uncomfortable nearly all the time in France. Americans feel that they’ve been cheated right and left. All France’s destroyed churches and towns do not make half the impression on the doughboy as the charge of 15 francs for a handkerchief. And somehow or other in Germany Americans aren’t over-charged even where military control is loose.19

Given all that France had suffered at the hands of Germany this is a curious statement. Yet it was by no means unique. Such anti-French bias is a recurring theme in accounts of travel in Germany between the wars, and one repeated by commentators of every class and political hue.

Germany may have been crushed by defeat, he went on, ‘but one can feel the strength and vitality in the air’.21 This was no doubt true in the relatively prosperous Allied-occupied Rhineland, but in the rest of Germany it was a different story, as Harry Franck was about to find out.

‘Nowhere were we treated with anything but tolerance and courtesy.’ Stewart Roddie, who was to spend much of the next seven years travelling around Germany on various army assignments, went on: ‘It is perhaps a curious fact that although I had duties to perform which might, naturally enough, have made me an object of hatred and detestation to the Germans, I cannot recall one occasion on which I received rudeness or insult from them. Difficulties – yes. Obstruction – yes. Stupidity – yes. But never incivility – and never servility.’24

After the terms of the Versailles treaty became public in May 1919, Franck noticed even more vitriolic posters. He kept one bearing a typical message:

END OF MILITARISM BEGINNING OF JEW RULE! Fifty months have we stood at the Front honourably and undefeated. Now we have returned home, ignominiously betrayed by deserters and mutineers! We hoped to find a free Germany, with a government of the people. What is offered us? A GOVERNMENT OF JEWS! The participation of the Jews in the fights at the Front was almost nil. Their participation in the new government has already reached 80 percent! Yet the percentage of Jewish population in Germany is only 1½ percent! OPEN YOUR EYES! COMRADES, YOU KNOW THE BLOODSUCKERS! COMRADES, WHO WENT TO THE FRONT AS VOLUNTEERS? WHO SAT OUT THERE MOSTLY IN THE MUD? WE! WHO CROWDED INTO THE WAR SERVICES AT HOME? THE JEWS! WHO SAT COMFORTABLY AND SAFELY IN CANTEENS AND OFFICES?

WHICH PHYSICIANS PROTECTED THEIR FELLOW-RACE FROM THE TRENCHES? WHO ALWAYS REPORTED US TIT FOR DUTY’ THOUGH WE WERE ALL SHOT TO PIECES? Comrades, we wish as a free people to decide for ourselves and be ruled by men of OUR race! The National Assembly must bring into the government only men of OUR ...

an arm lock on the Germans until the peace treaty was signed, the blockade imposed since 1914 remained rigorously in place – a cause of deep bitterness throughout the country. When Franck first crossed the border, he had witnessed the skill with which Dutch officials ferreted out foodstuffs no matter how meagre or ingeniously hidden. One woman even had her modest lunch confiscated. As she sat hunched in a corner of the compartment, silently weeping, two men, once safely into Germany, retrieved their respective contraband. The first drew a sausage out of a trouser leg while the second produced a tiny package of paper-soap leaves each no bigger than a visiting card.

To foreign eyes, Berliners were at once identifiable by their prominent cheekbones, sallow colour and loose-fitting clothes. Nor was it just the poor who went hungry; for once the middle classes were equally affected. Stewart Roddie described how the market places had been converted into public kitchens where thousands of people from every class of society were fed daily. ‘Hunger is a great leveller. The rag-picker stood cheek by jowl with the professor. And what an extraordinary appearance they presented – miserable, gaunt, emaciated, shivering.’

Franck found the musty-smelling war’ bread particularly repellent, ‘half sawdust and half mud, heavier and blacker than an adobe brick’. ‘Yet on this atrocious substance’, he wrote, ‘the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No wonder they quit!’30 Even the occasional smear of turnip jelly or ersatz marmalade did little to improve it. And because such food contained so little nourishment, people’s ability to put in a full day’s work became seriously compromised. Nor was just food ersatz. Everything from rope to rubber, shirts to soap was an imitation, occasionally ingenious but more often useless. Germany, newspapers proclaimed, had become an ersatz nation.

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. The immediate

Lack of fuel meant that the hopelessly overcrowded trains on which they travelled often stopped for hours on end. ‘What can you expect?’ a stationmaster said to her. ‘When the French and the English take away the coal we can’t run trains.’

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.

Germany was to lose all its colonies (the most significant lay in Africa), its most productive industrial areas were to be under foreign control for at least fifteen years, and it would have to pay an unimaginable sum in compensation. Its army was to be reduced to 100,000 men and its navy also decimated. In order to give Poland access to the Baltic, the port of Danzig was to come under Polish control

Bayreuth (home of Wagner’s Festspielhaus)

The Nazi rhetoric was echoed in the National Socialist newspaper, Der Angriff, edited by Goebbels, which called him the ‘Jew Chaplin’ whose ‘typically Jewish screen figure was leading German youth away from the heroic ideal of the manly German Siegfried’, thus ‘undermining the future of the German race’.8 Such was the virulence of the Nazi campaign that Chaplin left Berlin early, missing the premiere of his film.

At the mercy of fluctuating currencies, travellers now frequently found themselves stranded without enough money to get home.

In March 1932 a presidential election was held. This was an event of real importance because, in reaction to the Weimar government’s growing instability, Hindenburg’s powers had been significantly increased. He was now able to legislate by decree and dismiss or appoint governments at will. A few weeks before the vote the Rumbolds attended a dinner hosted by the field-marshal who had by then been president for seven years. ‘I was glad to have been armed into dinner by the great Hindenburg,’ wrote Lady Rumbold. ‘It might very well be his last official dinner, as he may not be re-elected as President.’ Pitted against the old gentleman were Adolf Hitler and the communist leader Ernst Thälmann. In the end Hindenburg was comfortably

Boothby summed up his views on the Germans: The two things that impressed me most were their workers’ houses which are magnificent; and their orderly desperation.’16

Cox spent the rest of that summer learning German in the university town of Heidelberg. Set against a backdrop of pine-covered hills, it reminded him of Dunedin in his native New Zealand. He admired the red sandstone ruined castle, the arched bridge over the River Neckar and the old university buildings. ‘Even the students appear picturesque. Most of them wear the uniform caps of the various duelling clubs, and a surprisingly large number have sabre scars on their cheeks,’ Seen as a mark of class and distinction, fencing scars, particularly among students, had been regarded as a badge of honour since the early nineteenth century.

September 1932 Sir Horace’s waistline, always a matter of concern, led the senior Rumbolds to spend their last Weimar summer at the Bohemian spa of Marienbad, whose hundred or more natural springs were thought to cure digestive disorders and alleviate rheumatism. ‘Horace’s cure is going on very well,’ Lady Rumbold told her mother, ‘he has taken off 12 lbs already.’ The spa, dominated by grandiose hotels built in the latter part of the nineteenth century, had long since attracted the rich and famous – Goethe, King Edward VII, Chopin, Wagner and the Emperor Franz Joseph among them. Its popularity had survived the war so that the Rumbolds found themselves taking the waters along with a handful of the English aristocracy, King Alfonso of Spain and Count von Metternich.

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. Shortly after noon on 30 January 1933, the new Reich chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his cabinet assembled in the president’s rooms. 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.

Nazi brutality so effectively silenced all opposition that one British resident, forced to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, reported in The Nineteenth Century and After that it had been left to foreign journalists, mostly American and English, to offer any protest.* ‘Hostile criticism from a German’, he wrote, ‘was suicide – more often economic, sometimes physical.’6 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.’7

Meanwhile Hitler’s bodyguards, in their black uniforms embellished with silver skull and cross-bones, were particularly chatty. One of them – ‘a tall well-built young man; row of white teeth; like a smart bus driver’ – told Jones how only a couple of nights earlier he had picked up a communist protester and ‘crashed his skull apart’ on a piano. Despite this, Jones noted that he had seen nothing cold about his fellow passengers, ‘they could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot Nazi myself’.9

the Reichstag was on fire. Running

most people, even Hitler’s supporters, assumed the fire had been started by the Nazis themselves in order to discredit the communists before the election.†

Lübeck, with its ravishing fourteenth-century streets, spires and gables, was a treat – ‘the best medieval town I have ever visited’, noted Tweedy.

That evening another colossal torchlight parade almost prevented the Rumbolds from reaching the State Opera House where Nazis were gathering en masse for a gala performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.

Two days later, on 24 March, Hindenburg signed the Enabling Act handing Hitler all the powers he had so persistently sought. With the Reichstag now redundant, the last flicker of democracy had been snuffed out.

After the election the weather turned unusually mild – ‘Hitler’s weather,’ remarked the porter’s wife at Isherwood’s lodging-house on Nollendorfstrasse, which, like all the other streets in Berlin, was now swamped with swastikas. It was unwise not to display them, Isherwood noted. It was also unwise not to step aside for uniformed Nazis, or to refuse them donations when they entered

As it was common knowledge that the SA leader, Ernst Rohm, 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.

In Berlin, all along Kurfürstendamm, the city’s most famous shopping street, the windows were plastered with bright yellow posters bearing a similar message, many embellished with a caricature of a Jewish nose. A number of foreigners defiantly turned out to shop in the empty Jewish stores.

On 7 April Hitler told McDonald in a private interview, ‘I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.’

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.

’Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen [Where they burn books, they will end by burning people].’

Lady Rumbold, who thought the students quite demented and ‘wanting in a sense of humour’, wondered why, as they were destroying Jewish literature so enthusiastically, they did not burn the Bible as well – ‘it would be logical’.

It was much harder to ignore the persecution of Jews. But then many foreign visitors to Germany in 1933 were themselves anti-Semitic, if only casually. To them, the discomfiture of a few Jews seemed a small price for the restoration of a great nation – a nation, moreover, that was Europe’s chief bulwark against communism. However, French