As for reports of people taken from their homes in the middle of the night, of torture and intimidation, many foreigners simply looked the other way, hoping that if they focused on the positive in National Socialism, the nastier aspects might soon disappear. 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.
