I am halfway through this excellent, quite new, book published in 2018.
It is the impressions of visitors to Germany from 1919 until 1945. Hindsight is all very well but these are the thoughts of people at the time and what’s so interesting is how many were taken in by the Nazi propaganda machine. One example is Henry, Tarka the Otter, Williamson.
“He saw in Hitler’s Germany only what he wanted to see. As an infantryman in the trenches he had taken part in the famous Christmas truce of 1914, an intense experience that had convinced him – contrary to all the propaganda – that he was essentially at one with his enemy. Then, fifteen years after the war, his own country still mired in depression, he saw Hitler leading the Germans to a bright new future while at the same time rekindling their hunger for national tradition. The Nazi cry of ‘Blut und Boden’ was the longed-for summons to a simpler era when peasants worked their land in harmony with nature, and tribe and territory were one. For Williamson, immersed in the natural world, this mystical past had profound romantic appeal. In Hitler, he saw a leader in perfect sympathy with such views and, moreover, one whose Hitler Youth movement was inspiring the young.” (Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd)
Williamson went to the Nuremberg Reichsparteitag in 1935. ‘We rushed into the faint mists of sunrise …’ he wrote. ‘It was thrilling to pass field-grey troops on the march, long boots and lumber wheels faintly dusty, each soldier wearing a flower in helmet or tunic.’ In the 1930s the British were even more polarised than today and there’s no doubt where Williamson stood on the spectrum.
“Opposed to war and believing that wars were caused by Jewish “usurial moneyed interests”, he was attracted to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and joined it in 1937.” (Wikipedia)
This is not what I expected from Tarka’s author. After the war he didn’t change his views a whit. On Desert Island Discs in 1969 he said he hadn’t been wise enough to know ‘a man of tremendous artistic feeling should never be in charge of a nation’. He thought Hitler had been a perfectionist ‘and once you begin to force perfectionism on other people you become the devil’.
I doubt now I could be swayed by a populist demagogue from my position in the middle of the road but who knows?
And something different. The BBC R4 news at 5.30 am, after the shipping forecast which reminds Ned and now me of Vice-Admiral Fitzroy, often has content subsequently deemed unsuitable for domestic consumption. In case you missed this morning’s bulletin, President Biden tactlessly called President Xi a dictator at a press conference. The four hour meeting between the leaders was subsequently hailed as a success by the BBC with no mention of the d word.
Much as my grandfather & his siblings had German 1st cousins from Saxony , they were not taken in by a ranting speaker . They had enough of tensions betwc1895 & 1918 . They did learn German but not all equally well from a governess . My grandfather appreciated the chivalry shown by the Christmas truces on the field during WW1 , as I am sure his brothers in law did .
I am sure they kept in touch from time to time even during Weimar era .
The SPD had Marxist ideology which they discarded by 1960 , which made them more electable in West Germany after WW2 . However , in East Germany in late 1940s , they were forcibly merged with Communist Party of Germany (KPD ) to form Social Unity Party (SED ) sponsored by USSR .
UK Gov’t confiscated assets held in UK but belonging to those resident in Germany . The Nazi regime did likewise to assets held in Germany & German occupied territories belonging to those resident in UK & allied countries . An aunt of my grandfather & his siblings fell victim to those confiscations , reducing her from affluence to poverty . My grandfather was convinced that she remained out of politics & pleaded to the UK authorities f hervtestitution .
The Soviet nominees had confiscated the rest & evicted her from her house as having become ” uninhabitable ” .
Dachau had acquired dubious status in 1930s , when questions about it attracted trouble . When I was staying in July 1985 with one of their relations , I was told that when I told them that I took the train on the S-bahn which ent in the wrong direction arriving at Dachau instead of the train heading f the southern terminus where I was expected . They told me that there was a famine with widespread starvation (food not harvested ! ) , accompanied by homelessness , aggravated by migration of German refugees .