Quotes from Julia Boyd

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become since he was last there. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934

This book describes what happened in Germany between the wars. Based on first-hand accounts written by foreigners, it creates a sense of what it was actually like, both physically and emotionally, to travel in Hitler's Germany.

But, as Guérin noted, 'When you sing in chorus you don't feel hunger; you aren't tempted to seek out the how and why of things. You must be right since there are fifty of you side by side, crying out the same refrain.

In Dresden, Sylvia Morris witnessed the ransacking of the Jewish department store - Etam's [on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938]. 'Dresden had been peaceful and not pro-Nazi so this was a major event,' she recalled. 'We girls in the Töchterhaus made our terrified landlady go to the store to buy things. We opened all the windows and sang Mendelssohn songs as loudly as we could.

hawser in place.' Yet set against this image

the propaganda was so pervasive and truth so distorted that many found themselves uncertain about what to believe.

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?

came home so happy and encouraged I blessed God most heartily and wanted to throw my arms round him and mend his stockings'.[21]

According to some estimates, by the early 1930s around a fifth of all Protestant clergy held Nazi sympathies while one in four was a party member. Many showed no hesitation in "worshipping" Hitler in their sermons and prayers. Indeed, a number of German Christians were so fanatically pro-Nazi that they called for Hitler's Mein Kampf to replace the Bible, since it was now "the people's most sacred text; their greatest, purest and truest moral code.

The demands of war provided Hitler with just the excuse he was looking for to rid the regime not only of Jews, but also of Gypsies, socialists, the disabled and mentally ill, homosexuals, Poles, communists, or anyone else who did not fit the National Socialist ideal. The elimination of those deemed undesirable became an issue of prime importance.

Between 20 January and 13 December 1940, the Nazis gassed 9,839 people at the Grafeneck "euthanasia" centre. Theodore Weissenberger was one of them. He was murdered because he was blind.

It was in the spring of 1939 that Hitler finally set in motion a "racial hygiene" policy that he had wanted to pursue for many years, namely the systematic killing of those who were mentally or physically disabled. He made his intentions clear in an address to the Nuremberg Rally tenyears earlier when he had argued that if of the million or so children born each year in Germany 70,000 to 80,000 of the weakest were removed, the nation would be made correspondingly stronger.

Once the means to kill children had been established, it was only a matter of months before the programme was extended to include adults living in asylums or other such institutions.

The problem immediately facing [the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care" in Berlin] staff was how to kill large groups of German adults swiftly without arousing public suspicion. The starvation method hitherto used for children was considered too slow and likely to attract too many questions.

The spectacular torchlight processions and pagan festivals that formed such a prominent feature of the Third Reich were naturally much remarked on by foreigners. Some were repelled but others thought them a splendid expression of Germany's new-found confidence. 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.

In the wake of their first major electoral success, the Nazis lost no time in demonstrating arrogance and brutality. Yet, to many foreign observers, it seemed that they had also injected a new dynamism into the country.

Many were hostile to Hitler but many more were seduced by the new "faith." It was "buoyant exciting and alive. It was not patronizing. It broke down social barriers, provided pageantry and stimulus." It was, in a nutshell, a new gospel.

As bonfires burned all over the country [on 10 May 1933], [Frederick] Birchall finished his piece for the New York Times: "There is going up in smoke more than college boy prejudice and enthusiasm," he wrote. "A lot of the old German liberalism—if any was left—was burned tonight" (citing Birchall in New York Times, 11 May 1933). Hitler had been in power exactly one hundred days.

Christ had now become more important as the leader in the fight against communism than as the saviour from sin. "They really believe, many of them, the Dean [Arthur Duncan-Jones of Chichester] wrote, "that Hitler is sent by God, and that the success of his movement after such small beginnings and after ten years of struggle, is plain evidence that God has worked a miracle.

In a plebiscite held twelve days [after Hindenburg's death], the country gave [Hitler] an overwhelming mandate making his dictatorship even more unassailable. In pious, picturesque Oberammergau, 92 percent of the villagers voted for Hitler, prompting a Berlin newspaper to ask, "Did Judas Vote No?

The incessant marching and beating of drums, the sweeping searchlights, flaming torches, and thousands upon thousands of gigantic red and black swastikas flapping in the breeze, were all skillfully deployed to pay homage to the one supreme chieftain, the demi-god pre-ordained to lead his tribe out of darkness to its rightful place in the sun.