Review: Travellers in the Third Reich, by Julia Boyd

This book is a truly exceptional piece of historical non-fiction. In painstaking, minute detail, Julia Boyd writes about a curious concept that we tend not to think about in the history of Germany post-World War One to the end of World War Two: tourists to Germany.

Beginning with the immediate aftermath of World War One, Boyd relates, using letters, diaries, and other writings from dozens of people, the trips of people who went to Germany between 1919 and 1945. Most were tourists, but some are military figures and their wives; diplomats and their families; and students from Europe and further afar. Germany's perceived crimes in the Great War matter not so much to particularly British travellers who still feel an affinity with their German brethren.

The subtitle of the book is to do with seeing creeping fascism and Nazism slowly work its way into every part of Germany. Despite the rise of authoritarianism, tourists and officials alike either close their eyes to, or embrace, the Nazi MO. Most chillingly, despite the clear rise in official anti-semitism, many of these visitors are blind to it, accept it as part of Germany's recovery, or even support it. They agree that Jews have been a problem for Germany and the Nazis are doing the right things to sort out 'the problem'. The Nazis, in their encouragement of tourism to Germany as part of a global propaganda effort, even offer excursions to labour camps as a way of showing that even with 'undesirables', the Nazis are benevolent deliverers of 'justice'.

Most surprisingly, even though tourism and students who spend time at universities in Germany slow down just before the war, they are still there. Love of Germany, either in spite of or because of the Nazis, don't stop people from flocking to its shores.

This book is really a phenomenal read. Julia Boyd uses her years of research to bring hundreds of different strands together into a coherent whole that is moving, deft, weighty, and superbly fascinating.