Julia Boyd > Quotes

“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”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

“the propaganda was so pervasive and truth so distorted that many found themselves uncertain about what to believe.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

“…[Samuel Beckett’s] diaries contained so little overt condemnation of the Nazis, although no one who has read them could be in any doubt about how much Beckett - who was to join the French Resistance in the war – loathed the regime. …[But] Beckett was quick to pick up on the absurd, such as the story he heard involving a servant and a milkman. In order to prevent Rassenschande [racial impurity], no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked a Herr Levi’s Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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?”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

“Thelma Cazalet MP, unlike most of the other British 'honoured guests' attending [the 1938 Reichsparteitag], was strongly anti-Nazi and had accepted Ribbentrop's invitation only because she thought it important 'to be aware of what was going on.' As she entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel on the first night, she immediately caught sight of Unity Mitford seated at the long 'British' table with her parents Lord and Lady Redesdale. 'Unity is alarmingly pretty,' she wrote in her diary, 'but I have never seen anyone so pretty with absolutely no charm in her face and a rather stupid expression.”
― julia boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

“Sir Barry Domvile sensed the chill as soon as he arrived in Nuremberg for the 1937 Reichsparteitag. 'Thought the SS more truculent than usual,' he observed ... And he was further disappointed when the Führer passed by him at the reception without a word. Indeed as Hitler walked along the line of British guests, he remained stiff and expressionless until introduced to Francis Yeats-Brown when he burst into smiles. Yeats-Brown's autobiography, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1930), had been made into a Hollywood movie (starring Gary Cooper) that had become a great favourite of Hitler's. He thought the film such a valuable demonstration of how Aryans should deal with an inferior race that he had made it compulsory viewing for the SS.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“[William Edward Burghardt] Du Bois saw things rather differently. He argued that it was entirely because of Hitler that Germany had in fact already ‘lapsed into Bolshevism’. In his view, the Nazi government was copying the Soviet Union to such an extent that there was now almost no difference between their two systems. He cited ‘its ownership and control of industry; its control of money and banking, its steps toward land ownership and control by government; its ordering of work and wages, its building of infrastructure and houses, its youth movement and its one party state at elections’.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“Philip Conwell-Evans, who three years earlier had witnessed the book burning at Königsberg University with such equanimity. Choosing to operate discretely behind the scenes, Conwell-Evans had been instrumental in bringing together a number of influential British figures with leading Nazis. It was he, for instance who in December 1934, had been the driving force behind the first major dinner party Hitler ever hosted for foreigners and at which Lord Rothermere had been guest of honour. And it was now Conwell-Evans, in harness with his close friend Ribbentrop, who was masterminding the Lloyd-George expedition. 'He is so blind to the blemishes of the Germans,' Dr Jones wrote of his fellow Welshman in his diary,' as to make one see the virtues of the French.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“hawser in place.’ Yet set against this image”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“The academically inclined Amy Buller would have argued that de Rougemont’s criticism was unfair. Her links to the higher echelons of the Church of England, and involvement with the Student Christian Movement, took her regularly to Germany between the wars, where she interviewed dozens of middle-class professionals. In her book Darkness over Germany (1943) she vividly records the torment so many experienced in trying to decide how best to resist the Nazis. The truth was that Hitler’s brutal suppression of all opposition had been so swift and so total that anyone wanting to set their face against the Party was left with the stark choice of exile or martyrdom. Otherwise they were doomed to an agonising compromise. One young schoolmaster told Buller that many of his colleagues would have preferred concentration camp to the daily torture of teaching Nazi doctrine were it not for the fact that their dependents would also be made to suffer.”
― Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“came home so happy and encouraged I blessed God most heartily and wanted to throw my arms round him and mend his stockings’.[21]”
― Julia Boyd, The Excellent Doctor Blackwell: The life of the first woman physician

“Although Cole was not himself particularly avant-garde, halfway round the exhibition he experienced an odd exhilaration. ‘The audacity of these pictures was infectious,’ he wrote. ‘It was like walking into a lunatic asylum and realizing that one had been trying to become a lunatic for years.”
― Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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?”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“Kristallnacht prompted the American government to recall its ambassador, Hugh Wilson, in protest. His deputy, Prentiss Gilbert, now in charge of the Embassy, found life in Berlin confusing. In a report to the State Department, he described the ‘peculiar character’ of the German government, which, in his experience, had become a ‘mass of inconsistencies’. Although new decrees were announced every day, many were never implemented. This, Gilbert suggested, was because there still existed ‘just’ and ‘humane’ officials, who took every opportunity to mitigate the unbearable situation in which Jews and other Nazi victims found themselves. ‘These men’, reported Gilbert, ‘say repeatedly to us that they cannot put anything in writing nor can they make any general statements of what they can do but they will, and dcy make marked and favourable exceptions in specific cases.”
― Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“Exploring the Third Reich among the people I grew up with – not anonymous monsters – taught me how fragile civilisation is. It also taught me that humble individuals can – and do – create pockets of humanity in inhuman times and circumstances. Last, but very much not least, I understood how lucky I was to be born after the war.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“What unsettled him was the fact that those who stood most naturally on the right – lawyers, doctors, industrialists and so on – were the very ones who most bitterly denounced National Socialism. Far from being a bulwark against communism, they complained, it was itself communism in disguise. They pointed out that only workers and peasants benefited from Nazi reforms, while their own values were being systematically destroyed by devious methods. They were taxed disproportionately their family life had been irreparably harmed, parental authority sapped, religion stripped and education eliminated. De Rougemont, a federalist who had little time for totalitarianism of any colour, was unimpressed by these cries of woe. He blamed the middle classes for not having faced up to social problems during the Weimar period. Now they were equally supine in the face of Hitler’s excesses. ‘If I ask them how they are going to resist,’ wrote de Rougemont, ‘they duck the question.”
― Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“We understand very well that we do not have universal support in every town, including Oberstdorf. We take office today in the hope that at the end of this parliamentary term it will be possible to return Oberstdorf’s affairs to the men to whom it was previously entrusted. But during our four-year term of office, it is vital that we gain acceptance for the measures Adolf Hitler wants put in place.”
― Julia Boyd, A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed by the Rise of Fascism

“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.”
― Julia Boyd, Travellers in the Third Reich

“Even in the late 1930s, it was still possible for a foreigner to spend weeks in Germany and experience nothing more unpleasant than a puncture. There is, however, a difference between "not seeing" and "not knowing". And after Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, there could be no possible excuse for any foreign traveller to claim that they did not know the Nazis’ true colours.

Perhaps the most chilling fact to emerge from these travelers’ tales is that so many perfectly decent people could return home from Hitler’s Germany singing its praises. Nazi evil permeated every aspect of German society yet, when blended with the seductive pleasures still available to the foreign visitor, the hideous reality was too often and for too long ignored.”
― Julia Boyd