After spending several months touring the Third Reich in 1936, W.E.B Du Bois wrote: "It is extremely difficult to express any opinion about Germany today which is true in all respects without numerous modifications and explanations." With World War II and the Holocaust in hindsight, Du Bois's comments seem soft. How could an intelligent academic, himself a persecuted minority, divorce the German economic progress that impressed him from the horror of Hitler's regime? That Du Bois had mixed opinions, rather than outright condemnation, shows the beguiling nature of the Third Reich to outsiders prior to World War II.
In Travelers in the Third Reich, British author Julia Boyd collects dozens of accounts from foreign tourists, diplomats, students, journalists and more between 1919 and 1945. The years just after World War I were full of famine and hardship, when Quaker activists brought food relief for millions of German children. Hyperinflation and feelings of humiliation over the Versailles Treaty deepened Germany's misery. For tourists, the exchange rate was excellent, and the loose social mores of the Weimar Republic proved irresistible.
After Hitler and the Nazis took power, foreign accounts turned more toward the ambiguous sentiments of Du Bois--the country had regained its footing, but at a terrible sociopolitical cost. It seems that until Kristallnacht in 1938, most visitors were blind to the depths of Jewish suffering. Travelers in the Third Reich is an intriguing new slant on well-trod ground, with especially fascinating accounts from Du Bois and Ji Xianlin, a Chinese postgraduate student who grew to hate the Germans but was trapped in Germany by the war. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer