28 ms·

To Heil, or Not to Heil, When Traveling in the Third Reich

134 points by smacktoward 8y ago

noir_lord 8y ago
> Sarah Norton was eventually caught vandalizing a publicly displayed copy of Julius Streicher’s virulent anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer and sent home by the Foreign Office. Her mother’s reaction was better than expected: “Well done, despite your nuisance value. I hope you learned the language.” She had in fact learned it well enough to be employed at Bletchley Park during the war. Outstanding part of a great read.
pjc50 8y ago
Reminds me of that extraordinary piece of travel writing, A Time of Gifts, in which the author is walking across Germany and Austria in 1933. He encounters the Brownshirts only once as a minor incident, but the foreshadowing somehow hangs across the whole book's view of this part of the world as an Eden before its collapse. But see also https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they... on Wallis Simpson; it should not really be surprising that the British aristocracy were often Fascist sympathisers and that a lot of the history has been whitewashed since and during the war. I had no idea there were foreign visitors in Dachau before the war, but then it was merely a brutal prison or a "concentration camp" in a pattern deployed by many countries against their colonial victims. A useful reminder that Fascism had absolutely tremendous advertising - the Hugo Boss uniforms, the logos, the slogans, the films, the rallies, etc - and tapped into exactly the sort of mass movement belonging and hostility to the Other that really galvanises people. > Did the parents of these fresh-faced young people not read newspapers? Or was it that they simply thought of Nazi violence and philistinism as an irrelevant sideshow compared with the joys of Schiller and Schubert? Depends which papers they were reading. The famous Daily Mail "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" article by Viscount Rothermere was in 1934.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  Fascism had some other key attributes: violence and dehumanizing rhetoric against opposition to keep them from having a voice in government was likely the biggest one.
  - jtr_47 8y ago
    This sounds strangely familiar in relation to what is occurring within the USA. I wonder if the same play book is being used today in my country, the USA.
    - claydavisss 8y ago
      Just waiting for a comment like this to appear. Last time I checked, the last President to roll out tanks against American citizens was Bill Clinton. Oh wait, during the Obama administration, ranchers in Oregon were also threatened by the government and ultimately prevailed in court. "Fascist" today is used in the same way "Counter-revolutionary" was used by Bolsheviks in the early Soviet Union - simply anyone who disagrees with the mob. I would be interested in hearing instances of state-planned violence against citizens in present day America that comes close to what happened in Waco. Please don't cite immigrants in cages or Gitmo - both were in full force for eight years of a "progressive" Presidency. edit: as predicted, downvotes and no responses
      - pjc50 8y ago
        The family separation policy that led to children in cages was definitely a Trump administration policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_se... Waco was a law enforcement disaster, but one typical of US law enforcement rather than a partisan issue. The policy of distributing MRAP vehicles to police forces has resulted in other victims: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steven-seagal-sued-for-driving-tank-into-arizona-home-killing-puppy/#6aaf65a97489 https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steve... The entire BLM movement is against state violence by US law enforcement. It's a longstanding problem. The Oregon ranchers did not prevail in court, they were pardoned by Trump: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44775113 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44775113
- dudul 8y ago
  Walter Benjamin said that the nazis invented Aestheticization of politics.
- jlarcombe 8y ago
  Yes 'A Time Of Gifts' a remarkable book, not least because as you say it is a snapshot of a world about to be destroyed, and because he is so open about the degree to which it didn't really impinge greatly upon his travels. Last year I read the whole of the book from which this article is excerpted, and I really recommend it. It's out in paperback now I think. I was surprised she didn't quote Leight Fermor but there's tonnes of other great stuff in it I hadn't come across before.
- RanInt1111 8y ago
  It's quite amazing to me just how much of that whole period is not really "whitewashed" but rather just distorted. It's been nothing but a psychological propaganda warfare mosh-pit even just after WWII. I'm sure someone will invariably want to knee-jerk make accusations of "nazi sympathy", which is precisely the kind of proto-religious type of response and psychological abuse nonsense I am talking about. Even this subject piece is not even trying to hide its utter and blinding bias that made reading it all but a challenge and totally destroyed any real credibility it may have, while also being really nothing different than the same kind of rousing propaganda to rally the opposition to imaginary fascists we see today. We get it, you're against fascists, now if there were just actual fascists besides yourself that you could be against, and no, insisting that my stuff not be stolen or given away to others is not fascism. What I really see as a major danger these days is that we are so obsessed and fixated on the particular incarnation of the characteristics that resulted in both nazism and communism, that we are missing that the very same mechanism is happening right before our eyes as the left ratchets up its mob rule and rousing of emotional animus towards a particular group. The even more dangerous part is the kind of nefarious and duplicitous nature in which they are going about this all. It is something that the Nazis never really even engaged in. They were quite open and frank about what they were doing and going to do, but what today's left is being driven to do is straight out of the communist playbook that you can even read from back during the interwar period. I expect to see the very fascist organized advertisement campaigns that we have already seen, largely starting with Obama, to only continue to nudge their way into mainstream. We are seeing all the same characteristics of the authoritarian socialists/communists we saw evolve into the nazis and the soviets, there is nothing that would make me believe that this time they would not also evolved into something else... some new brand ... using different colors... different uniforms (maybe the black masked types of anti-FA) with the same kind of well spoken, emotionally manipulative, well presenting cult of personality leader that frames herself as a wrongly persecuted individual to gain sympathies and political power as she rallies the stormtroopers and naive fools around her. One thing gives me at least a little solace at this point though, even if it's just self-delusion, that the current left is extremely scattered on the ground, even though they have utterly infiltrated and compromised the government and civil society and education system that is churning out Hillary Youth at an alarming rate that are also being elevated and rewarded into the halls of bureaucratic power by validating their party membership and loyalty to dear leader Hillary... just like under the Nazi and all other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. You thought "affirmative action" was some means for warm and fuzzy mutli-culty holding hands and singing kumbaya? ... the real point of affirmative action was to invalidate merit and install party loyalists into the bureaucracy. This is going to go sideways. The chances of it not all going sideways are far lower than those that it will, regardless of whether people recognize it or not. If you consider that the housing ~~bubble~~ fraud was a kind of WWI that totally shuck the system to its foundation, then we are really only in the interwar period before black friday; and the crash had been setting up for a while now with tech companies being pumped to astronomical levels on the basis of no real substance other than adding some emojis and playing cat videos as a basis for selling adds. Ironically, the left are also sounding ever more like the Socialist Workers Party, with Hillary's latest demands that the electoral college be done away with so that pure mob rule democracy can reign, and of course the guns need to all be controlled and taken and the Constitution needs to be destroyed and the monuments and history need to be eradicated and wiped clean (I think the author referred to that as being iconoclastic). I get it, I actually supported Hillary and Obama in the past and I was also indoctrinated in the liberal cult for a long time, but it is not too late to reject this resurgence of authoritarian socialist collectivism that has all the same core hallmarks that led to the Nazis and the soviets and all the other minor communist and socialist regimes around the world and throughout history. This is that moment you always said to yourself ... "I would have recognized it and I would have stood up against it, and I would have left" or "I would have killed Hitler" .... well, here we are "you have the option to recognize that Democrats are the heirs of socialist authoritarianism and that Hillary is the equivalent of Hitler.
- te_chris 8y ago
  Highly recommend Joseph Roth's The Hotel Years too. A series of his newspaper columns filed across Europe between the wars. It's in a roughly chronological order as well, and really captures the darkness and change that spreads across the continent from the 20's through the 30's - with some eerie parallels that can be seen in glimpses today.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  At that time only the rich and upper middle class travelled widely - daily mail readers went to Blackpool.
mannykannot 8y ago
Britain had its own fascist party, the British Union of Fascists, formed and led by Oswald Mosley. On 6 October 1936 (just two days after his blackshirts came off rather the worse in the 'Battle of Cable Street'), he married Unity's sister Diana, at a private ceremony in Goebbels' home. Hitler attended both this and an extravagant follow-up celebration hosted by Göring and intended to upstage Goebbels. During these events, it became clear to everyone present, and especially Mosley, that his bride was infatuated with Hitler, something that Mosley was not, of course, particularly thrilled about. At least three of Unity's and Diana's sisters (Jessica, Nancy and Deborah) leaned left to a greater or lesser extent.
norseman 8y ago
Hitler did nothing wrong.
bmmayer1 8y ago
This always fascinated me. What happened to foreign nationals who found themselves 'stuck' in Berlin when Hitler invaded Poland? Were they allowed to leave? Where they imprisoned?
- arbitrage 8y ago
  If they were the right heritage and class, they were fine. Of course, that was at the beginning of the war. Near the end, when Germany knew it was losing the war, it would not have helped a foreign national.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- hh3k0 8y ago
  Were foreign nationals in Washington not allowed to leave or imprisoned when America invaded Afghanistan or Iraq? Sure, two different political systems but I don't see the reason why the average foreign national should be arrested in times of war.
  - bmmayer1 8y ago
    Well, certainly in WWII we imprisoned US citizens of Japanese descent...
    - hh3k0 8y ago
      But US citizens, regardless of descent, aren't foreign nationals to the US. On top of that, Japanese weren't your average foreign national but rather enemy aliens – as the US was at war with Japan. I must have misunderstood your previous question, I apologize. I assumed that when you referred to "foreign nationals" you meant it as in "travelers of uninvolved foreign nations".
- pjc50 8y ago
  Nationals (or people of family origin!) of belligerent countries were interned on both sides. They were also at risk of violence. Third country neutral nationals were generally left alone subject to wartime travel restrictions, unless they were also Jewish.
dingaling 8y ago
Despite 4,230 words the article never really addresses the title and instead wanders off on verbose tangents. So I had to go and search for the answer myself. No, it was not mandatory to perform the salute if you were not a German citizen. Yes, it was often easier to do so; the Portuguese Consul General was beaten by SA thugs when he failed to do so, but couldn't be charged with any offence.
- gumby 8y ago
  The article talks about it a lot. The question wasn’t what the law said but whether you should or not, especially if you weren’t a supporter.
akavel 8y ago
Also highly recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29
mprev 8y ago
One thing that stands out to me in the photograph at the top of the piece is that so many of the crowd are smiling. I always thought of such salutes as a serious, even fearful, thing. I know it is fiction but The Man in the High Castle on Amazon certainly has everyone looking very grave when giving the salute.
- ocschwar 8y ago
  In the 1920s, Americans used that salute in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was called the Bellamy salute. It's mind warping to realize, but every symbol and word that we associate with the Nazis and Fascists had innocuous connotations until the Nazis corrupted them. The swastika, the fasces, the Hugo Boss uniforms, the salutes, the word "Nazi" (nickname for rural Bavarians), the word "Fascist" (Sicilian labor militants before WW1), the names Mussolini, Adolf, Hitler, none of those things had any scary associations before that era.
  - te_chris 8y ago
    Some of the American symbolism user by the Nazis is actually a bit more than coincidental: this New Yorker article details a lot of the American racism that inspired Hitler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-r...
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Fasci is Italian for bundles and associated with insignia of a sheaf of hay or rods, adorned with an ax carried before a magistrate in processions. So, no, it wasn't completely benign before either. However, the militant associations you mention were "fascista", specifically "partitio fascista rivoluzionario", and I don't exactly speak Italian so I couldn't tell if the meaning was ambiguous, or rather, what the ambiguity is. fascio it also meant burden, load; high office in Latin. Compare German "Bürde" (burden) and "Würde" (dignity, honour, your honour). The root would be basket, via Celtic, whose symbolism with the Celtish Knots is loaded with wicker work imagery. Compare also braided military shoulder signs of rank. Quite wicked. Fashism is, in my humble opinion, related to fashion, French façon (way; manner; fashion) although that's said to be from faciō (do, make; compare fact), cognate with do, believe it or not. That makes sense because cloth is woven, or rather coarsely braided at times. In case of facio, it would come via factiō, factiōnem, whence also faction. That would give "Jeder nach seiner Facon" a nuance comparable to "Jedem das seine". See also: Lt. vas (vessel; bail, surety); fiction, fingere, fingo; face (capitalism), fagot, fossil, irish cognate to fashion (neck tie, leash), Fessel, fetter, fesseln, Fass, vas, fassen, erfassen, ergreifen. Pulverfass - pulp (pulp fiction - coke stories). French fascher (now fâcher), from Latin fastus (“disdain”). Fastenzeit, fascher mittwoch; Fasten. Fasten seatbelt. Fast food. Mode droge. fingo, Fink, Finca. Sphinx. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascio#Italian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascio#Italian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascis#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascis#Latin
macca321 8y ago
I'm told Unity Mitford patted my dad on his head when he was a baby, to the horror of those around. This was on a ferry on the West Coast of Scotland, where she went after her failed suicide attempt. This means I always win at "6 Degrees of Hitler".
bogomipz 8y ago
Curiously the actual origins of the salute have been lost to history: https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-did-the-nazi-salute-come-from/ https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-did-t...
sevensor 8y ago
My (American) grandfather owned a pair of lederhosen. I knew he had gotten them in Germany, but it was twenty years from when I learned about the lederhosen to the time it occurred to me to ask when he had been in Germany. It turns out that the answer was "early 1930s," and that there are droll family stories about how well he passed for a young German. Apparently he'd spent a considerable amount of time there after university, and developed a firm command of the language. I was met with shrugs from my parents' generation when I pointed out how terribly bad that looked. Apparently it was far from unusual. Much like the young English people in the article, he was left-leaning and from a well-to-do family, and had been sent to Germany for perspective. So this article touched a nerve -- I was already distrubed by the idea of my grandfather blithely roaming around Germany in the early '30s, and by my family's willingness to treat the whole thing as a trifling bit of youthful tourism -- now I'm confronted with the mental image of him heil-ing his way across the country and dropping in to Hitler's favorite tea room.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  ... Germany in the 30's wasn't particularly different from any other European country at the time. It's more disturbing that you think there's anything wrong with visiting what was at the time one of the cultural and scientific centers of the world.
- accoil 8y ago
  Why does it look bad?
  - sevensor 8y ago
    Because going to Germany in the 1930s to soak up the kultur implies some pretty unsavory sympathies. At best, this puts him in the company of a great many other anglophones who allowed themselves to be duped by the regime into thinking that its intentions were basically civilized. It's not quite Wodehouse broadcasting from internment bad, but it doesn't look good.
    - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
mcguire 8y ago
Regarding the Mitfords, Wikipedia notes: "The sisters, six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles, became celebrated, and at times scandalous, figures that were caricatured, according to The Times journalist Ben Macintyre, as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur"."

134 points by smacktoward 8y ago

> Sarah Norton was eventually caught vandalizing a publicly displayed copy of Julius Streicher’s virulent anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer and sent home by the Foreign Office. Her mother’s reaction was better than expected: “Well done, despite your nuisance value. I hope you learned the language.” She had in fact learned it well enough to be employed at Bletchley Park during the war. Outstanding part of a great read.

pjc50 8y ago

Reminds me of that extraordinary piece of travel writing, A Time of Gifts, in which the author is walking across Germany and Austria in 1933. He encounters the Brownshirts only once as a minor incident, but the foreshadowing somehow hangs across the whole book's view of this part of the world as an Eden before its collapse. But see also https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-have-had https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they... on Wallis Simpson; it should not really be surprising that the British aristocracy were often Fascist sympathisers and that a lot of the history has been whitewashed since and during the war. I had no idea there were foreign visitors in Dachau before the war, but then it was merely a brutal prison or a "concentration camp" in a pattern deployed by many countries against their colonial victims. A useful reminder that Fascism had absolutely tremendous advertising - the Hugo Boss uniforms, the logos, the slogans, the films, the rallies, etc - and tapped into exactly the sort of mass movement belonging and hostility to the Other that really galvanises people. > Did the parents of these fresh-faced young people not read newspapers? Or was it that they simply thought of Nazi violence and philistinism as an irrelevant sideshow compared with the joys of Schiller and Schubert? Depends which papers they were reading. The famous Daily Mail "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" article by Viscount Rothermere was in 1934.

merpnderp 8y ago
Fascism had some other key attributes: violence and dehumanizing rhetoric against opposition to keep them from having a voice in government was likely the biggest one.
- jtr_47 8y ago
  This sounds strangely familiar in relation to what is occurring within the USA. I wonder if the same play book is being used today in my country, the USA.
  - claydavisss 8y ago
    Just waiting for a comment like this to appear. Last time I checked, the last President to roll out tanks against American citizens was Bill Clinton. Oh wait, during the Obama administration, ranchers in Oregon were also threatened by the government and ultimately prevailed in court. "Fascist" today is used in the same way "Counter-revolutionary" was used by Bolsheviks in the early Soviet Union - simply anyone who disagrees with the mob. I would be interested in hearing instances of state-planned violence against citizens in present day America that comes close to what happened in Waco. Please don't cite immigrants in cages or Gitmo - both were in full force for eight years of a "progressive" Presidency. edit: as predicted, downvotes and no responses
    - pjc50 8y ago
      The family separation policy that led to children in cages was definitely a Trump administration policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_se... Waco was a law enforcement disaster, but one typical of US law enforcement rather than a partisan issue. The policy of distributing MRAP vehicles to police forces has resulted in other victims: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steven-seagal-sued-for-driving-tank-into-arizona-home-killing-puppy/#6aaf65a97489 https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steve... The entire BLM movement is against state violence by US law enforcement. It's a longstanding problem. The Oregon ranchers did not prevail in court, they were pardoned by Trump: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44775113 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44775113
dudul 8y ago
Walter Benjamin said that the nazis invented Aestheticization of politics.
jlarcombe 8y ago
Yes 'A Time Of Gifts' a remarkable book, not least because as you say it is a snapshot of a world about to be destroyed, and because he is so open about the degree to which it didn't really impinge greatly upon his travels. Last year I read the whole of the book from which this article is excerpted, and I really recommend it. It's out in paperback now I think. I was surprised she didn't quote Leight Fermor but there's tonnes of other great stuff in it I hadn't come across before.
RanInt1111 8y ago
It's quite amazing to me just how much of that whole period is not really "whitewashed" but rather just distorted. It's been nothing but a psychological propaganda warfare mosh-pit even just after WWII. I'm sure someone will invariably want to knee-jerk make accusations of "nazi sympathy", which is precisely the kind of proto-religious type of response and psychological abuse nonsense I am talking about. Even this subject piece is not even trying to hide its utter and blinding bias that made reading it all but a challenge and totally destroyed any real credibility it may have, while also being really nothing different than the same kind of rousing propaganda to rally the opposition to imaginary fascists we see today. We get it, you're against fascists, now if there were just actual fascists besides yourself that you could be against, and no, insisting that my stuff not be stolen or given away to others is not fascism. What I really see as a major danger these days is that we are so obsessed and fixated on the particular incarnation of the characteristics that resulted in both nazism and communism, that we are missing that the very same mechanism is happening right before our eyes as the left ratchets up its mob rule and rousing of emotional animus towards a particular group. The even more dangerous part is the kind of nefarious and duplicitous nature in which they are going about this all. It is something that the Nazis never really even engaged in. They were quite open and frank about what they were doing and going to do, but what today's left is being driven to do is straight out of the communist playbook that you can even read from back during the interwar period. I expect to see the very fascist organized advertisement campaigns that we have already seen, largely starting with Obama, to only continue to nudge their way into mainstream. We are seeing all the same characteristics of the authoritarian socialists/communists we saw evolve into the nazis and the soviets, there is nothing that would make me believe that this time they would not also evolved into something else... some new brand ... using different colors... different uniforms (maybe the black masked types of anti-FA) with the same kind of well spoken, emotionally manipulative, well presenting cult of personality leader that frames herself as a wrongly persecuted individual to gain sympathies and political power as she rallies the stormtroopers and naive fools around her. One thing gives me at least a little solace at this point though, even if it's just self-delusion, that the current left is extremely scattered on the ground, even though they have utterly infiltrated and compromised the government and civil society and education system that is churning out Hillary Youth at an alarming rate that are also being elevated and rewarded into the halls of bureaucratic power by validating their party membership and loyalty to dear leader Hillary... just like under the Nazi and all other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. You thought "affirmative action" was some means for warm and fuzzy mutli-culty holding hands and singing kumbaya? ... the real point of affirmative action was to invalidate merit and install party loyalists into the bureaucracy. This is going to go sideways. The chances of it not all going sideways are far lower than those that it will, regardless of whether people recognize it or not. If you consider that the housing ~~bubble~~ fraud was a kind of WWI that totally shuck the system to its foundation, then we are really only in the interwar period before black friday; and the crash had been setting up for a while now with tech companies being pumped to astronomical levels on the basis of no real substance other than adding some emojis and playing cat videos as a basis for selling adds. Ironically, the left are also sounding ever more like the Socialist Workers Party, with Hillary's latest demands that the electoral college be done away with so that pure mob rule democracy can reign, and of course the guns need to all be controlled and taken and the Constitution needs to be destroyed and the monuments and history need to be eradicated and wiped clean (I think the author referred to that as being iconoclastic). I get it, I actually supported Hillary and Obama in the past and I was also indoctrinated in the liberal cult for a long time, but it is not too late to reject this resurgence of authoritarian socialist collectivism that has all the same core hallmarks that led to the Nazis and the soviets and all the other minor communist and socialist regimes around the world and throughout history. This is that moment you always said to yourself ... "I would have recognized it and I would have stood up against it, and I would have left" or "I would have killed Hitler" .... well, here we are "you have the option to recognize that Democrats are the heirs of socialist authoritarianism and that Hillary is the equivalent of Hitler.
te_chris 8y ago
Highly recommend Joseph Roth's The Hotel Years too. A series of his newspaper columns filed across Europe between the wars. It's in a roughly chronological order as well, and really captures the darkness and change that spreads across the continent from the 20's through the 30's - with some eerie parallels that can be seen in glimpses today.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
At that time only the rich and upper middle class travelled widely - daily mail readers went to Blackpool.

mannykannot 8y ago

Britain had its own fascist party, the British Union of Fascists, formed and led by Oswald Mosley. On 6 October 1936 (just two days after his blackshirts came off rather the worse in the 'Battle of Cable Street'), he married Unity's sister Diana, at a private ceremony in Goebbels' home. Hitler attended both this and an extravagant follow-up celebration hosted by Göring and intended to upstage Goebbels. During these events, it became clear to everyone present, and especially Mosley, that his bride was infatuated with Hitler, something that Mosley was not, of course, particularly thrilled about. At least three of Unity's and Diana's sisters (Jessica, Nancy and Deborah) leaned left to a greater or lesser extent.

norseman 8y ago

Hitler did nothing wrong.

bmmayer1 8y ago

This always fascinated me. What happened to foreign nationals who found themselves 'stuck' in Berlin when Hitler invaded Poland? Were they allowed to leave? Where they imprisoned?

arbitrage 8y ago
If they were the right heritage and class, they were fine. Of course, that was at the beginning of the war. Near the end, when Germany knew it was losing the war, it would not have helped a foreign national.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hh3k0 8y ago
Were foreign nationals in Washington not allowed to leave or imprisoned when America invaded Afghanistan or Iraq? Sure, two different political systems but I don't see the reason why the average foreign national should be arrested in times of war.
- bmmayer1 8y ago
  Well, certainly in WWII we imprisoned US citizens of Japanese descent...
  - hh3k0 8y ago
    But US citizens, regardless of descent, aren't foreign nationals to the US. On top of that, Japanese weren't your average foreign national but rather enemy aliens – as the US was at war with Japan. I must have misunderstood your previous question, I apologize. I assumed that when you referred to "foreign nationals" you meant it as in "travelers of uninvolved foreign nations".
pjc50 8y ago
Nationals (or people of family origin!) of belligerent countries were interned on both sides. They were also at risk of violence. Third country neutral nationals were generally left alone subject to wartime travel restrictions, unless they were also Jewish.

dingaling 8y ago

Despite 4,230 words the article never really addresses the title and instead wanders off on verbose tangents. So I had to go and search for the answer myself. No, it was not mandatory to perform the salute if you were not a German citizen. Yes, it was often easier to do so; the Portuguese Consul General was beaten by SA thugs when he failed to do so, but couldn't be charged with any offence.

gumby 8y ago
The article talks about it a lot. The question wasn’t what the law said but whether you should or not, especially if you weren’t a supporter.

akavel 8y ago

Also highly recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29

mprev 8y ago

One thing that stands out to me in the photograph at the top of the piece is that so many of the crowd are smiling. I always thought of such salutes as a serious, even fearful, thing. I know it is fiction but The Man in the High Castle on Amazon certainly has everyone looking very grave when giving the salute.

ocschwar 8y ago
In the 1920s, Americans used that salute in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was called the Bellamy salute. It's mind warping to realize, but every symbol and word that we associate with the Nazis and Fascists had innocuous connotations until the Nazis corrupted them. The swastika, the fasces, the Hugo Boss uniforms, the salutes, the word "Nazi" (nickname for rural Bavarians), the word "Fascist" (Sicilian labor militants before WW1), the names Mussolini, Adolf, Hitler, none of those things had any scary associations before that era.
- te_chris 8y ago
  Some of the American symbolism user by the Nazis is actually a bit more than coincidental: this New Yorker article details a lot of the American racism that inspired Hitler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-r...
- posterboy 8y ago
  Fasci is Italian for bundles and associated with insignia of a sheaf of hay or rods, adorned with an ax carried before a magistrate in processions. So, no, it wasn't completely benign before either. However, the militant associations you mention were "fascista", specifically "partitio fascista rivoluzionario", and I don't exactly speak Italian so I couldn't tell if the meaning was ambiguous, or rather, what the ambiguity is. fascio it also meant burden, load; high office in Latin. Compare German "Bürde" (burden) and "Würde" (dignity, honour, your honour). The root would be basket, via Celtic, whose symbolism with the Celtish Knots is loaded with wicker work imagery. Compare also braided military shoulder signs of rank. Quite wicked. Fashism is, in my humble opinion, related to fashion, French façon (way; manner; fashion) although that's said to be from faciō (do, make; compare fact), cognate with do, believe it or not. That makes sense because cloth is woven, or rather coarsely braided at times. In case of facio, it would come via factiō, factiōnem, whence also faction. That would give "Jeder nach seiner Facon" a nuance comparable to "Jedem das seine". See also: Lt. vas (vessel; bail, surety); fiction, fingere, fingo; face (capitalism), fagot, fossil, irish cognate to fashion (neck tie, leash), Fessel, fetter, fesseln, Fass, vas, fassen, erfassen, ergreifen. Pulverfass - pulp (pulp fiction - coke stories). French fascher (now fâcher), from Latin fastus (“disdain”). Fastenzeit, fascher mittwoch; Fasten. Fasten seatbelt. Fast food. Mode droge. fingo, Fink, Finca. Sphinx. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascio#Italian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascio#Italian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascis#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascis#Latin

macca321 8y ago

I'm told Unity Mitford patted my dad on his head when he was a baby, to the horror of those around. This was on a ferry on the West Coast of Scotland, where she went after her failed suicide attempt. This means I always win at "6 Degrees of Hitler".

bogomipz 8y ago

Curiously the actual origins of the salute have been lost to history: https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-did-the-nazi-salute-come-from/ https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-did-t...

sevensor 8y ago

My (American) grandfather owned a pair of lederhosen. I knew he had gotten them in Germany, but it was twenty years from when I learned about the lederhosen to the time it occurred to me to ask when he had been in Germany. It turns out that the answer was "early 1930s," and that there are droll family stories about how well he passed for a young German. Apparently he'd spent a considerable amount of time there after university, and developed a firm command of the language. I was met with shrugs from my parents' generation when I pointed out how terribly bad that looked. Apparently it was far from unusual. Much like the young English people in the article, he was left-leaning and from a well-to-do family, and had been sent to Germany for perspective. So this article touched a nerve -- I was already distrubed by the idea of my grandfather blithely roaming around Germany in the early '30s, and by my family's willingness to treat the whole thing as a trifling bit of youthful tourism -- now I'm confronted with the mental image of him heil-ing his way across the country and dropping in to Hitler's favorite tea room.

jplayer01 8y ago
... Germany in the 30's wasn't particularly different from any other European country at the time. It's more disturbing that you think there's anything wrong with visiting what was at the time one of the cultural and scientific centers of the world.
accoil 8y ago
Why does it look bad?
- sevensor 8y ago
  Because going to Germany in the 1930s to soak up the kultur implies some pretty unsavory sympathies. At best, this puts him in the company of a great many other anglophones who allowed themselves to be duped by the regime into thinking that its intentions were basically civilized. It's not quite Wodehouse broadcasting from internment bad, but it doesn't look good.
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago

mcguire 8y ago

Regarding the Mitfords, Wikipedia notes: "The sisters, six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and Sydney Bowles, became celebrated, and at times scandalous, figures that were caricatured, according to The Times journalist Ben Macintyre, as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur"."