
To Heil, or Not to Heil, When Traveling in the Third Reich - smacktoward
https://longreads.com/2018/10/10/to-heil-or-not-to-heil-when-traveling-in-the-third-reich/
======
pjc50
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...](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could-
have-had) 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
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
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.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _This sounds strangely familiar in relation to what is occurring within the
> USA..._

Not quite. There are no concentration camps in the United States. And we don't
have guys out executing jews and other minorities while trashing their temples
and churches.

EDIT: Oops. iamdave below makes a very good point that people _are_ out
executing minorities and attacking their churches. (In fact, a few
enterprising numbskulls are out doing both at the same time.) That was a miss
on my part. Extremely bad example.

~~~
iamdave
_And we don 't have guys out executing jews and other minorities while
trashing their temples and churches._

How far off the mark would I be in guessing you're not a minority in America?

Jason Van Dyke, a Chicago police officer was just convicted of 2nd degree
murder and sixteen counts of aggravated battery with a fire arm of a black man
in a time when more and more black Americans feel scared for their lives
simply being in the presence of a police officer (I happen to be one of them)
and Dylan Roof was given the death penalty for killing nine black parishioners
at a church in my hometown of Charleston South Carolina three years ago.

These are by no means the only examples I can give you.

~~~
glafa
This year in Chicago there has been 457 (around 350 blacks) killed, how many
have the police killed in Chicago? 4 this year. The crime rate is the biggest
problem not the cops in minority areas.

I understand the fear of cops and I do believe in self policing but for the
black community the biggest problem is rampant crime.

~~~
ivraatiems
What do you believe causes the rampant crime?

~~~
mullingitover
Poverty[1]:

For the period 2008-12-

\- Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL)
(39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as
persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000).

\- Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a
firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8-2.5 per 1,000).

\- The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent
victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of
violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels.

\- Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to
poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000).

\- Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent
victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per
1,000).

\- Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor
urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).

[1]
[https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137](https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137)

~~~
ivraatiems
I agree, in part.

According to the latest government data, as of 2017 21% of African Americans
and 18% of Hispanics are living in poverty. Only about 10% of Asian Americans
and 8.7% of whites are in poverty.[1]

To what would you attribute the racial disparity in poverty rates?

(Naturally I have an opinion, but I'm withholding it because I want to
understand your approach to this.)

[1] [http://federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-
statistics.html](http://federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html)
citing
[https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26...](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-263.html)

~~~
mullingitover
> To what would you attribute the racial disparity in poverty rates?

It's no secret that blacks and latinos in the US have been the victims of
widespread institutional racism. I recommend 'The Case for Reparations' by Ta-
Nehisi Coates for a thorough breakdown on the topic.[1]

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-
cas...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-
reparations/361631/)

~~~
ivraatiems
Heh. You got me. I thought this was gonna go in a different direction based on
your initial post.

I agree completely :).

Unfortunately, I think the solution is likely as cyclical as the problem.

------
noir_lord
> 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.

------
dingaling
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
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
Also highly recommended:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_%282008_film%29)

------
mprev
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
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
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-r...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-
racism-influenced-hitler)

------
sevensor
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.

~~~
accoil
Why does it look bad?

~~~
sevensor
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
Eh Germany had the reputation of being into healthy natural lifestyle type
stuff; vegetarianism/special diets, exercise and fresh air, homeopathic
medicine and so forth. It was kind of the California of Europe in that regard.
The Nazis did pick up the clean living aesthetic but it was more about being
German than about being fascist

------
mannykannot
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.

------
bogomipz
Curiously the actual origins of the salute have been lost to history:

[https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-
did-t...](https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/where-did-the-nazi-
salute-come-from/)

------
macca321
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".

------
bmmayer1
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
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.

------
mcguire
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"._"

