There’s something very compelling about reading a contemporaneous account of an historical event. I still remember how much I enjoyed dipping into The Faber Book of Reportage when I first bought it more than thirty years ago and reading eyewitness accounts of events like the funeral of Queen Victoria or the assassination of Gandhi. It felt like raw history with all its immediacy and urgency and with none of the layers of explanation, interpretation, and analysis. In Travelers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd had the simple but brilliant idea of telling the story of Germany between 1919 and 1945 exclusively through the experiences of visitors: foreign eyewitnesses to the events of those momentous years.  Tourists, exchange students, diplomats, journalists, and many others give us, through their letters, postcards, reports and articles, firsthand accounts of what it was like to be in Germany during the fall of the Weimar Republic, the ascent of Hitler, and the Second World War.

The virulent antisemitism that found its most grotesque and tragic expression in the death camps started to appear in Germany almost before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles.  From the moment people started to express hateful anti-Jewish propaganda, others (Germans and foreigners) began to look the other way or find excuses. At every stage – from the appearance of antisemitic posters in 1919 to the boycotting and destruction of Jewish-owned stores in the early 1930s to the forcible removal of Jews from their homes and to their systematic murder – ordinary witnesses found ways to exonerate the guilty and to explain their hideous ideology.  What made it possible for so many to be so complicit? Fear of communism. Ancient, deeply buried and hideous anti-Jewish tropes. Guilt about how the allies had punished the German nation at the end of the First World War. Wilful naivety. The superficial glamor of the Nazis with their choreographed festivals, uniforms and music. The willingness to excuse anything as long as economic growth was achieved and sustained.

It’s all complicated but some simple things became shockingly clear as I read all these accounts. Some people don’t or can’t see what’s right in front of them. Some people always want to believe that decency will prevail. Some people care only about themselves. Some people are frightened to speak up. Some people support disgusting ideologies.  Edmund Burke summed it up as long ago as the 1770s. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing“.

Compelling stories of the past ought to make us think about the present. We live in a time when political leaders feel no hesitation about spreading horrible lies about ethnic and religious groups. Attacks against Jews and Muslims are on the rise almost everywhere. Recent research showed that 55% of Americans don’t know how many perished in the Holocaust. Anyone who thinks that what happened in Germany eighty years ago couldn’t be repeated isn’t really much different from those who strolled around Munich and Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s admiring the pretty window boxes and smart uniforms.