Seeing Hitler's Germany is the first fully researched, wide-ranging study of commercial tourism under the swastika. The book demonstrates how effectively the Nazi regime coordinated all German tourism organizations. At the same time, it emphasizes the apparent 'normality' of many everyday tourist experiences after 1933. These certainly helped some Germans and many foreign visitors to overlook the regime's brutality. However, tourism also celebrated the most racist, chauvinist aspects of the 'new Germany', which in turn became a normal part of being a tourist under Hitler. While violence and terror have continued to dominate many recent studies of the Third Reich, this book takes a different view. By investigating a range of 'normal' experiences - such as taking a tour, visiting a popular sightseeing attraction, reading a guidebook or sending a postcard - Seeing Hitler's Germany deepens our understanding of the popular legitimization of Nazi rule.

An account of the millions of foreign workers imported into Germany during the Second World War.

Travelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, fascists, artists, tourists, and even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler—one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes, and its ultimate destruction.

Seeing Hitler's Germany is the first fully researched, wide-ranging study of commercial tourism under the swastika. The book demonstrates how effectively the Nazi regime coordinated all German tourism organizations. At the same time, it emphasizes the apparent 'normality' of many everyday tourist experiences after 1933. These certainly helped some Germans and many foreign visitors to overlook the regime's brutality. However, tourism also celebrated the most racist, chauvinist aspects of the 'new Germany', which in turn became a normal part of being a tourist under Hitler. While violence and terror have continued to dominate many recent studies of the Third Reich, this book takes a different view. By investigating a range of 'normal' experiences - such as taking a tour, visiting a popular sightseeing attraction, reading a guidebook or sending a postcard - Seeing Hitler's Germany deepens our understanding of the popular legitimization of Nazi rule.

A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

In Hitler’s Foreign Executioners, Heinrich Himmler’s secret master plan for Europe is revealed: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of ‘Germanic’ peoples from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an ‘SS Europa’. This revised and fully updated book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe’s dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish Bolshevism. Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers ‘like any other’ and fought a decent war against Stalin’s Red Army. Historian Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler’s murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy of joining his future ‘SS Europa’. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler’s monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler – and to the downfall of the man once known as ‘loyal Heinrich’.