Introduction

Tourism has remained a relatively unexplored topic for historians of Nazi Germany. While research into the Kraft durch Freude (KdF, Strength through Joy) holidays continues, the practices of commercial tourism, the contours of its culture and its organisational structure have attracted considerably less attention. In many ways, the past neglect of this subject is understandable. Tourism sits uncomfortably alongside persecution, terror and genocide, the defining hallmarks of the Nazi regime. In the context of a murderous dictatorship, tourism indeed seems a 'soft topic', one that threatens to ignore more fundamental historical problems (Confino, 1999). Yet such an assessment is misguided. As many historians have come to acknowledge, what once appeared almost trivial or trifling can actually reveal a great deal about the past. Moreover, if historians have considered tourism to be a soft topic, the Nazi regime certainly did not. It saw tourism as an important branch of the German economy, which demanded support and regulation by the state. More significantly, tourism offered a means to advance the regime's political agenda, for it served the creation and unification of a racially purified, unswervingly loyal and deeply patriotic Volksgemeinschaft (national community). The regime, therefore, embarked upon a thorough and effective coordination of all German tourism organisations. Soon it enjoyed unchallenged authority over leisure travel by Germans within Germany.

This chapter is drawn from my doctoral dissertation, which attempts an inclusive foray into the world of domestic commercial tourism under the swastika through its analysis of three very different tourist destinations: Berlin, Weimar and the Black Forest (Semmens, 2002). By providing a reconstruction of that world, this larger project seeks to enrich what is to date a relatively meagre historiography. At the same time, it employs tourism as a prism through which to view and shed new light on larger issues in Third Reich history.