1936 On the Continent

staying. I was only asked for my passport, which was stamped, and all was over. Fellow travellers told me that in Germany the control of foreigners is carried out quite otherwise than in England. Whilst here it is not necessary to report for three months and the examination of the foreigner is done at the frontier, in Germany each newcomer has to report at once, though if one is staying in a hotel or pension there is nothing to it, as the porter fills in the form from the passport and sees to all the rest. If one is living privately one certainly has to go oneself to the police, but at the most it means a slight loss of time without any other unpleasantness or obligation.
Customs and Tobacco
    First at the frontier and somewhat later at the first German station, I was struck by the enormous number of different uniforms. There were in our train forty or fifty young people whom I took to be soldiers. The customs examination was done by a gentleman in a green soldier’s uniform. Having looked at my passport he did not examine my luggage, but all the same the handbags of a German passenger were well searched. The customs regulations are in the main the same as ours, if anything, somewhat less strict. Photographic apparatus, portable gramophones, typewriters, if for personal use, may safely be taken. It is really not worth while taking a lot of cigars and cigarettes, as pipe tobacco prepared in the English manner is to be had, also cigarettes which are very much like our own Virginia cigarettes. These are all produced in Germany, but foreign brands are prohibitively dear. A genuine English or American cigarette costs about 4d., whilst about twenty-five good German cigarettes may be had for 1s. This is the result of the duty, which is enormously high on all tobacco products in Germany. Fortunately for me I am a cigar smoker, and in this connection had my first pleasant surprise in Germany—an excellent German cigar costs hardly more than 3d. or 4d. and for the same kind of thing I should have to pay at least 1s. 6d. in England. The Germans have a highly developed cigar industry, and their products are shipped from Bremen all over the world. Genuine Havana cigars however, which are very popular in England, are rare and even dearer than with us.
    All this, however, has nothing to do with uniforms, but the green-clad customs official led me to a digression. I was inclined to be over-cautious, as I had been warned not to discuss political questions with strangers in Germany. We have to get accustomed to the fact that in other countries opinion cannot be expressed so freely as in England, and as visitors we should avoid criticising the political affairs of other people. Now I could not decide whether a harmless question about uniforms would be considered political. My curiosity, however, won, and I began a diplomatic conversation on the subject. “Your soldiers are quite differently dressed to ours” I said to myneighbour, who had told me that he was a jeweller from Pforzheim, the centre of the German jewellery trade. The chief German industries are centralised for the most part according to towns and districts—Leipzig has the original fur industry and the fur market, the Ruhr towns the heavy industries, Offenbach, near Frankfurt is the leather town, in Central Germany the largest factories in the chemical industry are situated, although the most important organisation in the German chemical industry the I.-G. Farben, is at Höchst, near Frankfort. Chemnitz, Plauen and other Saxon towns owe their prosperity to the world-renowned German textile manufactures. My neighbour the jeweller told me all this, and I gathered that his interests lay first and foremost in his civil calling. The answer he gave me to my question about the uniforms, however, taught me something else.
Uniforms
    I learnt that most of the uniforms I saw in Germany have nothing to do with militarism. He himself had formerly belonged to the Stahlhelm, but was now in the National Socialist Vanguard organisation and often wore uniform once a week. The youths in our compartment who wore brown shirts and jackets were members of the S.A., the Sturmabteilung, which was so widely described in all the newspapers even before the seizure of power by Hitler. The members are all in civil callings and only use their free time for work for the Party, which to Germans is now synonymous with the State. He pointed out a particularly fine-looking fair man, wearing a really very