An American Tourist in Nazi Germany

This is a guest post by Manuscript Division archivist Katherine S. Madison.

On July 31, 1936, after a week aboard the ocean liner MV Britannic, Wendell Cannon was ready to get through the “transports, visas, red cards, blue cards, permits to board, permits to stay, customs inspection, etc etc etc,” and disembark in La Havre, France, and start his European vacation. In summer 1936, Cannon was thirty-one years old and on a break from his job as a high school math teacher in Illinois. He had booked a tour with Amerop Travel and was off to see the sights of France, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. Cannon’s trip, and the record he left behind, was packed with familiar sites and experiences. Yet two things were unique: First, this was the summer of the Olympic Games in Berlin — and alongside that international celebration of sport — the Nazi Party’s consolidation of power in Germany was on full display.

For the first few weeks of his trip, Cannon kept a diary in which he recorded his thoughts and experiences. He saw most of the standard tourist spots as he traveled through Paris, Cologne, Berlin, The Hague, and eventually London and its surrounding areas. He climbed the Arc de Triomphe on August 1 (“2 francs to climb or 4 to go by elevator”) and marveled at Cologne Cathedral the next day (“The thrill one gets when he steps in Cologne’s 13^th century cathedral is worth a trip to Europe”). He bought guidebooks when he visited the British Museum and Windsor Castle and snapped a picture in front of “Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Palace” in The Hague. Cannon also photographed more pedestrian subjects, such as a French cattle farmer and a Dutch cat perched atop a bicycle. He enjoyed different cuisines, especially marveling at the amount of butter in French food, and attended several theatrical revues, including a show at the famous Folies Bergères cabaret hall in Paris.

During his day in Cologne, Cannon got his first taste of the Nazi Party’s popularity. “[We] enjoyed a happy evening walking by and through Cologne’s magnificent cathedral and thru the queer, narrow streets crowded by seemingly happy Germans in quite a holiday mood,” he wrote on August 2, 1936. “Swastikas were everywhere and everybody seemed jovial and happy.”

Cannon stopped writing in his diary just after he reached Berlin on August 3. “Row upon row upon row of apartments passed us by as we entered Berlin on an elevated road bed. Nazi banners were everywhere,” he wrote in his last entry. Recounting the end of that day, following a walk past the Brandenburg Gate and down the Unter den Linden boulevard, he noted that “the whole street was an ‘Avenue of Flags’ and Berlin looked like the World’s Fair on one of its busiest nights.”

Cannon’s exceptional photographs, now housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, tell the remaining story of his European trip. It is through these photographs that we know Cannon attended track and field events at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, witnessing historic races featuring Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson. Owens, an African American athlete from Ohio, famously won gold during the Games that were supposedly intended to highlight Hitler’s ideal of Aryan physical supremacy. From his place in the stands, Cannon captured the moment when Owens was awarded one of his four gold medals, surrounded by a crowd giving the Nazi salute.

With his journal left incomplete, it’s unclear when Cannon left Berlin to continue exploring western Europe. What he did write, however, captures his excitement and wonder at new experiences. Through his photographs, he left behind valuable additions to the historical record — a firsthand account of the Berlin Olympics through an American tourist’s eyes and visual documentation of the growing omnipresence of the Nazi Party — but in his writings that summer, there is little evidence that he saw indications of the darkness the Nazi regime would soon cast over western Europe.

The Wendell Eugene Cannon Papers, comprised of his 1936 journal as well as guidebooks, brochures, programs, and pamphlets from the many sites he visited, are now open for research in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Photographs from the collection are available in the Prints and Photographs Division and are identified under the same collection name.

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“Etc etc etc…” Wendell Cannon, journal, July 31, 1936, pages 20-21, box 1, Wendell Eugene Cannon Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. All subsequent citations are to this source.

“2 francs to climb…” Cannon, journal, August 1, 1936, page 23.

“The thrill one gets…” Cannon, journal, August 1, 1936, page 26.

“Swastikas were everywhere…” Cannon, journal, August 2, 1936, page 26, page 28.

“Row upon row upon row of apartments…” Cannon, journal, August 3, 1936, page 33.

“The whole street was an ‘Avenue of Flags’…” Cannon, journal, August 3, 1936, page 35.