Cycling Through the Third Reich
Viktoria Hertling

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"You’ve got to get in touch with Dr. Harvey. He is a most unusual gentleman and he has some amazing photographs that would interest you,” my friend informs me over the phone.

When I ring the doorbell to his house, Dr. Harvey greets me with a friendly invitation to step in. His living room is a veritable museum of unusual specimens, memorabilia, and exquisite photographs taken during his travels to all corners of the world. They share the space with paintings of erupting volcanoes, a desk with two computer stations, research papers, journal articles, and books, books, books everywhere.

“I’m 95,” he informs me, and his agile eyes seem to watch me for my reaction to this revelation. While I listen to his story, told with enthusiasm and with great attention to detail, I wonder from where he takes the energy to live such an active life. There is an aquarium near the kitchen, and on the windowsills facing his backyard are blossoming flowers. His little garden is like an orchestra of colors, with hummingbirds darting everywhere and ducks trying to nibble on fallen down apples and peaches.

Dr. Harvey has prepared himself for my visit. He hands me a journal article written in German with a color photograph of a painting done in 1988, in which he holds a sample of the crystals he discovered in South America in 1945. Then he hands me a worn brown envelope with small black and white photographs taken in Germany in 1935 where he had studied two years earlier.

In the summer of ’35, even before having his doctorate from Harvard in his pocket, this young naturalist and geologist set out for Europe to collect mineral specimens from old mines and pits. Before beginning his first job in New York City, Dr. Harvey wanted to return to Heidelberg where, from 1932 to 1933, he had studied. In order to collect specimens at remote locations, Dr. Harvey purchased a bicycle from a Bremen cycle shop.

With his “new” old bicycle, Harvey crisscrossed some 5000 kilometers — through northern and southern Germany, then through Switzerland, Austria, and into Czechoslovakia. He passed through hamlets, small villages and towns, and also stopped in many picturesque old cities, such as Hildesheim, Münster, Cologne, Heidelberg, Dresden, Salzburg, Vienna, and Prague. The young geologist did not set out to document anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany that summer of 1935. His intention was to identify minerals, and pinpoint and map their location. But his sharp eyes, trained to discover hidden geological phenomena deep inside the earth, discovered something else, something chilling, something right “on the surface” and visible to anyone who cared enough to see and understand.

Dr. Harvey was traveling during a historically important juncture, right before the Nazis promulgated the September 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which robbed German citizens of Jewish faith and culture of their civil rights and their citizenship. The demeaning and vicious signs and banners that Harvey documented were the ideological precursors to actions that eventually would lead from exclusion, to expulsion, to deportation, and finally to extermination.
I can imagine that Harvey must have encountered quite of few of these defaming signs before he came to realize their omnipresence and started documenting them. Obviously, such signs and banners were not haphazard aberrations. Rather, they were part of the new German landscape. The anti-Semitic propaganda was everywhere — in small towns as well as large cities. Harvey not only captured the various epithets; he also photographed the environment in which they occurred. His photographs make it evident that people could plainly see them on their way to work, to school, or when going shopping or taking a walk.

And while in 1935 no one could foresee the impending Holocaust with certainty, these nauseating signs and banners helped prepare the population to accept increasingly vicious anti-Jewish measures. German citizens of Jewish faith were dismissed from civil service jobs; Jewish students were expelled from universities; Jewish professionals were forced out of law offices and hospitals. Eventually, businesses, houses and other properties were expropriated from their Jewish owners while neighbors and colleagues looked on.

Dr. Harvey was not the only person who noticed what was going on during that summer. On July 21, 1935, Victor Klemperer, a linguist and professor of Romance languages — his brother was the renowned Berlin conductor Otto Klemperer, who like Victor, was forced out of his job because he was Jewish — wrote in his diary: “The Jew-baiting and the pogrom atmosphere grow day by day. Der Stürmer [this was one of the most blatant and crude anti-Semitic newspapers published during the Nazi period. V.H.], Goebbels’s speeches (‘exterminate [the Jews] like fleas and bedbugs!’), acts of violence in Berlin, Breslau, yesterday also here [in Dresden] in the Prager Strasse … I truly expect that one day our little house will be set on fire and I shall be beaten to death.” [Quoted from: I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. New York: Random House, 1998, p. 128]. And on August 11, Klemperer again writes, “The Jew-baiting has become so extreme, far worse than during the first boycott [this refers to the boycott of Jewish stores and businesses on April 1, 1933. V.H.]; there are the beginnings of a pogrom here and there, and we expect to be beaten to death at any moment.” [p. 130] A few days after the Nuremberg Laws were passed, Klemperer writes, “I have the impression that an explosion is imminent. I am reckoning on a pogrom, the ghetto, money and house to be taken away, anything.” [p. 134].
Dr. Harvey’s photographs are unique. They confirm with new documentation how prejudice, hatred, and dehumanization policies originate. They demonstrate how they manifest themselves, and how they eventually become stepping stones toward physical exclusion and extermination. Contrary to the popular children’s rhyme: “Sticks and stones can break my bones / But words can never hurt me,” anti-Semitic and racist words and images do hurt. In 1935 they paved the way for the Nazis to break bones and render human beings to ashes.

We sincerely appreciate the permission to present these photographs here for the first time.