…between 1933 and 1939?
There were foreign visitors. My granddad took my mother and her sisters on a tour of Europe that included both France and Germany during the summer of 1939.
There was lots of tourism in Nazi Germany- especially in 1936, the year Berlin hosted the Olympics.
The Nazis were shameless self-promoters, and loved having foreigners visit, so they could show off how marvelously everything was working under their rule.
Note that both the Winter and Summer Olympics were held in Germany in 1936.
The festivals in Bayreuth (Richard Wagner) and Salzburg, Austria, were another two big magnets (although foreign interest went down a bit after the Nazis had started to pump propaganda into them) . For quite some time, the Third Reich was pretty keen on presenting itself to the rest of the world as a peace-loving, culturally first-class nation.
There was also considerable state-organized tourism from Germans abroad, incidentally, run by the Kraft Durch Freude(“strenght through joy”) program.
People still visit tyrannies and dictatorships today. Tourists generally don’t let themselves be deterred by the political situation.
In her autobiography Pentimento, playwrite Lillian Hellman describes her involvement in the underground resistence while a tourist to Germany in the mid-1930s. This was later dramatized in the film Julia, where she was played by Jane Fonda.
Hellman’s story has since been debunked as a tissue of lies; her heroic friend Julia’s biography matches in most details the life of Muriel Barber, a real-life resistence hero who, unlike Julia, did not disappear mysteriously and who, unlike Julia, never met Hellman in her life. It’s also been shown that further on in her European tour Hellman attended a Russian production of Hamlet which didn’t take place. About the only point in Hellman’s story which has not been challenged is the idea that she could have visited Nazi Germany as a tourist–she probably didn’t, but she could have.
The first of the two films Alfred Hitchcock directed which bore the title The Man Who Knew Too Much begins with a British family visiting Germany at the time of the Winter Olympics.
Kind of like America.
Don’t forget the popularity of the Hindenburg, which was emblazoned with huge swastikas: