A festival day in Weimar, 1937

Swastika banners hang between the shuttered windows of Schiller's house, its door framed by fir trees and evergreen arches; Hitler Youth boys in brown shirts lounge at the doorway and three girls of the League of German Girls walk arm in arm down a street where a Ferris wheel shows over the roofs. The long baroque front of Goethe's house on the Frauenplan is hung with garlands and wreaths, and on the market square crowds and soldiers sit at long tables beside a striped maypole.

Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller and of the republic's constitution of 1919, had turned early to the party; the Hitler Youth took its name there in 1926. In July 1937 the SS opened a camp on the Ettersberg above the town: Buchenwald.