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Making History listener Mary Johnson has some photographs of her father as a 23 year old on holiday in Germany. What interested Mary was that this was in 1937 and her dad was a left-wing Labour voter who never went on holiday abroad again and spent 4 years as a Prisoner of War during the Second World War. What was he doing visiting the Third Reich she asks?

Nick Baker put this question to Petra-utta Rau of Portsmouth University.

Germany was an important holiday destination in the thirties. Much cheaper than the UK and easily accessible by boat from Harwich, it was a place that many middle class and a few working class people could afford to visit. So, as well as the well-documented fascination with Nazi Germany in certain quarters of the British aristocracy, there was also a more innocent tourist trade which was heavily exploited by the German propaganda machine. Petra-utta Rau says that Thomas Cook received payments from Goebbels' propaganda ministry from 1934-1937 to help advertise trips to Germany and that in 1937 the 'contribution' was as high as 50,000 Reichsmark to produce a brochure advertising the beauty of the German landscape with seemingly depoliticised images.

Whether or not Mary Johnson鈥檚 father was aware of the true extent of the Nazi鈥檚 excesses at this time, though, is difficult to establish. Petra-utta Rau reminded the programme that the Dachau concentration camp was opened in 1933 and in 1937 anyone with just a little understanding of the German language would have understood the signs outside many German towns and cities discouraging Jews from entering.