Primary Sources: Germany: Third Reich

"Gareth Vaughan Jones (1905–35) was a famous researcher, journalist and author who met his death at the hands of supposed Chinese ‘bandits’ in Inner Mongolia in August 1935. During his career he travelled the world, reporting on the Holodomor in Ukraine and Nazisim in Germany.

The collection includes the famous ‘Hitler diary’ kept by Jones during his visit to Germany in the spring of 1933 and describes conditions and various events in Nazi Germany shortly after the Fuehrer had come to power there and presents uncannily perceptive pen-portraits of Hitler himself and Goebbels. In February 1933, one month after Adolf Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany (and just 3 days before the burning of the Reichstag), Gareth became the first foreign journalist to fly with the newly elected dictator to a rally at Frankfurt-am-Main.

A further group of six pocket diaries describe in some detail Jones’s visits to the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1933, especially his travels there, the people whom he meets and graphic accounts of the conditions of the Holodomor, the severe famine which accounted for millions of deaths in Ukraine, and which Gareth Jones almost alone reported in British newspapers and journals at the time. Gareth Jones’s diaries, perhaps represent the only independent verification of arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity."

This site is from Randall Bytwerk, a Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan (USA). The archive contains "a growing collection of English translations of propaganda material from Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic."