Julia Boyd reconstructs the experience of visiting Nazi Germany through the eyes of foreigners who traveled there between Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939. Drawing on diaries, letters, and memoirs from an extraordinarily varied cast—American students on junior-year abroad programs, British aristocrats attending the Nuremberg rallies, Black athletes competing in the 1936 Olympics, diplomats filing dispatches, journalists chasing stories, and tourists simply curious about the new Germany—Boyd creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of how outsiders perceived the Third Reich in real time. What emerges is deeply unsettling: many visitors came away impressed. They admired the clean streets, the apparent economic recovery, and the enthusiasm of ordinary Germans, and they dismissed reports of anti-Semitic persecution as exaggerated or noted them only in passing. The book gives detailed attention to figures like Charles Lindbergh, who accepted a medal from Göring, and Samuel Beckett, who traveled through Germany in 1937 and recorded the atmosphere of menace in his notebooks. Boyd also follows less prominent travelers whose accounts are no less revealing—a young American woman who studied in Heidelberg and slowly grew alarmed, a British schoolteacher who organized student exchanges and remained willfully blind. The cumulative effect of these testimonies is a demonstration of how people process evidence of atrocity when it unfolds gradually and is wrapped in the ordinary textures of daily life. Boyd, a British historian, lets the travelers speak largely in their own words, allowing readers to judge how and why so many intelligent observers failed to see what was plainly before them.