WHAT KRISTOF WOULD HAVE REPORTED IN 1938

Imagine that Nick Kristof had been reporting from Germany instead of Iran, and in 1938, instead of 2012.  This is what he would have said:

The government of the Reich gave me a very rare journalist visa, along with permission to drive unescorted across the country on a government-approved route from Breslau in the east to Wiesbaden in the west, and back to Berlin. I interviewed people at random along the way, and as far as I could tell I was not tailed....


... To me, the German Reich feels like other authoritarian countries I covered before they toppled. My guess is that the demise of the system is a matter of time — unless there’s a war between Germany and the West, perhaps ignited by French strikes on German military sites in the demilitarized Rhineland. That, I sense, would provoke a nationalist backlash and rescue the Fuehrer and his gauleiters.