  A short visit across the border to Hitler’s Germany left Prior aghast. ‘We got out of the place as fast as we could’, he said: ‘the general mental atmosphere is just one big Hell’. At Roquebrune he met a young German backpacker, a Lutheran, pleasant and mild of manner, according to Prior, but pro-Hitler and virulently anti-Jewish—the German responded with ‘a queer look’ when Prior ‘told him that if I was in Germany I would be a member of the Bekenntniskirche’, the anti-Hitler, Barth-inclined German Confessional Church. The Priors also visited Austria, not long after the March 1938 Anschluss (union) with Germany. Horrified by the rampant anti-semitism they found there, they wrote an article about the plight of the Austrian Jews for the Otago Daily Times, under Clare’s nom de plume ‘John Everdean’. They reported that posters bearing slogans like ‘You will never get clean milk if you get it from Jews’ were ruining Jewish businesses, and Jewish shops had a ‘dirty yellow placard pasted across the door’, warning customers away (Everdean 1938).