They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

by Milton Sanford Mayer

Five irreparable years later, the man we sent to Germany to re-educate the Germans found himself re-educated: “In looking backward,” said former High Commissioner McCloy, “I wish we had been able to erect tribunals not composed exclusively of the victors.”

“There was one thing you had to say for the Bolsheviks,” said the Nazi Fanatiker Schwenke. “Their ‘No’ wasn’t a three-quarters ‘Yes.’”

unlike American workers, who were born with civil rights, the German and all other European workers had had to fight to win theirs.

the German Social Democrats had been a force for fundamental change among perhaps one-third of all the Germans. Respectability, which the Social Democrats finally achieved by supporting the war government in 1914, killed that force and left its vestiges to the Nazis and the Communists.

“When all is said and done, it is cheaper to pay one man, who knows how to rule, twenty million marks than to pay five thousand men ten thousand marks apiece.”

“In your government,” said the argumentative bill-collector, who wanted to talk about America and had read about it in Luckner, “nobody has authority. This is a fine thing, to be sure, in a big, rich, empty land, unless there is an emergency. Then you suddenly establish authority. You boast that you have elections even in wartime, but you never change governments then; then you say, ‘Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream’ (we have the same saying in Germany); and you don’t. We don’t pretend that we can.”

We have heard of your American cities ruled by gangsters working with dishonest politicians who steal the people’s money and give them poor service, bad roads, and such, charging them always for good roads or good sewers. That we have never known here in Germany, not under the Kaiser, not under Hitler. That is a kind of Anarchie, maybe not mob rule but something like it.”

“but what about the law against drinking liquor that you had in the United States. Wasn’t that a majority dictatorship?”

This immense hierarchism, based upon blind servility in which the man on the third rung would never dare to imagine that the man on the second would order him to do something wrong, since, after all, the man on the second had to answer to the man on the first, nourished the buck-passing instinct to fantastic proportions.

The only objection to the scheme is that men who always do as they’re told do not know what to do when they’re not.

Germany sent—drove, rather—its best. Between Prince Metternich’s Mainz Commission of 1819 (the Un-German Activities Committee of its day) and the last renewal of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws in 1888, some four and a half million Germans came to the United States alone, 770,000 of them after the suppression of the Revolution of 1848. Wave after wave, after each unsuccessful movement against autocracy, came over to constitute, wherever they went, the finest flower of immigration.

all men, in whatever form they love it, love liberty. Thus throughout Germany, as everywhere where there is oppression among literate peoples, one encountered, and still encounters, more diversity, more individuality, than there is among, say, Americans, who are unoppressed;

Free Americans all read the same papers, wear the same clothes, and vote for the same two transposable parties; Germans dress freely, freely read different papers, and vote a dozen different ways, but they are, in their submissiveness, the same.

“The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”

On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. “What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame.

It is so much easier to ‘oppose the excesses,’ about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day.”

“You know,” he went on, “when men who understand what is happening—the motion, that is, of history, not the reports of single events or developments—when such men do not object or protest, men who do not understand cannot be expected to.

“How might your faith of that first day have been sustained?” “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?” “I am an American,” I said. My friend smiled. “Therefore you believe in education.” “Yes,” I said. “My education did not help me,” he said, “and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant.

Even Herr Schwenke, the tailor, proud of his having refused a Jew of old acquaintance a light for his cigarette, frankly glad that the synagogue had been burned, said of the gas ovens, “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.” And, if he were ever able to admit that it did happen, he would have to admit that it was right and, to prove it, cry out, with his wound rubbed raw, in still greater anguish against the victims and ascribe to them sins even he had not yet been able to dream of.

What we don’t like, what I don’t like, is the hypocrisy of these people. I want to hear them confess. That they, or some of their countrymen and their country’s government, violated the precepts of Christian, civilized, lawful life was bad enough; that they won’t see it, or say it, is what really rowels.

The other nonbeliever was really the truest believer of them all. He was a biologist and a rebel against a religious background. He had no trouble perverting Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ into Nazi racism—he was the only teacher in the whole school who believed it.”

“Many of the students—the best of them—understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones.

“Well, the old among them are, I suppose you would say, the hopeless now. The younger, those who were teen-agers then—I don’t know what to say about them except that they have lost their old illusions and see nothing new to turn to. This is dangerous, both for them and for the world ten or twenty years from now.

Putting ignorant ‘reliables,’ from politics or business, over the educators was also part of the Nazi way of humiliating education and bringing it into popular contempt.

“I still say,” said Herr Kessler, “that National Socialism was good for Germany.” “Was it good for you?” I said, on an off chance. There was a pause. Then: “No.” “Why not?” I said, “if it was good for Germany?” “Perhaps we will talk about that, one day, Herr Professor.” We did, one day, months later. It burst out. “Through National Socialism I lost my soul. I blasphemed. Every night, through all those years, I blasphemed; I said my children’s prayers with them; I took the name of the Lord in vain. I wanted them to be Christians, and I myself had denied Jesus Christ.”

Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century,

During the next six years Herr Kessler was called upon more and more often to perform German Faith Movement funerals, baptisms, even weddings. There was no church service, of course, for the funerals, only a cemetery service, and no sermon but, rather, a speech, “no Bible, never a word about God or the soul, the whole personal afterlife denied by the clearest implication.” The baptism celebrated nature as the source of life and the child’s father as the “life-giver,” and the wedding joined the couple as “Germans.” “But,” said Herr Kessler, “man is still man, he must be comforted in the presence of death and sobered in the presence of life. Those who had left the Church—Evangelical or Catholic—had no place to go. And no—pastor.”

“Millions had left the Church—the Protestant much more than the Catholic—before 1933. Not just Social Democrats and, of course, Communists, but people in general.

“The trouble was that the Church—Catholic as well as Protestant—was supported by taxes. Thus it did not have to consider the people’s wants in order itself to survive, or minister to their needs.

“At the beginning of National Socialism,” said Herr Kessler, “there was no effort to draw people away from the Church. Just the opposite. The Weimar Republic had separated Church and State, just as it is in America, you know, and the pastors, most of them, supported the Nazis in the hope of reuniting the two and rebuilding the Church. Certainly the Party call for ‘positive Christianity’ was clear, so much so that, in the first days of the regime, many liberals and radicals who had left the Church hurried to join it again as a means of ‘covering up,’ of proving that they were not leftists.

left with me the conviction that there was one thing that would have made Nazism even worse than it was: the nonexistence of the Christian Church.

General Nathan DeWitt, the West Coast Area Commander of the United States Army, in 1942: “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not You can’t change him by giving him a piece of paper. The Japanese race is an enemy race.”

“Much learned trifling,” says Gibbon in one of his savage little footnotes, “might be spared, if our antiquarians would condescend to reflect that similar manners will naturally be produced by similar conditions.”

National Socialism could have happened elsewhere in the modern world, but it hasn’t yet. Up to now it is unique to Germany. And the deception and self-deception it required were required of a people whose civilization, by common measurement, was very highly advanced.

When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, and then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’

wryly decided that the Germans had “confiscated for themselves all the common human virtues.”

Germany has more frontiers—and they are “soft” frontiers—and more historically dissimilar neighbors than any other nation on earth. Its people first knew and became known to the world through the hostile invasion of their land.

What the rest of the world knows as German aggression the Germans know as their struggle for liberation.

Germany’s need was every place in the sun, all the living space. The man who dreams that he can’t breathe in a telephone booth can’t breathe in a circus tent.

I asked my friend Simon, the “democratic” bill-collector, what he liked best about Hitler. “Ah,” he said at once, “his ‘So—oder so,’ his ‘Whatever I have to do to have my way, I will have my way.’”

Ethnical heterogeneity is greater among the Germans (taking the Austrians as Germans) than it is among any other of the world’s peoples except the Russians and the Americans.

the gypsies, whose treatment was, if anything, more horrible than that of the Jews and who had no voice anywhere in all the world to cry out for them.

Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consequence, not the cause, of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.

“A trite, nauseatingly repulsive, ignorant charlatan without esprit, who with unexampled impertinence scribbled together twaddle and nonsense, which his venal adherents trumpeted forth … the hollowest farrago of words devoid of sense that ever satisfied dunderheads … repulsive … recalls the ravings of madmen.” This is a philosophical critique by one of Germany’s greatest philosophers, Schopenhauer, of another of Germany’s greatest philosophers, Hegel.

He who has Science has Art, Religion, too, has he; Who has not Science, has not Art, Let him religious be.

We know that in one night, November 9, 1938, five hundred and eighty-six synagogues were destroyed in Germany, and the Court takes judicial notice of this fact which led to the disgrace of the German nation and a tragic misunderstanding of the German character everywhere in the world.

“The crime was committed at a time when the leadership of the State would not punish such assaults against unpopular persons or groups or their property and in this sense favored and even urged such assault. In addition, many of the highest officials of the State competed with one another, in the interest of their own political popularity, in the most violent denunciations of such persons or groups, thus arousing the passions of ordinary citizens who look to their public officials for counsel and direction.