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

by Milton Sanford Mayer

point, service to the tyranny was, naturally, highly advisable for the ambitious and the politically suspect, but it was not required of the man who wanted to hold a job, a home, a family, and an honored place in the Singverein or the Turnverein.

modern tyrants all stand above politics and, in doing so, demonstrate that they are all master politicians.

The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.

Local hoodlums could beat up Communists or Social Democrats, desecrate Jewish cemeteries or smash Jews’ windows by night; the local police, overseen by the Gestapo, would make a routine and invariably unsuccessful investigation of the assault; and the ordinary demands of decency would be satisfied.

The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere.

You were sorry for the Jews, who had to identify themselves, every male with “Israel” inserted into his name, every female with “Sarah,” on every official occasion; sorrier, later on, that they lost their jobs and their homes and had to report themselves to the police; sorrier still that they had to leave their homeland, that they had to be taken to concentration camps and enslaved and killed. But—weren’t you glad you weren’t a Jew? You

But my friends do not mean 1939–45 when they speak of “the Nazi time.” They mean 1933–39.

These Hitlers, Stalins, Mussolinis are commoner upstarts, the half-literate Hitler the commonest of the lot. Kings and kaisers rule by God’s grace, Hitlers by their own.

Veer interesting point related to modern populism

The failings of one’s biological father could not but affect one’s attitude, but the failings of the true father-figure were, like the Emperor’s new clothes in the fairy tale, beyond the very presumption of his subjects to observe.

Nothing surprised my friends so much as to hear that Americans still speculate about Hitler’s survival, in the flesh in Argentina or Spain or in personal spirit in Germany. He lived, succeeded, failed, died, and is dead.

either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and, with one’s country fighting for its life and one’s sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat,

A good man—even a good American—running to catch a train on an important assignment has to pass by the beating of a dog on the street and concentrate on catching the train; and, once on the train, he has to consider the assignment about which he must do something, rather than the dog-beating about which he can do nothing. If he is running fast enough and his assignment is mortally important, he will not even notice the dog-beating when he passes it by.

The former bank clerk, Kessler, told his Jewish friend, former Bank Director Rosenthal, the day before the synagogue arson in 1938, that “with men like me in the Party,” men of moral and religious feeling, “things will be better, you’ll see.”

When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, “And if they had been—what then? Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?”

Long after the war, he learned that the local boss had been an anti-Nazi who had joined the Party in the hope of hanging on to his job, because his boss, the section superintendent, was an ardent Nazi.

So far we are still able to openly resist in the US

Of these twenty thousand people, how many opposed? How would you know? How would I know? If you ask me how many did something in secret opposition, something that meant great danger to them, I would say, well, twenty. And how many did something like that openly, and from good motives alone? Maybe five, maybe two. That’s the way men are.”

They went to the meetings just to hear something new, anything new. They were desperate about the economic situation, ‘a new Germany’ sounded good to them;

“Hitlerism had to answer Communism with something just as radical. Communism always used force; Hitlerism answered it with force. The really absolute enemy of Communism, always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was National Socialism, the only enemy that answered Communism in kind. If you wanted to save Germany from Communism—to be sure of doing it—you went to National Socialism.

was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was, “Throw them all out.”

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians.

Politicians are a fact of life. And in democracies we can help ourselves but choosing calm, sober ones, when possible

the good thing. For the first time in my life I was really the peer of men who, in the Kaiser time and in the Weimar time, had always belonged to classes lower or higher than my own,

here. But there was a democracy in Nazism,

“We think with our blood.” Expertness in thinking, exemplified by the professor, by the high-school teacher, and even by the grammar-school teacher in the village, had to deny the Nazi views of history, economics, literature, art, philosophy, politics, biology, and education itself.

Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line.

Trumpism distilled Perhaps our worry is not that we will have a Holocaust but that we will have authoritarianism without enemies (like Turkey)

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable

We have to justify our having injured those we have injured,

Hitler turned Germany (as they see it) right side up. He was an independent Sovereign, popularly supported, in part for no other reason than that he was an independent Sovereign. This was government.

But you might have a dictatorship not by the best of your people but by all, or a majority, of your people. Isn’t that possible, too?”

good discipline produces, at least in limited areas, the same performance as good self-discipline. 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.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand,

one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. 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.”

I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”

People outside Germany seem to think that ‘the Germans’ came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonsense that passed for truth. It is a very bad mistake, a very dangerous mistake, to think this.

That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see,

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.

fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. I wanted to be able to sleep nights—”

even the policeman might have a hard time of it in the police state.

“I think,” says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, “that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. 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.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.’”

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

without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought—and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, its preservation the first function of all its members. Every normal personality of the day before becomes an “authoritarian personality.”

A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand—the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the known criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens—95 per cent or so of the population—duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

Tales of the founding of Peoria, once taken lightly, reveal that our city was no ordinary city to begin with. Legends turn out to be true. No wonder Peoria sticks it out, sees it through; see the stuff Peorians are made of, always were. Peorians are superior people, superior blood and superior bone; their survival proves it.

This story of a city in a flood is a wonderful metaphor

Rauschning says that Hitler once told him that the Germans and the Jews could not live together because they were too much alike.

There is (or, until very recently, was) no Jewish nation to suffer pressure and put consequent pressure on both its members and the outside world. It is the individual Jew who is both object and subject of the pressures which, in Germany’s case, are sustained and exerted by the nation.

This is why criticism of Israel is still seen as anti-Semitic. It is in many cases a transfer of this hateed

How German he seemed to be abroad, so much so that everywhere in the Allied countries in the first World War the Jew was suspected of being pro-German! What happened to him from 1933 on he could not believe; he stayed on, until 1936, until 1938, until 1942, until—. “It won’t last,” he told himself. What made him think it wouldn’t? Why, this was Germany, his Germany.