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

by Milton Sanford Mayer

“You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God’s care; I am not being light when I say this—that not a person ‘fell,’ fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party’s caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles—” “Except,” I said, “‘inferior races’ and opponents of the regime.” “Of course,” he said, “that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, ‘over the fence,’ and nobody thought about them.” “But these, too, were ‘sparrows.’” “Yes,” he said. “Could these,” I said, “have been ‘the least of them,’ of whom Jesus spoke?” “Herr Professor, we didn’t see it that way. We were wrong, sinful, but we didn’t see it that way. We saw ‘the least of them’ among our own people, everywhere, among ordinary people who obeyed the laws and were not Jews, or gypsies, and so on. Among ordinary people, ‘Aryans,’ there were ‘the least of them,’ too. Millions; six million unemployed at the beginning. These ‘least,’ not all who were ‘least’ but most of them, had somewhere to turn, at last.