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

by Milton Sanford Mayer

I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.

Foreigners speaking of the “National Socialist Party” miss the point, said the younger Schwenke; it was the National Socialist German Workers Party, “the party of the little men like me. The only other was the Communist.”

This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.

The real lives that real people live in a real community have nothing to do with Hitler and Roosevelt or with what Hitler and Roosevelt are doing. Man doesn’t meet the State very often.

1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939—until September 1, when, as the Head of the Government told them, Poland attacked their country—the little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them.

With the civil service and the military safely “faithful,” it took so few at the administrative level and so few more, a million at most, of a population of seventy million, to carry out the whole program of Nazi persecution; a million ex-convicts, future ex-convicts, poolroom hoodlums, disheartened young job-seekers, of whom every large country has its million.

No professional in America has the status of the teacher in Germany, and to have achieved, as Herr Hilde-brandt did, the rank of Studienrat (which means senior high-school teacher), with its title no less than its tenure and pension, is an eminence which no American teacher dreams of.

It’s a story about a Jew riding in a streetcar, in Germany during the Third Reich, reading Hitler’s paper, the Völkische Beobachter. A non-Jewish acquaintance sits down next to him and says, “Why do you read the Beobachter?” “Look,” says the Jew, “I work in a factory all day. When I get home, my wife nags me, the children are sick, and there’s no money for food. What should I do on my way home, read the Jewish newspaper? ‘Pogrom in Roumania.’ ‘Jews Murdered in Poland.’ ‘New Laws against Jews.’ No, sir, a half-hour a day, on the streetcar, I read the Beobachter. ‘Jews the World Capitalists.’ ‘Jews Control Russia.’ ‘Jews Rule in England.’ That’s me they’re talking about. A half-hour a day I’m somebody. Leave me alone, friend.”

They had never numbered more than 1 per cent of the German population, and their rate of apostasy was higher in modern Germany than anywhere else except Italy. After the first World War, social scientists predicted that within two generations there would be no more Jews in Germany. The progression from orthodoxy to agnosticism (via “liberalism”) was the largest factor, underlying the conversion of thousands to nominal Protestantism, which had economic and, more significantly, social advantages, and even to Catholicism.

Not one of my ten friends had changed his attitude toward the Jews since the downfall of National Socialism. The five (or six, if young Rupprecht is included) who were extreme anti-Semites were, I believe, not a bit more or less so now than before. What surprised me, indeed, was that, with the war lost and their lives ruined, they were not more so. Certainly Nazism’s defeat by force would not make Nazis love the Jews more; if anything, less. Nor would their country’s destruction. Nor would the three-quarters of a billion dollars their conquerors compelled them to pay, as restitutive damages, to the Jews of Israel.

“In looking backward,” said former High Commissioner McCloy, “I wish we had been able to erect tribunals not composed exclusively of the victors.” Why weren’t we able to?

Believe me, this is true. 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. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

If 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.”

I want my friends not just to feel bad and confess it, but to have been bad and to be bad now and confess it. I want them to constitute themselves an inferior race, self-abased, so that I, in the magnanimity becoming to the superior, having sat in calumnious judgment on them, may choose to let them live on in public shame and in private torment. I want to be God, not alone in power but in righteousness and in mercy; and Nazism crushed is my chance. But I am not God. I myself am a national, myself guilty of many national hypocrisies whose only justification is that the Germans’ were so much worse.

Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ 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, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”

“You say, ‘Totalitarianism.’ Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so (you’ll pardon me, Herr Professor) it is easy for you to say, ‘Totalitarianism—no.’ But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But, believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.

Policeman Hofmeister was less remorseful about 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.

The achievements of Jews in every field in which the “Germans” excelled gave rise to an essentially schizoid condition in my friends. The inferior race, the Jews, was also, like the Germans themselves, superior. The gypsies would have made a better Devil for German racism, if only the Devil were not, by definition, superhuman as well as inferior. The gypsies were adequately inferior, but they were not, in German terms, superhuman. They were, quite literally, such poor Devils. The Jew would have to do—if he could be distinguished from the German.

It was an occupation; worse yet, a civilized occupation, which, as such, violated Machiavelli’s inviolable injunction either to liberate or exterminate a conquered people but under no circumstances to irritate them by halfway measures.

For the American Occupation to have chosen freedom for the post-Nazi Germans would have been dangerous; even my anti-Nazi friends, so thoroughly German were they, were opposed to freedom of speech, press, and assembly for the “neo-Nazis.” But it was the fear of freedom, with all its dangers, that got the Germans into trouble in the first place. When the Americans decided that they could not “afford” freedom for the Germans, they were deciding that Hitler was right.

In 1945 the Americans interrogated some 13,000,000 individual Germans—and indicted some 3,500,000 of them—under a statute “for the de-Nazification and demilitarization of Germany.”

A world that was disposed to relieve the Germans of pressure would have to be a world that itself was not under pressure, a world that breathed freely. So far are we from living in such a world that the two powers now dividing the world there is are both falling victim to the paranoid panic which brought Germany to its present pass, both of them sacrificing all other objectives to encircle their encirclers. In this one respect, at least, has Goebbels’ perverse prediction been validated: “Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

“Never before,” wrote Hans Kohn, the eminent historian of German ideas, in The New York Times, “has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider as in Mr. Mayer’s report.”

The belief of many Germans that things could never be so good as they had been under Nazism would change only in the 1960s, after a period of rapid economic growth known in Germany as “the economic miracle.”

Mayer’s rambling final chapters are weak, less interesting than the earlier ones, and dated. In truth, his ten subjects are not a good basis on which to generalize about supposed German arrogance, German racism, German prejudice, and German desire for order, as he does.

And yet the voices of those whom Mayer interviewed speak to us across the decades in ways that still can provoke and shock. A snapshot of a small sample of Germans in the aftermath of Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II, Mayer’s book still stands as a timely reminder of how otherwise unremarkable and in many ways reasonable people can be seduced by demagogues and populists, and how they can go along with a regime that commits more and more criminal acts until it plunges itself into war and genocide.