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

by Milton Sanford Mayer

for the first time realized that Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions.

Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany—not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.

“The King makes war, and the people die”; it’s an old, old saying in Kronenberg.

So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.

Having fixed our faith in a father-figure—or in a father, or in a mother or a wife—we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one’s best, unrealized self.

A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good.

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community’s attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. 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.

A member of the pre-Hitler Prussian cabinet, asked what caused Nazism, said: “What caused Nazism was the clubman in Berlin who, when he was asked about the Nazi menace in 1930, looked up from his after-lunch game of Skat and replied, ‘Dafür ist die Regierung da. That’s what the government’s there for.’”

Other nations sent their worst people away. 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. Their letters back home brought new and larger waves of their friends and relatives, who were, in large measure, moved more by economic opportunity than by political hope or necessity—who, however, belonged to families or circles in which political liberalism had led to emigration. Left behind were, in the main, those who conformed, willingly or because they saw no way out. Left behind, too, for the next generation, was the dream, always madder as it was frustrated, which produced new outbreaks, new suppressions, new emigrations. National Socialism brought dream and conformism together into something satanic.

Each new generation’s leadership was somewhere in Pennsylvania or the Argentine or Wisconsin or China. But millions of liberty-loving Germans remained, and 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; more variety in entertainment and in the arts, in political partisanship and in the political complexion of the press; all this, more individuality, more independence, stubborn or sublimated, in the land of the goose step than one finds in the land of the free. 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.

“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, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it. “This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“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. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think? “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, 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.

“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.”

“He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European.”

None of this mattered; all this was only reality, a parliamentary quibble.

It is the German Jew who, in a minority, will soon or late dominate Israel; already we hear, in Israel, of what we think of as peculiarly German forms of extremist tendency, the same tendency toward “Nazi” behavior observed among the Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald by Professor Bruno Bettelheim.

Those houses against which the war was waged were built—even the tenement houses—of stone or Gargantuan timbers laced together and covered with a smooth, impermeable stucco. There were, in Germany, no rural slums, no bulging, leaning, or caving barns, no tar-paper or clapboard shanties, no abandoned homesites, rotten fences, great mountains of rusting automobiles, nothing left to oxidize and blow away. Everything had been built to endure to the last generation. Maybe this was the last generation.

It failed because it was an occupation, and no occupation has a chance of succeeding.

The new German joke was: “How do the Germans feel about the situation?”—“Well, how does a bone feel between two dogs?”

dreams as a United States of Europe are no further advanced in Europe than World Federalism is here. The Europa Union movement, in Germany as elsewhere, is widespread among, and only among, nongovernmental intellectuals, and especially among the young. At the University of Munich 88 per cent of the students, in a random sampling, favored “the unification of Europe” over “German sovereignty.” But “the unification of Europe” means different things to different men—to some peace, to others war. And it is an ideal much more nebulous, and much more limited, than democracy. In the context of the world struggle, European Union means, first, military union of non-Communist Europe; second, economic union (presently supported by both the young idealists and the old cartelists); and last, if ever, political union. And any union that left Germany divided would take place only on paper, if there.

He was an American who rode a bicycle!