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

by Milton Sanford Mayer

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.”

Herein lies the difference between 1930 Germany and 2020 USA. It's also a similarity. MAGA transformed a Republican Party affiliated with businesses for decades into a populist people's party.

My friends were little men—like the Führer himself.

Neither Donald Trump, any other Republican leader, nor any Democrat leader is a bohemian corporal. Although Trump is by far the best at appearing to be one.

Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.

There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets. What does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing. In those days she knew or thought she did; what difference does it make? So things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?

As there were two Americas, so, in a much more sharply drawn division, there were two Germanys. And so, just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat and another waves “Hello” to him, there are two countries in every country.

Analyze this in juxtaposition with text of David French's analysis of two (three) Americas.

local bosses, in order to function effectively, have to be locally popular.

All politics is local.

Germans had been at one another’s throats since 1918, and dissension grew shriller and more bitter all the time.

War seems to be the German sport—if not exclusively theirs—and the Germans seem to be poor sports.

Free Americans all read the same papers, wear the same clothes, and vote for the same two transposable parties;

“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.

“The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting.

I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that, by the words with which the oath began, ‘Ich schwöre bei Gott, I swear by God,’ I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience.

you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that, really. Americans have never known anything like this experience—in its entirety, all the way to the end.

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.

This is exactly the line of argument why each and every one of us was completely responsible for the Vietnam war (as explained in the public domain boom “Hello, Stupid” - which I have never been able to refind after giving away my copy in the ‘80s. I believe it was originally published in someone’s basement in the ‘60s.)

I did not believe that I could ‘remove mountains.’ The day I said ‘No,’ I had faith. In the process of ‘thinking it over,’ in the next twenty-four hours, my faith failed me. So, in the next ten years, I was able to remove only anthills, not mountains.”

it is not the performance of political systems which justifies or condemns them, but their principles. Communism, in principle, supposes itself to represent the wretched of the earth and bars no man by nature from Communist redemption; the Nazis, in categorical contrast, took themselves to be the elite of the earth and consigned whole categories of men to perdition by their nature.

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

It may be that the explanation of survival is not exhausted by historical and anthropological analysis or by social-psychological curve-making; it may be that Cain’s answer to the Lord is relevant, too.

National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.

choice, and choice alone, informs them that they are men and not machines.

When the Americans decided that they could not “afford” freedom for the Germans, they were deciding that Hitler was right.

The Declaration of Independence did not say that all Englishmen—or their overseas colonists—were created equal. It said that all men were created equal, and with certain inalienable rights. The Communist Manifesto, too, proclaimed the equal rights of all men but, denying creation, deprived the rights of their inalienability.

still-wet picture

For a modern reader, pictures were chemically developed in liquid chemicals, not printed like today. The paper containing the picture was then dried to become the finished photograph. So, a still wet picture is so new it hasn’t even made it out of the photo-lab yet. (An expression kinda like a broken record)

In Communist East Berlin no worker was free—or unemployed; in Capitalist West Berlin one of every four workers was unemployed—but free.

I find this a telling indictment of American’s simplistic view of world politics. Not that “communism” is good. But that a good/bad dichotomy is too simplistic.

“Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

a one-tenth-of-one-per-cent chance is one-tenth of one per cent better than no chance at all.

It is risky to let people alone. But it is riskier still to press my ten Nazi friends—and their seventy million countrymen—to re-embrace militarist anti-Communism as a way of national life.

A series of intensive interviews conducted with elderly Germans in the 1990s still showed that they remembered the Nazis fondly for ending the economic chaos and disasters of the Weimar Republic—although,