Charles McBryde’s Reviews > They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 > Status Update

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.

“The propaganda didn’t make me think of him as I knew him, but of him as a Jew. And it was as a Jew, praying alone, that he frightened us. So I suppose that, in the end, that was a part of it. Of my Antisemitism. I can still make myself frightened. Put myself back there. I hear my mother saying not to be frightened.”

The non-political pastor, satisfied Nazi require requirements by being non-political. But the non-political schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being non-political, a dangerous man from the first. he himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion. But he could not help begin dangerous. Not if he went on teaching what was true.

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 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) dishonestly to the party line.

For Nazism, unlike modern communism, began with practice. Because the mass movement of Nazism was non-intellectual in the beginning, it had to be anti-intellectual in before it could be theoretical.

My friends wanted Germany purified of all the politicians. The wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the anti-politician, was the pure man, the ma untainted by politics, which was only a cloak for corruption.

National Socialism was a revulsion against parliamentary politics, parliamentary government, parliamentary debate, against all of the higgling and haggling of the parties, the splinter parties, the coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of the rascals. Its motif was “throw them all out.”

Most pastors in Germany had always preached christ crucified without seeing (who does?) that He was being crucified all around them every day.

In the Weimar Republic, the German tradition of the non-political, non-party, civil servant, always safely conservative, was broken down. The Nazis finished the politicalization of government workers that the Social Democrats began. It would not be reckless to assert that half the civil servants had to join their party, or lose their jobs. The other half were well advised to do likewise, and nearly all of them did.