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They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First
published in 1955
By Milton Mayer
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a
philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the
government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was
to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You
know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be
told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to
be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has
little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"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.
"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German
was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a
specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new
activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation;
meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all,
papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists,
questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the
community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’
participate that had not been there or had not been important
before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all
one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to
do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about
fundamental things. One had no time."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had
no time to think. There was so much going on.’"
"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "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.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly
educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see,
even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered
that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist
the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the
end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must
foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be
done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might
have. And everyone counts on that might.
"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National
Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater
offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to
say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for
the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too
modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the
Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a
Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the
Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not
a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the
press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but
still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he
was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where
or how to move. 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.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of
decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets,
in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no
protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy
there would be slogans against the government painted on walls
and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there
is not even this. In the university community, in your own
community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom
certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s
not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to
this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but
how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do
you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your
enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the
other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even
neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are,
naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere
or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many
as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become
smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the
organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of
your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to
yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things.
This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a
further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that,
if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do
it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and
you wait.
"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or
thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the
difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had
come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes,
millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say,
the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the
‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in
’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between
come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them
imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by
the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you
did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so
on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever
sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of
self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in
my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish
swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything,
everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world
you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes,
the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the
spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong
mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you
live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and
fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is
transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system
which rules without responsibility even to God. The system
itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in
order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing
process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It
has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any
effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been
living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new
principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted
five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in
Germany, could not have imagined.
"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.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’
your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not
I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your
shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the
circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor
kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares
to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a
judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly
wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early
’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case
involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’
woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was
especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the
judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense
and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus
saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant
concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But
the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s
opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of
course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the
courtroom."
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a
case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He
thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the
Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The
thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it,
first to his family, then to his friends, and then to
acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44
Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."
I said nothing.
"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance,
protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a
multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of
enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’
You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt
with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here,
too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’
those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped
notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that
was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.
"Once the war began, the government could do anything
‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the
Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never
dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its
‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away
with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler
would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who,
once the war had begun, still thought of complaining,
protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war.
It was a long bet. Not many made it."
Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They
Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by
the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University
of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and
shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in
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version of the text.)
Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
©1955, 1966, 368 pages
Paper $19.00 ISBN: 0-226-51192-8
Posted on site 02/09/06
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