They Thought They Were
Free
The Germans, 1933-45
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 not 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, 2017 by the
University of Chicago. All
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Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were
Free: The Germans, 1933-45
©1955, 1966, 2017 368
pages