They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free
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 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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Milton Mayer
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
©1955, 1966, 368 pages
Paper $19.00 ISBN: 0-226-51192-8