1
" 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. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
2
" Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
3
" In 1936 or 1937 each of the Kronenberg detectives was openly assigned to a local church as observer, to report on the "loyalty" of the sermons. In addition this the detectives were not supposed to know, but they did - there was a Gestapo agent assigned to report on the fidelity of the detective's report. One day, at the height of the Church-Party struggle, Hofmeister was ordered to inform Pastor Faber, whose sermons he reported, that he must not read the pastoral letter sent out by the Protestant bishops to be read from the pulpits on the following Sunday.
To Policeman Hofmeister's horror, Pastor Faber coldly told him that the Church, not the State, would decide what was to be read from the pulpit. Hofmeister tried to "reason" (he puts it this way, fifteen years later) with the clergyman and told him that there would be a Gestapo agent present and that they would both, Faber and Hofmeister, get into trouble if the pastoral letter were read. Faber said that Hofmeister would have to look out for himself, and rose, ending the interview.
To my amazement, Hofmeister, who had by no means been an ardent Nazi, still, fifteen years later, resented the pastor's defiance of the "law," that is, of the authorities. He no more admired Faber's heroism - the letter was read from the pulpit - now than then. He himself, Hofmeister, had violated the "law," that is, what his superiors told him to do, by revealing to the pastor that there would be a Gestapo man present, and the pastor was willing to jeopardize an innocent man along with himself. "It was like a slap in the face/' said Hofmeister, and I saw that even the policeman might have a hard time of it in the police state. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
4
" In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
9
" As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
11
" The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it. As "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
14
" When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.” I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, “What do you mean, ‘what it would lead to,’ Herr Wedekind?” “War,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war.” The "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
18
" I think," says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, "that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.' But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, 'Germany—no, not Germany. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
19
" 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. "
― Milton Sanford Mayer , They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
