"They Thought They Were Free"

[AverageOldGuy]

I have just started reading “They Thought They Were Free,” by Milton Mayer, published in 1955.

In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of a German town he called "Kronenberg" (in reality it was the town of Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany. The town, located in the German state of Hesse, population 20,000 at the time, and a university, was in the part of Germany under US control after WW II.

The interviews took place while Mayer was studying at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research.

All ten people he interviewed were men in the lower middle class. Mayer was not a German speaker, and the men did not speak English.

The interviewees had the following occupations: baker, cabinetmaker, bank clerk, bill collector, law enforcement officer, salesperson, student, tailor, and teacher. On critic of the work wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the "anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class". The tailor had served a prison sentence for setting a synagogue on fire, but the others were never found to have actively attacked Jewish people. Mayer read the official case files of each interviewee.

Essentially, those interviewed for the book were not particularly concerned about the Nazi rule of German because it did not in any meaningful way touch their lives. Basically, they had fond memories of the Nazi era.

One thing that most of us do not realize is the impact of WW I on Germany and, hence, the German people. At the end of WW I, the other European countries turned on Germany -- forcing Germany to pay huge cash reparations thereby wrecking the German economy for years, generally blaming Germany for the war, and causing everyday Germans considerable disruption and insecurity.

These “decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men,” Mayer wrote of the Nazis, to whom he refers as “friends” throughout, “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 had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press.… None of them ever heard anything bad about the Nazi regime except, as they believed, from Germany’s enemies, and Germany’s enemies were theirs.

Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see.…The lives of my friends were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets.

There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached ‘nobody.’…You and I leave ‘some sort of trouble on the streets’ to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg. […] Man doesn’t meet the State very often.

Here is a link to an article that does a better job than I can in linking the opinions of ordinary post-WW I Germans to Americans who support Trump.

https://popula.com/2020/09/28/they-thought-they-were-free/

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, ‘blood’, ‘folkishness’) seeped through Germany, the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off.

“They Thought They Were Free.” I'm not far into the book so I'm not prepared to draw final conclusions about how Mayer's interviews with 10 Germans who lived through WW I and WW II and Nazism relate to us today, however, so far, it's scary.

[dgauss]

1. A book that should be read in every high school civics class.

If those still exist.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. The metamorphosis was so nuanced that

many didn’t realize until too late.

[dgauss]

3. "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people..."

“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.”

Longer passage here, really worth a read.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

[JoseBalow]

5. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams

he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic Nazi.

[dgauss]

7. Cockroach? Hard to see that coming. But Nazi?

Still maybe hard to see coming, but he should have paid more attention.

[markodochartaigh]

4. The reparations did have terrible effects on the German economy.

And these effects were predicted by Keynes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace

The central banker who got the German economy on track again was Hjalmar Schacht. He went from celebrated banker to a concentration camp for standing up to Hitler. After the war, at the Nuremberg Trials he was acquitted by the Allies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjalmar_Schacht

[canetoad]

6. It would be interesting to know what their ages were

In 1933 and 1945.

I knew a man born in 1926 in Graz, Austria. Asked him once what the atmosphere was like in the years leading up to WW2.

He obviously was very young. People were suffering through the depression. I asked him what the general feeling among people was and he replied that the jews were blamed for everything they were going through. It was hammered into the populace over and over. "Blame the jews."

He was called up to the German army in 1944, basic training, sent to the Italian front, captured by US soldiers and sat out the war in a field.