It depresses the hell out of me that people I grew up with...

[ColoradoHoosier]

97. An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 - 45"...

...written in 1955 by American journalist Milton Mayer. This is one of a series of interviews Mr. Mayer conducted during a year long visit to post-war Germany, in an attempt to provide some insight into how ordinary German people were caught up in the nationalistic fervor of the Nazi movement.

"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."

"You see, 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 the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

"...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 the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. 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 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 in at all."

And as Mayer cautions in his book:

"I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt - and feel - that it was not "German Man" that I had met, but "Man". He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."