Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1996 08:32:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Patricia Neill <[p n pj] at [db1.cc.rochester.edu]>
Subject: THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS


"THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS, 1933-45"
    by Milton Mayer
    The University of Chicago Press

>From the chapter, "But then it was too late" pages 169 to 172, 1966
edition.

    "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 worse 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 'Jew 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 responsibilty 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 succesion 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 everyday, 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."

--- GEcho 1.00
 * Origin: Gun Control=Criminals & Gestapo vs. the Unarmed. (1:231/110)