From: pierce@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Brad Pierce)
Subject: They thought they were free
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Distribution: alt
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 17:26:53 GMT

Excerpted and condensed without permission from Milton Mayer's _They 
thought they were free; the Germans, 1933-45_ (U. of Chicago Press, 1955). 
The following comments are attributed to a German philologist (pp. 166-172):

``What no one seemed to notice," ... ``was the ever widening 
gap ... between the government and the people. ... And it became 
always wider. ...

``What happened here was the gradual habituation of the 
people ...  to be 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 ...  
it could not be released because of national security. ...

``This separation of government from people ...  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 ... so occupied the 
people that they did not see the slow motion underneath ...

``... 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' ...; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, ... . 
Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and 
never had. ... Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things 
to think about ... and kept us so busy with continuous changes 
and `crises' and so 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. ...

``To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to 
notice it ...  unless one has a much greater degree of political 
awareness ... 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 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. ...

``How is this to be avoided ... Many, many times since it 
all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims ... 
`Resist the beginnings' and `Consider the end.' But one must 
foresee the end in order to resist ... the beginnings. ...  and 
how is this to be done ...? ...

``Your `little men', ..., were not against National 
Socialism in principle.  Men like me, who were, are the greater 
offenders ...

``... One doesn't see exactly where or how to move. ... 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.' ... And it is not just fear ... 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, 
..., `everyone' is happy.  One hears no protest, and certainly 
sees none. ...  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. ... On the one hand, your 
enemies ... intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-
pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your 
close friends, ... people who have always thought as you have.

``... 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...

``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... 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 ... all rush in 
upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and 
some minor incident, in my case my little boy ...  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 were born 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. ...

``... Life ... has flowed to a new level, carrying you with 
it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live 
... 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 ... 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 everything now, and your heart 
breaks.  Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

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