They Thought They
were Free: The Germans, 1933- 1945 – Milton Mayer
About 10 years after the end of WWII, journalist and college
professor Mayer visited West Germany. Under the guise of German language
lessons, he met and conversed with 10 Germans, mainly working class and
minimally educated though one was a high school teacher. Not wanting to test
prejudice, he didn’t disclose to them that he was Jewish or had access to
information about them that they didn’t know he had. Mayer’s goal was to
understand why Germans liked Hitler up until about 1943 when military reverses in the East spelled disaster for Germany.
During his conversations, much to his
surprise, Mayer found that none of his ten Nazi friends took National Socialist
racial theories seriously. They laughed about it. “That was nonsense,” said one
of them, “something for the universities and the SS.” But despite their disagreement
with Nazi racism, they were all anti-Semites. They did not hate the Jews
because they believed that they belonged to a strange or inferior race; they
hated the Jews for economic and political reasons. The Germans thought that everybody knew - "know" in the sense of "accepting something is true cuz everybody thinks so" - the Jews
were always making money as middle-men and were thus the enemies of Germany.
The concentration camps, the gas chambers? Fake news. “If it happened, it was
wrong. But I do not think it happened,” one said, who spend three years in the
joint for burning down a synagogue.
Mayer did not conduct his journalistic fieldwork with a
sense of lofty righteousness. He seems to have been a lefty of the undogmatic
sort. He didn’t defend Jim Crow in the United States and he freely admitted that
federal and state government interned Americans of Japanese descent in camps. Brave
of Mayer, given that the chairman of the state of Washington's Committee on
Un-American Activities said in 1948 “If someone insists there is discrimination
against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there
is every reason to believe that person is a communist.”
The most provocative chapter in the book is printed here.
To summarize, a German who had not been a Nazi told him that the means by which
the regime had ruled had not been terror. It was rather the
distraction. Every day, so much happened, that you did not think anymore.
Gradually, the Germans got used to being ruled by surprises. Uncertainty grew
over time. Meanwhile, the measures against the enemies of the regime intensified
as in slow motion. “People said, 'It's not so bad’ - or, you just picture it – 'You're
an alarmist.’”
Perpetual distraction - see Neil Postman.
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