They Thought They Were Free

 

Nonfiction: History, Politics, Germany

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer

Seven years after Hitler committed suicide and World War II ended, Mayer moved from Chicago, Illinois to Germany with his young family. There he had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small German town. He developed friendships with ten German men to gain an understanding of their lives under Nazism.

“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but “they were sufficiently different from each other in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis.” Of particular interest to Mayer was how they were able to be silent about and even become complicit in the targeting of groups of people for persecution and murder.

When Mayer asked one man how Christians in Germany could accept the persecution of Jews, the man answered, “Others may have other reasons for destroying the Jews, but we Christians had a Christian duty to.” Hatred motivated them to take the name of Christ and attach it to the ruling political party’s agenda. The Nazis, in turn, exploited their hatred and fear which made it “easier” to rationalize immoral behaviors.

For followers of Christ in Nazi Germany life consisted of many spiritual challenges. One of the Germans, who was a Catholic, worshipped regularly and led his children in bedtime prayers every night. His boss told him that he had to take a Nazi loyalty oath to keep his job. The Catholic man refused but his boss gave him 24 hours to “rethink” his choice. He struggled with his decision; he knew his only loyalty was to Christ. However, fearing what would happen if he lost his job, he relented and took the oath. Deeply ashamed, he told Mayer, “Through National Socialism I lost my soul. I blasphemed. I myself had denied Jesus Christ.”

Fear of being an “Untermensch” (subhuman) also led Germans to ignore immoral acts committed by the Nazi regime, their fellow Germans, and themselves. One man explained Germans just wanted to reassure themselves that they were Germans, that they were not one of “them.” If the Nazi government targeted certain persons or groups of people as “Untermensch” that meant it was acceptable to ignore and rationalize the persecutions because you weren’t one of “them.” As one German astutely observed, all that was (and is!) required of “us” in an authoritarian regime – “is that we do nothing,”

Rosenstrasse Protest, 1943. Notice how many of the protesters linked their arms together.

Some Germans did do something. There was one notable protest in Nazi Germany. In February and March 1943 non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who had been arrested for simply being Jewish by the Gestapo staged a nonviolent protest in Rosenstrasse (Rose Street) in Berlin. The small group grew to a crowd of thousands. The Nazis threatened them with gunfire, but the protesters remained yelling and chanting on the street. News of the demonstration spread quickly throughout the country and even to the international press. To dispel potentially damaging international attention and to prevent further protest, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the release of the prisoners at Rosenstrasse on 6 March 1943.

Seven years had passed since the end of Nazism, how did the ten men feel about what happened? Here Mayer distinguishes between collective shame and the notion of guilt. The latter can never be collective. - "Collective shame may be possible, but it cannot be compelled. Shame is a state of being while guilt is a juridical fact.”  Some of the Nazi leaders were found guilty as a juridical fact during the Nuremberg Trails while eight out of the ten German men Mayer interviewed expressed shame over their actions during the Nazi regime. However, all ten men expressed regret and “felt bad about the torture and slaughter of innocent people" – not however about the “resettlement, relocation” (concentration and killing camps). One of the men who had participated in the burning of a synagogue said of the Holocaust, “If it happened, it was wrong. But I don’t believe it happened.”

Mayer, clearly frustrated, writes, “That they, or some of their countrymen and their country’s government, violated the precepts of Christian, civilized, lawful life was bad enough; that they won’t see it, or say it, is what really rowels … They did not care enough.”

One of the closing chapters, "Peoria Uber Alles," is prophetic. It's the story of how what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria, Illinois, if the city were to experience some type of “emergency,” become isolationistic, and identify who would be "us" and who would be “them.”  Mayer describes how people fell into the warm but deadly embrace of authoritarianism. Resistance, protest, criticism, complaint all carried with them the likelihood of retaliation – they would be “dealt” with sooner or later. Just like Goebbels who continually promised a “victory orgy” to “take care” of those who thought that their “treasonable attitude” had escaped notice. “Uber Alles” can happen anywhere!

The author concludes: ""What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret … 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."

This is the best book I have read about “regular” people living in Nazi Germany. The ten German men sound like people that live in the United States today. What Germans thought then and what we still think about today are ourselves, our families, having enough money, and being treated fairly. “The indictment of the ordinary German is powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune” to authoritarianism. The lessons are here if we only take the time to learn!