2011 book review of Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free". Its relevance to now.

[madfloridian]

I happened on this book review from February 2011 by the Head Butler. I have read excerpts of the book online, but I found it most interesting how Milton Mayer traveled to Germany in 1951 to research the book. And I found it gave me a chill.

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

I am going to put the words of the reviewer in italics. They are found at the top of the review.

I wrote about this book in 2008. Why showcase it again? Because the reports of "freedom" and "revolution" coming out of the Middle East are, in most American media, overly simplistic. (Is "the Jasmine Revolution" a re-run of the European revolutions of 1848? If so, expect less freedom soon --- remember: France was a monarchy again by 1852.) And while others see only peaceful protestors, I see men on horseback and camels, wielding clubs, and buses of Tea Party supporters streaming into Wisconsin to cheer on the Governor's bust-the-unions campaign. And I thought: time to look back and see how easy it to wake up one morning and find you're living in a dictatorship.

He tells how a Chicago reporter, Milton Mayer, went to Germany in 1935 in hopes of interviewing Hitler. He did not get the interview, but he returned in 1951.

In 1951, the Jewish reporter from Chicago returned to Germany. This time Milton Mayer had a different goal: to interview ten Nazis so thoroughly he felt he really knew them. Only then, he believed, might he understand how it came to be that the Germans exterminated millions of their fellow citizens.

He found ten Germans. And interviewed them at such length they became his friends. Reading his daughter's memories of her father, I can understand how that happened, “His German was awful!” wrote Julie Mayer Vogner. “And, he said, this was a great aid in the interviews he conducted: having to repeat, in simpler words, or more slowly, what they had to say made the Germans he was interviewing feel relaxed, equal to, superior to the interviewer, and this made them speak more freely.”

The reviewer is right, it makes your jaw drop.

Milton Mayer picked people from all walks of life...a janitor, a baker, a teacher, a high school student, a policeman. He points out that none of them were really aware of Nazism as we knew it.

The reviewer summarizes some of the reasons they were so unaware. Many of them sound familiar.

And none ever thought Hitler would lead them into war.

Why not?

-- They had never traveled abroad.
-- They didn't talk to foreigners or read the foreign press.
-- Before Hitler, most had no jobs. Now they did.
-- The targets of their hatred had been stigmatized well in advance of any action against them.
-- They really weren't asked to “do” anything --- just not to interfere.
-- The men who burned synagogues did not live in the cities of the synagogues.
-- Hitler was a father figure, right to the end. (He was “betrayed” by his subordinates.)

The more you read, the more your jaw drops. How many people did it require to take over a country? “A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct.... a few thousand to supervise and control.... a few score thousand specialists, eager to serve...a million to do the dirty work....”

Many of the excerpts I have found online are not pertinent to America right now. But unfortunately too many things are relevant...the lack of awareness and the easy acceptance of things we would have abhorred just a few years ago and never tolerated.

An excerpt from the book:

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 responsibility 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 succession 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 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, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

University of Chicago Press

We have seen lately how the Koch brothers operate and others of the "few hundred at the top" mentioned by the reviewer. The Dick Armies and their Freedom Works. As a former teacher I need to mention such "grassroots" groups as the Parents' Revolution, which is no revolution at all... but a group founded by the head of the Green Dot charter schools.

I feel that the corporate world has controlled our media to the extent that even good Democrats who care a lot have to be careful what they say if they want to go on the air or be otherwise heard. What a dangerous situation.

Maybe that is one of the reasons we are having such a bad case of "bipartisanship." Perhaps it is not worth the effort to speak out strongly....and perhaps it is just easier to go along.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. And the book is Free! e-book download at archive.org

available in multiple formats.

http://www.archive.org/details/theythoughttheyw027497mbp

[madfloridian]

4. Thanks for the link. I found a way to read it online, but format not great.

Oops, having to find a better way to link. I see the full text online, but it links elsewhere? Got to figure out why.

Trying link again. It appears to work.

http://www.archive.org/stream/theythoughttheyw027497mbp/theythoughttheyw027497mbp_djvu.txt

Glad to see it online. I noticed right away his lead in:

"The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself,
"God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are."


Foreword to the 1966 Printing

Let a tract for the times be republished after a hundred years
or a thousand and there can be no question of its having
been timeless from the first. But let it be republished after
ten years and the author is lucky if he gets off with no
notice at all and an unbloodied head. "Things" have changed
in ten years, and they have not changed as he promised
(or appeared to promise) that they would. What he would
give now if only he hadn't written this line or that one!
Let him change them, then, and bring the work up to date
the publisher is generous in these small matters."

"In the always admirable hope of playing it safe, I have
taken advantage of the publisher's generosity and made all
the changes in this edition that I was sure I was safe in
making. They were two in number. I inserted the word
"late" before a reference to Jawaharlal Nehru and I substi-
tuted "Stalin" for "Malenkov" in an abstract reference to
modern dictatorship. Otherwise the book stands as it was
first published, and if I must eat my words (except for those
two), I must eat them.

Every thing changes. Every thing but one. Even the me-
dieval Schoolmen admitted a limitation on God's omnipo-
tence: He cannot change the past He can, in his own time,
disclose it, or let man stumble on it But he cannot change it.
The pre-Nazi and Nazi lives of my *ten Nazi friends and
of some millions of other Germans like them are and ever
will be what they were ten years ago and twenty. To the
extent that I read them right then, and wrote them right
then, the account is long since complete. Nor has anything
been revealed in the events of the past ten years (including
the trials in Germany compelled by Eichmann's in Israel)
to alter the picture that my ten Nazi friends drew of them-
selves."

[laundry_queen]

16. Thanks for that

Although I do feel awfully foolish for buying the book a few days ago. Ooops!

[snagglepuss]

2. I never heard of Mayer. His observation that people can't see profound

changes in their society because of the lifelong mistake of identifying the spirit of a society with forms that remain untouched is very perceptive.

This is now at the top of my must read list. Thanks so much for posting this.

[madfloridian]

3. I have read other excerpts, he is impressive.

Very perceptive. Here's another excerpt from Information Clearing House.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm

"But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to 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, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, 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 (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

[sabrina 1]

9. I have read that passage so many times over the past several

years and wondered why we still have not learned anything.

Airc, he goes on to say that they were aware that something was wrong, but that things 'happened incrementally'. They didn't happen with a big event that would have alerted and possibly mobilized the people. Doing it incrementally made it possible for people to maybe feel 'uncomfortable' but not to be alarmed exactly.

By the time it became obvious that there was cause for alarm, it was too late.

When people object to comparisons between the American people and the German people I think it can only be because they do not realize how long it took to get to the final stages that we are all familiar with. That it did not happen overnight. As Mayer points out. If it had, it probably wouldn't have happened at all.

There are so many 'uncomfortable' things happening right now, the torture of Manning eg, the wars themselves, but for ten years we have been desensitized and even on the left, now that a Democrat is in charge, the propaganda that Manning and Wikileaks are a threat to our democracy, the enemy, has an effect and if people are not outright in agreement, if they feel 'uncomfortable about these things, they are not sure that what they are being told may not be truth so its safer to remain silent or to actually try to rationalize ~ torture!

Thank you for the OP. I think Mayer did an exceptional job of demonstration how it could all happen again.

[madfloridian]

10. Did you notice this part quoted by the reviewer?

I read it several times. I get the impression that the men Mayer interviewed never really connected themselves to any bad things done. I gather they did not make a connection of any of it to themselves at all.

“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer notes. “They were not opinion makers.... In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men...”

What didn't they know, and when didn't they know it?

"They did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now in 1951. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew it, and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it."

Maybe I am interpreting it incorrectly.

[sabrina 1]

12. No, I don't think you are. Check your post #3

What I am remembering didn't come from the ten men he interviewed, airc, but maybe from the 'colleague' mentioned in the quote to which I responded in post #3?

I will have to go check to see if I can find those comments. My computer has been very slow today for some reason, hanging up all the time, otherwise I would have checked before posting.

I haven't read the book, just excerpts so I am not sure who the person I am thinking of was, but airc, he was a professor of some sort, someone who did know better than the ten men interviewed, and was explaining why even the educated class had done nothing. He mentions how they used to at least discuss things, but gradually there were fewer and fewer in his 'group' and fewer and fewer discussions until there were none at all.

I'll try to find it if my computer cooperates :-)

[spedtr90]

5. continual "crisis" and "national enemies"

from an interview in the book:

"Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about - we were decent people - and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, 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. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?"

[bertman]

7. spedtr90, that quote perfectly describes what our "leaders' are doing today.

Thanks to madflo for this excellent thread that should be required reading.

REC.

[madfloridian]

18. I was reading comments on the book at Amazon.

Several mentioned that the book should be required reading today. I am reading in the online txt version linked above. The unawareness to the national scene was astounding.

[madfloridian]

6. There is a comment from his daughter at the Amazon link.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R29ZOJCS01EWTH/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0226511928&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=

Excerpting part, go read the rest.

She thanks them for their great reviews of his book.

"My father was always a superlative interviewer; he said as little as possible, aside from encouraging the interviewee to go on talking. If someone seemed to be avoiding a subject he was really interested in, he would repeat the name of the subject the interviewee had abandoned, and look terribly keen and respectful.

When my father was about 14, a wind blew in one of his ears while he was camping out, paralyzing one nerve in his face. For the rest of his life, he could only open, while speaking, one side of his mouth (and he had a very diabolical grin), and could never raise both eyebrows--always, he was raising one eyebrow! This gave him a very wise look, somewhat ironic at the same time, and made him appear even smarter than he was.

My sister and I occasionally exchange "Misms." Things he used to say from time to time, some inherited from his father, and others from God knows where. Here are a couple (try them; they are very effective in many convrersations):

"I left it in my other suit."
"Been to the city and seen the gaslights."

I don't think I have anything to add substantively to what has already been said in the excellent reviews, aside from these few personal details. Milton Mayer died in 1986, and is survived by several real and step children, real and step grandchildren, and two great grandchildren (at least), all of whom, like him, are pacifists."

[madfloridian]

8. What cable and networks really won't show us anymore.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/12/955694/-WisconsinCan-we-throw-a-protest-rally-or-what!-%28Photo-Diary%29

That's pretty much the saddest thing I've seen...for the media not to cover this. I would like to say they are making themselves irrelevant....but they are in control of what most believe. So I really can't say that at all.

[BrklynLiberal]

11. I sure wish I had $100 right now for every time I have posted a link to that

in the past 10 years....

It is sooooooooooooooooooooooo relevant to what has been happening here for the past 20-30 years!!!!!!!!!!!!


At least 7 times in the past few months, including the latest yesterday
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=439&topic_id=609266#617982

[madfloridian]

13. I have posted them also. I like this because it gives more about Mayer...

and how he chose them. I am starting to read the full text now at the link above...it's fascinating.

[MedleyMisty]

14. I have been researching Nazi Germany since I was 9

read all the books on the Holocaust in the local library that winter.

I've never been able to understand the mental block on Nazi comparisons, why people act like it's some horrible thing, like the Germans of the 20s, 30s, and 40s weren't human or something.

They were human. They were just like us. There's no need to be horribly offended by being compared to them. Some of them were like the Tea Party members, some of them were like our activists and did things like help Jewish people get out of the country, some didn't like it but went along, some saw personal opportunities and took advantage, some didn't notice and just went on living their comfy bubbled lives. They were all human, all varied and diverse, some honorable, some violent, some apathetic. I don't get the outrage.

Unless you know in your heart that your apathy and cowardice has contributed to where we are, and you don't want to admit that.

[madfloridian]

15. Exactly..."They were all human, all varied and diverse, some honorable, some violent, some apathetic

Yes. And mostly there was a disconnect to what was happening. Even if they really knew. The scary part to me is that so many are disconnected right now. I guess I see so much of this in the fundamentalist area where I live. Often it boils down to having a downright fight or keeping my mouth shut when seniors do not understand that the government they want shut down provides their social security.

Unaware.

[Overseas]

17. K&R! //nt

[JDPriestly]

19. I highly recommend this book.

[radhika]

20. Excellent and relevant book...here's another

When you finish reading that one, you may also want to read another book that highlights how the legal system was used to validate the Third Reich and it's operations. And how the worst of the judges and administrators were in time restored high positions in post-war Germany.

The book is "Hitler's Justice: Inside the Courts of the Third Reich". By Ingo Muller. I could not find a free version online.

http://www.jlaw.com/Commentary/book.html