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

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637

The University Of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

Copyright 1955 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved

Paperback edition 1966

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-226-51192-8 (paperbound)

eISBN-13: 978-0-226-92473-1 (e-book)

LCN: 55-5137

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

THE GERMANS 1933-45

MILTON MAYER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO & LONDON

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO MY TEN NAZI FRIENDS:

Karl-Heinz Schwenke, tailor

Gustav Schwenke, unemployed tailors apprentice

Carl Klingelhfer, cabinetmaker

Heinrich Damm, unemployed salesman

Horstmar Rupprecht, high-school student

Heinrich Wedekind, baker

Hans Simon, bill-collector

Johann Kessler, unemployed bank clerk

Heinrich Hildebrandt, teacher

Willy Hofmeister, policeman

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 hadnt written this line or that one! Let him change them, then, and bring the work up to datethe publisher is generous in these small matters.

In the always admirable hope of playing it safe, I have taken advantage of the publishers 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 substituted 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 medieval Schoolmen admitted a limitation on Gods omnipotence: 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 friendsand of some millions of other Germans like themare 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 Eichmanns in Israel) to alter the picture that my ten Nazi friends drew of themselves.

When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg. It had gone out with a bang. Now there was nothing but rubble between the Americans and the Russians, standing face to face and armed to the teeth. Nobody wanted to hear about what was well gone and well forgottenleast of all to hear that the blood of millions of people had bought nothing definitely durable. Hitler had attacked the civilized world, and the civilized world, including by happiest accident the uncivilized Russians, had destroyed him. Basta.

But the civilized world was not, even then, so well satisfied with what it had done and with what, even then, it was doing, as to be able to stop doing what it was doing and take a long thoughtful look at what it had done. Nazism was a drug on the market. This bookand not this one alonebecame a collectors item without collectors. But occasionally the publisher got an inquiry from a person (or a school or a college) who wanted it and couldnt get it. The inquiries increased to an interesting trickle. As things changed, on the whole for the worse, and the postwar world became the prewar world, and disarmament became rearmament, there arose a modestly circumscribed sentiment that it might be profitable to find out what it was that had made the Germans act as badly as they did.

Dreadful deeds like Auschwitz had been done before in human history, though never on so hideously handsome a scale. But they had not been done before in an advanced Christian society likewell, like ours. If we would keep such deeds from ever being done again, at least in advanced Christian societies, it might be worth digging a little deeper than the shallow grave so hurriedly dug at Nuremberg. After the heat of the long moment had gone down, it was equally difficult to cling to the pleasurable doctrine that the Germans were by nature the enemies of mankind and to cling to the still more pleasurable doctrine that it was possible for one (or two or three) madmen to make and unmake the history of the world. These were the things that had met the bloodshot eye. But man has many saving graces, and not the least of them is his impulse to sober up between brawls.

Four wonderful facts of life contributed to the sobriety. First, the Jews of Germany (and of Poland, and of where all else) were dead, and some humanistic men in America and elsewhere had supposed at one time that it was necessary to go to war with Germany to save the Jews. That, as it turned out, had not been the way (however gratifying its taking may have been to the humanistic impulses). Second, the destruction of Hitler had involved the prior destruction of a whole nation to a degree that was possible to the technology of total war in which battlefields are only incidental areas of operation; and the nation which had been destroyed and revived (by those who had just destroyed it) was now the industrial and military titan of Europe. Third, the Germans were now civilized Christians again and, more than that, good democrats and the front-line defenders of Christian democracy against atheist tyranny. Fourth, after so much blood and wealth invested, and then balm and wealth invested, the suspicion persisted that the German problem, whatever it was, had not been solved and would not be solved by repeated application of the same dosage.

The German problem moves in and out of focus as the twentieth century continues to produceat an always accelerating tempomore history than it can consume. Korea is forgotten, and Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez are the new sensations; Hungary, Cyprus, and Suez slide into sudden oblivion, and we are all agog at Tibet and the Congo; Tibet and the Congo vanish before we have time to find them on the map (or to find a map that has them) and Cuba explodes; Cuba subsides to something combining a simmer and a snarl, and Vietnam and Rhodesia (or is it Southern Rhodesia?) seize us. Ghana, Guiana, Guinea. Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes, and dishes ever more exotic, before we are able to swallow (let alone digest) those that were just before us. Remember the Lebanon crisis of 1958, in which the United States was deeply involved? Of course not. Who would, these days? Who could? And why?

The German problem is different. It is off center stage sometimes, but it is never offstage altogether. Most Americans are inattentive to itthey cant be attentive to everythingunless something as pictorial as the Berlin Wall becomes a one-season wonder. (Whatever else it was, the Wall was the worst political gaffe since Paris snatched Helen). But to the Europeansincluding the GermansGermany and the Germans are the first order of business every season. The Englishman who remembers the summer of 1940 is dismayed to see the new German