The Road to Nazism in Milton Meyer's "They Thought They Were Free"

Why did Nazism take root in Germany in 1933? What conditions do and do not move a society in the direction of a repressive fascist dictatorship?

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Meyer, explores the experience of ten "regular" Germans in the years during and leading up to World War II. The book grapples with questions of social responsibility and the moral culpability of the average German, but I read the book with an eye toward the question: what led Germany down its path toward ruin and fascism? How did the German people become so vociferously anti-Semitic and what led the them to support and adore Hitler?

There seems to be six political conditions or themes that weave their way through this book to shed light on these questions.

Theme 1: A Geopolitics of Siege

Milton Meyer repeatedly emphasizes the role that geopolitical pressure played in moving Germany toward Nazism. Specifically, the German people felt encircled by enemies and oppressed by Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles.

My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life. They believed that self-preservation is the first law of nature, of the nature of nations as well as of herd brutes. Were they wrong in this principle? If they were, they saw nothing in the history of nations (their own or any other) that said so. And, once there was shooting war, their situation was like that of the secret opponents of the regime whom my colleague described: there was no further need for the nation, or anyone in it, to be justified. The nation was literally fighting for its literal life—“they or we.” Anything went, and what “anything” was, what enormities it embraced, depended entirely on the turn of the battle.

Elsewhere in the book, this observation is summarized:

Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one.

Even the final solution was only tolerated as a perceived exigency of war:

“Once the war began,” my colleague continued, “resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’...“Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it.

Theme 2: A Polarized Political System

Inside Germany, politics was polarized between the parties of communism and anti-communism.

“Hitlerism had to answer Communism with something just as radical. Communism always used force; Hitlerism answered it with force. The really absolute enemy of Communism, always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was National Socialism, the only enemy that answered Communism in kind. If you wanted to save Germany from Communism—to be sure of doing it—you went to National Socialism. The Nazi slogan in 1932 was, If you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote Communist; if you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi.’

“The middle parties, between the two millstones, played no role at all between the two radicalisms. Their adherents were basically the Bürger, the bourgeois, the ‘nice’ people who decide things by parliamentary procedure; and the politically indifferent; and the people who wanted to keep or, at worst, only modify the status quo. 

“I’d like to ask the American Burger, the middle-class man: What would you have done when your country stood so? A dictatorship, or destruction by Bolshevism? Bolshevism looked like slavery and the death of the soul. It didn’t matter if you were in agreement with Nazism. Nazism looked like the only defense. There was your choice.”

Whether or not German communism was a dangerous ideology, many Germans believed it to be so, and this starkly polarized climate offered the German people few and unpleasant choices:

Those Germans who would do anything, be anything, join anything to stop Bolshevism had, in the end, to be Nazis. And Nazism did stop Bolshevism. How it stopped Bolshevism, with what means and what consequences, did not matter—not enough, at least, to alienate them. None of its shortcomings, mild or hideous, none of its contradictions, small or calamitous, ever swayed them. To them, then and now, Nazism kept its promise.

Theme 3: Anti-Elitism

...Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. 

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, “blood,” “folk-ishness”) seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the “little man,” the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society....By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon “intellectuals” as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated.

Theme 4: Segregation

One of the most enduring and unsettling messages of the book is that most regular Germans didn't hate Jews. Instead, most regular Germans just didn't know Jews and therefore, they managed to stay ignorant or indifferent to their plight.

The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to?

Meyer repeatedly draws an analogy between the segregation of Jews in Germany to the segregation of blacks that was happening in America at the same time:

We whites—when the Negro moves away—do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? 

American citizens also become acclimated to oppression when the oppressed population is segregated:

In the pleasant resort towns of New England Americans have seen signs reading “Selected Clientele” or “Restricted.” They have grown accustomed to seeing such signs, so accustomed that, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, non-“Aryan” Americans, they take no notice of them and, in taking no notice, accept them. In the much less pleasant cottonseed-oil towns of the Deep South Americans have grown accustomed to seeing signs reading anything from “White” and “Colored” to “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here,” and, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, northern Americans, they take no notice of them. There were enough such signs (literally and figuratively) in pre-Nazi Germany, and there was enough non-resistance to them, so that, when the countryside bloomed in 1933 with signs reading “Juden hier uneiwünscht, Jews Not Wanted Here,” the Germans took no notice of them. So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.

In conclusion, it was it was separation, more so than prejudice, that made Nazism possible:

...it was separation, not prejudice as such, that made Nazism possible, the mere separation of Jews and non-Jews. None of my ten friends except Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, had ever known a Jew at all intimately in a town.

Theme 5: Self-Identification with the Leader

The German citizens saw a savior and father figure in Adolf Hitler. Even when the war ended in disaster for Germany and the grotesque horrors of the regime were exposed for all to see, German citizens were unable to see fault in Adolf Hitler. For them, he was and will remain an aspirational embodiment of their best-selves:

Having fixed our faith in a father-figure—or in a father, or in a mother or a wife—we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one’s best, unrealized self. Thus Hitler was betrayed by his subordinates, and the little Nazis with him. They may hate Bormann and Goebbels—Bormann because he rose to power at the end, and they are ashamed of the end; Goebbels because he was a runt with a “Jewish mind,” that is, a facile and cunning mind unlike theirs. They may hate Himmler, the Bluthund, above all, because he killed in cold blood, and they wouldn’t do that. But they may not hate Hitler or themselves. 

“You see,” said Tailor Schwenke, the littlest of my ten little men, “there was always a secret war against Hitler in the regime. They fought him with unfair means. Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different.” For “Hitler” read “I.” 

“The killing of the Jews?” said the “democratic” bill-collector, der alte Kämpfer, Simon. “Yes, that was wrong, unless they committed treason in wartime. And of course they did. If I had been a Jew, I would have myself. Still, it was wrong, but some say it happened and some say it didn’t. You can show me pictures of skulls or shoes, but that doesn’t prove it. But I’ll tell you this—it was Himmler. Hitler had nothing to do with it.” 

“Do you think he knew about it?” 

“I don’t know. We’ll never know now.” 

Hitler died to save my friend’s best self. 

Theme 6: Lack of Political Engagement

Political engagement is hard and most people aren't up to the task:

It was this, I think—they had their own troubles—that in the end explained my friends’ failure to “do something” or even to know something. A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal conditions, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried their normal responsibilities well enough; every one of them was a good householder and, with the possible exception of Tailor Schwenke, a good jobholder. But they were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.

This same phenomena can be observed in America, with respect to the program of Japanese internment that happened during World War II:

What is the proportion of revolutionary heroes, of saints and martyrs, or, if you will, of troublemakers, in Stockholm, Ankara, El Paso? We in America have not had the German experience, where even private protest was dangerous, where even secret knowledge might be extorted; but what did we expect the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte to do when, in the midst of war, he was told, openly and officially, that 112,000 of his fellow-Americans, those of Japanese ancestry on the American West Coast, had been seized without warrant and sent without due process of law to relocation centers? There was nichts dagegen zu machen [nothing to do about it]—not even by the United States Supreme Court, which found that the action was within the Army’s power—and, anyway, the good citizen of Minneapolis or Charlotte had his own troubles.

Recurring throughout the book is the idea that the average German was horrified by crimes of the Nazi regime, but the average German lacked the energy or the will or the opportunity to ever do something about it. There is a sense throughout the book that the German people were always ready to oppose the "excesses" of the regime - the shocking incident of abuse that everyone could see was wrong, but that shocking moment never came. Instead, the excesses of the Nazism regime were so incremental and creeping that they were hardly noticeable to most people.

“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, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. 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.

“Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to ‘oppose the excesses,’ about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day.”

Conclusion

They Thought They Were Free suggests that hatred is not a prerequisite for oppression. Instead, a nation's politics and a person's individual morality can operate in orthogonal ways and good people can promote an evil political program. It is possible to be oppressed by people who don't hate you and it is possible to oppress other people that we don't hate. This book leaves the reader with the haunting impression that the democracy and freedom that we enjoy, our freedom from tyranny and the relative lack of oppression in our society, is a frighteningly precarious arrangement. Once a society starts along a path of racism and anti-democracy, it may already be too late to stop.

Many Americans assume that the evils of Germany could never be replicated in America, at least not any time soon. Perhaps that is true, but American history is veritable cornucopia of moral horrors and before 1933 the German people also believed that fascism could never happen in Germany:

German music and art, German belles-lettres and philosophy, German science and technology, German theology and education (especially at the highest levels) were part and parcel of Western achievement. German honesty, industry, family virtue, and civil government were the pride of other Western countries where Germans settled. “I think,” says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, “that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, and then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.’”