They Thought They Were Free
Feb. 17th, 2014 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliThey Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer
A book possibly unique in what it contains.
The author, a Jewish American, went to Germany shortly after World War II, found a town, and befriended ten Nazis who lived there. Hiding that he was a Jew, and that he had other sources of information about them, he yet honestly told them that in the interests of understanding, he wanted to know about how they became Nazis and lived as Nazis. He also includes some from other sources of information, talking to other, German professors and the like. But the core ten group are mostly of men too unreflective to have ever come forth with this sort of information on their own.
They were all "little men." At one extreme, one had been justly convicted of having participiated in a synagogue burning on Kristallnacht. At the other, a teacher had joined to help hide his Social Democrat past, which meant certainly losing his job if it were found out. In between, they included a man who joined because the Nazis were the first political party, ever, to have held a meeting in his farming village, and another who joined to protect his job when his boss did -- not knowing that his boss was an ardent anti-Nazi who had joined to protect himself from his boss, an ardent Nazi, and who covertly tried to get him fired, assuming he was sincere, only the boss's boss protected him.
The teacher explained there were five teachers who didn't join the party. Three were religiously motivated. One never joined anything. And one, who ardently poured the Nazi doctrine into his biology classes
Full of little details about this and that in life. Their actual interactions with Jews in real life, and what they knew, for a certainty about what was happening. The story of a judge who was consumed with guilt for his failure to convict a Jew for a crime while thinking him innocent -- out of jail, the Jew fell into the hands of the Party for a racial offense. (The detainment of the Japanese in the United States came up often.) The unwillingness to blame Hitler rather than Himmler, or Goebbels, or Bormann.
The difficulty of teaching under the vague guidelines -- among Shakespeare's plays Macbeth and (of course) The Merchant of Venice were recommended, but none of the rest forbidden, not even Hamlet for its flabbiness of spirit. (He resorted to A Midsummer's Night Dream so he could talk about Mendelssohn's music.) On the other hand, in math classes, the teachers were given the problems they were to set. Such as graphing by using population growth rates, and adding the question about what dangers the Germans face as a consequence.
The last section where he leaves off the interviews and intimate discussions seems to me to be the weakest. Still, the earlier sections are vital.
A book possibly unique in what it contains.
The author, a Jewish American, went to Germany shortly after World War II, found a town, and befriended ten Nazis who lived there. Hiding that he was a Jew, and that he had other sources of information about them, he yet honestly told them that in the interests of understanding, he wanted to know about how they became Nazis and lived as Nazis. He also includes some from other sources of information, talking to other, German professors and the like. But the core ten group are mostly of men too unreflective to have ever come forth with this sort of information on their own.
They were all "little men." At one extreme, one had been justly convicted of having participiated in a synagogue burning on Kristallnacht. At the other, a teacher had joined to help hide his Social Democrat past, which meant certainly losing his job if it were found out. In between, they included a man who joined because the Nazis were the first political party, ever, to have held a meeting in his farming village, and another who joined to protect his job when his boss did -- not knowing that his boss was an ardent anti-Nazi who had joined to protect himself from his boss, an ardent Nazi, and who covertly tried to get him fired, assuming he was sincere, only the boss's boss protected him.
The teacher explained there were five teachers who didn't join the party. Three were religiously motivated. One never joined anything. And one, who ardently poured the Nazi doctrine into his biology classes
Full of little details about this and that in life. Their actual interactions with Jews in real life, and what they knew, for a certainty about what was happening. The story of a judge who was consumed with guilt for his failure to convict a Jew for a crime while thinking him innocent -- out of jail, the Jew fell into the hands of the Party for a racial offense. (The detainment of the Japanese in the United States came up often.) The unwillingness to blame Hitler rather than Himmler, or Goebbels, or Bormann.
The difficulty of teaching under the vague guidelines -- among Shakespeare's plays Macbeth and (of course) The Merchant of Venice were recommended, but none of the rest forbidden, not even Hamlet for its flabbiness of spirit. (He resorted to A Midsummer's Night Dream so he could talk about Mendelssohn's music.) On the other hand, in math classes, the teachers were given the problems they were to set. Such as graphing by using population growth rates, and adding the question about what dangers the Germans face as a consequence.
The last section where he leaves off the interviews and intimate discussions seems to me to be the weakest. Still, the earlier sections are vital.
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Date: 2014-02-20 03:05 pm (UTC)I'd like to read that. “History is written by the victors,” and so the contemporary point of view goes down the memory hole - there was a REASON the NSDAP rose to become such a power in the land that Hitler was able to muscle into the actual government and, well, take it from there…
It's been said that if he'd stopped at Czechoslovakia, Germany would be National Socialist to this day. The fact that scarcely five years after carpet-bombing the country into surrender we were re-arming and reinstating those same Germans to help fight the very people the NSDAP had formed to fight in the first place makes me think there's something to that idea…
[It is perfectly possible, had events gone differently in the USA following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 - specifically, if the vastly more competent Herbert Hoover had won re-election (over someone other than the prototype “limousine liberal” FDR; he was like Reagan in 1980, saying what people wanted toi hear at just the right time), the Party would not have got the beachhead the New Deal gave them, to turn US foreign polkicy into an instrument of Soviet statecraft. Eugenics was big in the USA, anti-Semitism was completely normal, and what with one thing and then another, World War II might have been a Reich-US alliance fighting the Soviets for domination of Europe! (With Japan left alone to dismantle China and take over East Asia; 1905 wasn't that long before, and they might have had our tacit blessing as uncredited allies against the Russian Far East! Yow, would history books read differently or what!]
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Date: 2014-02-20 05:09 pm (UTC)But in the book, one man said they had been de-militarized and de-Nazified. Then, they were being re-militarized. Are they going to be re-Nazified, too?
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Date: 2014-02-20 07:48 pm (UTC)Weirdly enough, in East Germany World War II never happened. No joke. A friend of mine spent part of her formative years in East Germany:
I'd like to hear that “proper history.” The Nazi view was much the same, that while Germany had had to fall back and regroup from 1918 to 1939, it was ON NOW, Part II of der Weltkrieg, and their propaganda specifically linked the Imperial German Soldaten to the present-day Reichsheer. The triumphal arch Albert Speer envisioned building in post-victory Berlin would have had engraved on it the name of every German soldier who'd died from 1914 onwards. (It was going to be a big arch.)
p.s. I did not ask my friend how she was able to so blithely “move away to West Germany” when the Berlin Wall et al were there specifically to prevent such “moves” - but I think it's because her family wasn't actually German, so the Party didn't really care. After 1975, Australians were still welcome in Vietnam, even though Australian forces had played a major role in-country; the official line was that they were dupes of the American warmongers, and they were forgiven… as long as they brought hard currency with them, that is..
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Date: 2014-02-20 07:57 pm (UTC)