Germany Than it was to late
The discrepancy between the kind of society many Germans
thought they were building and the reality of the horror of the Third Reich
presents one of the most intriguing questions of our age. "How could
it -- the Holocaust -- have happened in a modern, industrialized, educated
nation ? The genesis of my interest in the Third Reich lies in my search
for an answer to that enigmatic question.
The excerpt reproduced below is one of the
most insightful I have yet discovered. I share it with you -
Pass it on - Lest we forget.
RCD -
Web Ho
"What no one seemed to
notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever
widening gap, after1933,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 he 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 universe 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."
"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker.
"One had no time to think. There was so much going on."
"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The
dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all
diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want
to think anyway. I do not speak of your "little men", your
baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind
you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never
had. There was no need to. 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?
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -
please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political
awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each
step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion,
"regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process
from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in
principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic
German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing
from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day
it is over his head.
"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated
ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many,
many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis
obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and
"consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to
resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and
certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary
men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did;
they didn't, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.
"Your "little men," your Nazi friends, were not against National
Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders,
not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we
sensed better. Pastor Niemoller spoke for the thousands and thousands of
men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the
Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was
not a Communist, and so he did nothing: and then they attacked the Socialists,
and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing;
and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always
uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church,
and he was a Churchman, and he did something - but then it was too late."
"Yes," I said.
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where
or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion,
is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next
and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that
others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.
You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out
of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the
habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that
restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as
time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general
community, "everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly
sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the
government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities,
perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own
community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel
as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or
"You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to
this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do
you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even
surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the
Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as
pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who
are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or
submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did
at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off
in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in
small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to
yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This
weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to – to
what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything,
you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a
troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
"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 the
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.
"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of
them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too
heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a
baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that
everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The
world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were 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.
"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what
you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done ( for that was all
that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early
meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others
would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of
hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember
everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are
compromised beyond repair.
"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or
"adjust" your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose,
succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with
your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances,
to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more,
I think, than the world knows or cares to know."
I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.
"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a
judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an
anti-Nazi. He was just – a judge. In "42" or
"43", early "43", I think it was, a Jew was tried before
him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an
"Aryan" woman. This was "race injury", something the
Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case a bar, however, the judge
had the power to convict the man of a "nonracial" offense and send
him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party
"processing" which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably,
deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the "nonracial"
charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted
him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the
courtroom.
"
"And the judge?"
"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience – a
case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought
that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could
he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more,
and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then
to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the
"44" Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."
I said nothing.
"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." You assumed that there were lists
of those who would be "dealt with" later, after the victory.
Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a
"victory orgy" to "take care of" those who thought that
their "treasonable attitude" had escaped notice. And he meant
it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to
all uncertainty.
"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. The people abroad who thought
that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in
Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting,
resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long
bet. Not many made it."