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, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. We were decent people-and the fascists kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and ‘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. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things, and we never had. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was, above all, diverting. And all the crises and reforms so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
“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. “What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people to being governed by surprise to receiving (conspiratorial) decisions deliberated in secret to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government (and their bureaucrats) had to act on information which the people could not understand, or was so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of ‘national security.’ You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy.
“What no one seemed to notice was the ever-widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. 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).” “Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. “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.”
Excerpts from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 – Quotes from Germans that were Cunningly Led by the Nazis to Participate in the “Final Solution”:
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