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Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think
about...and kept us so busy with continuous changes and crises and so
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...Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so
well explained or, on occasion, regretted, that...unless one understood what the
whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures...must someday lead
to, one no more saw it developing than a farmer in his field sees corn
growing...Each act...is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait
for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking
that others, when such shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You
don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to go out of your way to
make trouble....And it is not just fear...that restrains you; it is also genuine
uncertainty...And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to
this, and you can't prove it...But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or
hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the
difficulty...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 ...You have accepted things
you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your
father...could never have imagined.
- Milton Mayer,
They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1938-45
(University of Chicago Press, 1955)
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