Thread by @jasonwbade

1/ In 1955, Milton Mayer published this masterpiece – drawn from years of post-war interviews with 10 average, boring, law-abiding Germans – about how they became Nazis.

While reading I felt he had travelled 50 years in the future to write about today. Here are my highlights…

2/ These "decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know that before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now."

3/ "None had ever talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press.… None of them ever heard anything bad about the Nazi regime except, as they believed, from Germany's enemies, and Germany's enemies were theirs.

4/ "Men think first of the lives they lead the things they see.…The lives of my ten friends were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? …

5/ "They were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets. …

6/ "There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached 'nobody.'…You and I leave 'some sort of trouble on the streets' to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg. …

7/ "The real lives that real people live in a real community had nothing to do with Hitler and Roosevelt.…Man doesn't meet the State very often.

"The Nazis were able, ultimately to establish anti-Communism as a religion, immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone.

8/ My friends "were positive that National Socialism was Germany's and therefore their own, salvation from Communism.…Did they know what Communism was? They did not. ……

9/ "Ethnical heterogeneity is great among the Germans (more than any other European nation).… But my friends accepted a kind of racist 'Germanism,' a biologized mystique. …

10/ "Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then, 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. …

11/ "As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, 'blood', 'folkishness') seeped through Germany, the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery.…

12/ "By 1933, at least five of my ten friends looked upon 'intellectuals' as unreliable and among these unreliables, upon academics as the most insidiously situated.

13/ "Putting ignorant 'reliables', from politics or business, over the educators was also part of the Nazi way of humiliating education and bringing it into popular contempt. … …

14/ "After the Church-Party split began to develop, in 1936, the Party services became more ritualistic, more specifically a substitute for church. …

15/ "Look at the suicides; look at the immorality. People wanted something radical, a real change.…

16/ "Hitler was a simple soldier, only he had a feeling for masses of people, and he could speak with passion. The people didn't pay any attention to the Party program as such. They went to the meetings just to hear something new, anything new.…

17/ "The masses of the people could not be held back from Nazism, so powerful was its appeal, and so this same priest, who would not leave his people, went with them to Nazism, too. …

18/ "They were desperate about the economic situation, 'a new Germany' sounded good to them; but from a deep or broad point of view they saw nothing at all. Hitler talked always against the government, against the lost war, against the peace treaty, against...

19/ ...unemployment. All that people liked. By the time the intellectuals asked 'What is this?' it had a solid basis in common people. …It was the Party of workers controlling the social orders; it was not for the intellectuals.

20/ One Nazi: “My medals were sold. I was nothing. Then suddenly, I was needed. National Socialism had a place for me. I was nothing–and then I was needed.”

21/ One anti-Nazi: "the enthusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet.…

22/ …While a Nazi parade went past on the movie screen, "a girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, 'Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!' No one outside seems to understand how this was."……

23/ "It was not anti-Semitism or socialism or the New Order that first animated the Nazis; their first slogan was, 'Break the chains of Versailles.' [referring to the punitive peace treaty of WWI]” That of course didn’t last…

24/ "Between 1918 and 1933 this marginal man, the Jew, in a situation which put a premium on adaptability, rose to such power in a decomposing Germany that his achievement looked dangerously like that of a superman. But wasn't the German to be the superman?…

25/ "Very well, then. The order would have to be reversed, the standards of supermanliness redefined to fit the German. Superman, the German, would not adjust to his world; he would adjust it.…

26/ "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 the teacher had ever known a Jew at all intimately.…

27/ One Nazi: “My father liked him, Moses. But my father always said that you couldn't trust a Jew in money matters. And he was right.'

'Were you ever cheated by a Jew?'

'No, but that was because I was warned and was careful.”
…

28/ "You were sorry for the Jews, that they lost their jobs and homes…You were sorry, and more terrified when it happened, as it did, to thousands of non-Jews. But – weren't you glad you weren't a Jew? ……

29/ One of my friends countered my questions “with great interest in the mass deportation of Japanese-Americans.…He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with it.
When I said 'No,' he asked me what I had done about it.

When I said “Nothing,” he said triumphantly…

30/ “There.”
…

31/ "What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after, 1933, between the government and the people. … Their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap.…

32/ "We were decent people – and kept 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.…

33/ Some imagined resisting from within: “For the sake of being 'effective' [in his opposition to the regime] one ‘Nazi’ did everything required of him, and of course he wasn't effective. He knows that now. But then had hope of being able to oppose the excesses of the regime…

34/ "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. …

35/ You realize eventually: ”The world you live in–your nation, your people–is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all reassuring…

36/ "…the houses, the shops, the mealtimes, the concerts. But the spirit, which you never noticed…because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.…

37/ "…You wait for 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, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.'" Genuine uncertainty "restrains you."…

38/ "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. …

39/ "If the last and worst act of the regime had come immediately after the first and smallest… But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of the imperceptible, each preparing you not to be shocked by the next.…

40/ "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.

/END – edited for clarity only