These ten men were “little men”; only Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, had any substantial status in the community. And when I say “little men,” I mean not only the men for whom the mass media and the campaign speeches are everywhere designed but, specifically in sharply stratified societies like Germany, the men who think of themselves in that way. Every one of my ten Nazi friends—including Hildebrandt—spoke again and again during our discussions of “wir kleine Leute, we little people.”
This self-consciousness is nonexistent—or repressed—in America. European students of our culture have all cited our egalitarianism as an affectation and an expensive one, producing a national leadership indistinguishable from its constituency. If everybody is little, nobody is little. But the rise of National Socialism involved both the elitist and the servile impulses. When “big men,” Hindenburgs, Neuraths, Schachts, and even Hohenzollerns, accepted Nazism, little men had good and sufficient reason to accept it. “Wenn die ‘Ja’ sagen,” said Hen Simon, the bill-collector, “dann sagen wir auch Ja.’ What was good enough for them was certainly good enough for us.”
Foreigners speaking of the “National Socialist Party” miss the point, said the younger Schwenke; it was the National Socialist German Workers Party, “the party of the little men like me. The only other was the Communist.” Emperor and Führer both required the consciousness of littleness in the Germans, but Führer, bringing bigness down, lifted littleness up. The democratic baby-kisser and backslapper does the same thing, but it is more effective when an absolute ruler does it. My friends were little men—like the Führer himself.
These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.
A year’s conversations, in their own language, under informal conditions involving meals, “a glass of wine,” or, more preciously, a cup of coffee, exchange of family visits (including the children), and long, easy evenings, Saturday afternoons, or Sunday walks—these were things that not one of my ten friends had supposed possible with an American. None of them had had any but official American contacts. None had been to America or England or outside Germany as civilians, excepting the teacher, who had spent much time in France. None spoke English.
My relationships with them were, in every case, established with considerable difficulty, through a third (or fourth or fifth) person who could convince them of my good faith and my good intentions. And all ten of them, with the possible exception of Baker Wedekind, seemed sooner or later to have accepted my statement of my mission: I had come to Germany, as a German-descended private person, to bring back to America the life-story of the ordinary German under National Socialism, with the end purpose of establishing better understanding of Germany among my countrymen. The statement was true, and my German academic position gave it weight with them. But my greatest asset was my total ignorance of German—the only language that any of them, except the teacher (who spoke French) could speak. They were my teachers. “Mushi,” the old tailor, Schwenke, would call to his wife, “just listen to the way the Herr Professor says ‘Auf wiedersehenf “ My friends had ample opportunity to display their pedagogy and their patience with the Herr Professor, who was slow, but good-natured.
I did lie to all ten of them on two points: on the advicc of my German colleagues and friends, I did not tell them that I was a Jew; nor did I tell them that I had access to other sources of information about them than my private conversations with them.
I think that I may now call all of them, with the exception of the baker, friends of mine. I think that four of the ten, Tailor Schwenke, his son Gustav, Bank Clerk Kessler, and Teacher Hildebrandt (and, possibly, Policeman Hofmeister) told me their stories as fully as the stories were in them to tell. They were none of them, except the teacher, the student, and the bank clerk, at all fluent by temperament, but none of the ten consciously lied to me (in my opinion) except, possibly, Baker Wedekind and Tailor Schwenke, and the latter only on his role in the arson of the synagogue. I found no intolerable discrepancies or contradictions in their individual accounts over months of discussion; memory lapse, normal reserve, and, above all, the confusion and repression inherent in such cataclysmic experiences as theirs seemed to me to explain the small discrepancies and contradictions I observed. At no point did I try to trap any of them.
Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know 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. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.
As we know Nazism, it was a naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of National Socialism is a little simple, so is theirs. An autocracy? Yes, of course, an autocracy, as in the fabled days of “the golden time” our parents knew. But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term? Nonsense.
When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.”
I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, “What do you mean, ‘what it would lead to,’ Herr Wedekind?” “War,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war.”
The evil of National Socialism began on September 1, 1939; and that was my friend the baker.
Remember—none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad (except in war); none had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press; none ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so, and none (except, oddly enough, the policeman) listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France—or America. 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. “Everything the Russians and the Americans said about us,” said Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer, “they now say about each other.”
Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds. The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets. What does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing. In those days she knew or thought she did; what difference does it make? So things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?
The best time of their lives. There were wonderful ten-dollar holiday trips for the family in the “Strength through Joy” program, to Norway in the summer and Spain in the winter, for people who had never dreamed of a real holiday trip at home or abroad. And in Kronenberg “nobody” (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for. For whom do men know? They know people of their own neighborhood, of their own station and occupation, of their own political (or nonpolitical) views, of their own religion and race. All the blessings of the New Order, advertised everywhere, reached “everybody.”
There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached “nobody.” Once in a while (and only once in a while) a single crusading or sensation-mongering newspaper in America exposes the inhuman conditions of the local county jail; but none of my friends had ever read such a newspaper when there were such in Germany (far fewer there than here), and now there were none. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was “some sort of trouble” on the streets of Kronenberg as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave “some sort of trouble on the streets” to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg.
The real lives that real people live in a real community have nothing to do with Hitler and Roosevelt or with what Hitler and Roosevelt are doing. Man doesn’t meet the State very often. On November 10, 1938, the day after the arson of the synagogues, an American news service reported a trivial incident from a suburb of Berlin. A mob of children were carrying great sacks of candy out of the smashed shop window of a Jewish-owned candy store, while a crowd of adults, including some of the children’s parents (including, too, a ring of SA men in Brown Shirt uniform), stood watching. An old man walked up, an “Aryan.” He watched the proceedings and then turned to the parents and said to them: “You think you are hurting the Jew. You do not know what you are doing. You are teaching your children to steal.” And the old man walked off, and the parents broke out of the crowd, knocked the candy out of their children’s hands and dragged them wailing away. Man, in the form of the parents, had met the State, in the form of the SA. But it is doubtful if he knew it; after all, the SA men just stood there, without interfering.
In its issue of November 11, 1938, the Kronenberger Zcitung carried the following report, at the bottom of page 4, under a very small headline reading Schutzhaft, “Protective Custody”: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” I showed it to each of my ten friends. None of them—including the teacher—remembered ever having seen it or anything like it.
1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939—until September 1, when, as the Head of the Government told them, Poland attacked their country—the little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them. “No one outside Germany seems to understand this,” said an anti-Nazi woman, who had been imprisoned in 1943, ostensibly for listening to the foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal). “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and 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. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the 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.”
The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets, untranslatable, and wildgewordene Spiessbürger is one of them. It means, very roughly, “little men gone wild.” Of themselves, such men would perhaps use the borrowed and Germanicized term Fanatiker. Fanatikei are not to be confused either with Spitzbuben, rascals, or with Bluthunde, hired hoodlums or goons. When I asked (of anti-Nazis and of Nazis) how many genuine Fanatiker there were in the Third Reich, how many little men gone wild, the hazard was never over a million. It must be remembered, especially in connection with Communism in Russia, and even with Fascism in Italy, that the National Socialist movement died young; it never had a chance to rear a whole generation of its own.
And the rest of the seventy million Germans? The rest were not even cogs, in any positive sense at all, in the totalitarian machine. A people like ourselves, who know such systems only by hearsay or by the report of their victims or opponents, tends to exaggerate the actual relationship between man and the State under tyranny. The laws are hateful to those who hate them, but who hates them? It is dangerous, in Nazi Germany, to go to Communist meetings or read the Manchester Guardian, but who wants to go to Communist meetings or read the Manchester Guardian?
In the America of the 1950’s one hears, on the one hand, that the country is overcome by mistrust, suspicion, and dread, and, on the other, that nobody is afraid, nobody defamed, nobody destroyed by defamation. Where is the truth? Where was it in Nazi Germany? None of my ten Nazi friends, with the exception of the cryptodemocrat Hildebrandt, knew any mistrust, suspicion, or dread in his own life or among those with whom he lived and worked; none was defamed or destroyed. Their world was the world of National Socialism; inside it, inside the Nazi community, they knew only good-fellowship and the ordinary concerns of ordinary life. They feared the “Bolsheviks” but not one another, and their fear was the accepted fear of the whole otherwise happy Nazi community that was Germany. Outside that community they never went, or saw, or heard; they had no occasion to.
That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it—from its victims and opponents whose world was outside the Nazi community and from journalists and intellectuals, themselves non-Nazi or anti-Nazi, whose sympathies naturally lay with the victims and opponents. These people saw life in Germany in non-Nazi terms. There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. And in the America of the 1950’s—I do not mean to suggest that the two situations are parallel or even more than very tenuously comparable—those who did not dissent or associate with dissenters saw no mistrust or suspicion beyond the great community’s mistrust and suspicion of dissenters, while those who dissented or believed in the right to dissent saw nothing but mistrust and suspicion and felt its devastation. As there were two Americas, so, in a much more sharply drawn division, there were two Germanys. And so, just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat and another waves “Hello” to him, there are two countries in every country.
In Russian-Communized East Germany after the second World War, a worker in a State factory is compelled to attend one meeting a week, of two hours, for purposes of what we should call “indoctrination” or “brain-washing” and what the Communists call “education.” Beyond that and paying his taxes, he is compelled to do nothing more; he takes military service, secret police, and rationing for granted (as who doesn’t?). Of course, he is blared at, from posters, newspapers, radio, and public address systems (as who isn’t, for one purpose or another?), but he is let alone.
Most Germans—nearly all of them, after twelve years of Nazism—see nothing inordinate in this amount of compulsion. Even under Nazism (before the war), Party members were required to give only Friday evenings and Sunday mornings to Party or public work. Beyond this point, service to the tyranny was, naturally, highly advisable for the ambitious and the politically suspect, but it was not required of the man who wanted to hold a job, a home, a family, and an honored place in the Singverein or the Turnverein. I encountered a few civil servants in Kronenberg who had never joined the Party and had not been bothered; they were the kind that never joined anything, and nobody expected them to—the kind, too, that is never promoted; and I met a pastor who had not been persecuted although he had refused to let his children join the Hitler Youth and the German Maidens until membership became automatic.
It is local conditions, even under totalitarianism, which govern the application of public authority to the individual. These conditions, which vary so much elsewhere, varied much more than I had supposed possible under National Socialism and tended almost always to relax the central controls (just as local courts everywhere tend to relax legal principles), except where the local boss was a Fanatiker. And these latter instances were the exceptions; local bosses, in order to function effectively, have to be locally popular.
Pastor Wilhelm Mensching, in the village of Petzen, in Lower Saxony, preached anti-Nazism to his little flock during the whole twelve years that the Nazis were in power in Germany. Every Sunday morning he stood in his pulpit and answered the speech which the Bürgermeister, an “Old Party Fighter,” made every Saturday night in the Market Place. Mensching was never touched; when the Gestapo came from Hannover to arrest him, the Bürgermeister went to the Gauleiter to oppose them, and the arrest wasn’t made. Wilhelm Mensching had “always” been pastor of Petzen, and to disturb him would have been an intolerable disturbance to the configuration of the village. And both he and the Bürgermeister knew it.
There were not enough thousands of Menschings in Germany, simply because such men are not born every day and the church in Germany (as elsewhere) does not nourish their multiplication. But there were dozens enough of them to make the point. To be sure, National Socialism had only a few years to achieve its great Gleichschaltung, its integration of man into the State; still, six of them were war years, in which the tempo could be, and was, stepped up considerably. But modern tyrants all stand above politics and, in doing so, demonstrate that they are all master politicians. They know, without having to read Florentine theorists, that politicians cannot afford to be hated. A Niemöller would have to be silenced, at whatever risk to the tyranny; the best-known of all German pastors, he had said, “God is my Führer.” He was a national and an international challenge, and he had to be handled the hard way. But there were easy ways (the easiest being to ignore them) to confine the effectiveness of dozens of Menschings to their separate villages without taking steps which would have rocked any good villager on his heels and made him say, “No, not this, not this.”
Ordinary people—and ordinary Germans—cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet. The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.
In the pleasant resort towns of New England Americans have seen signs reading “Selected Clientele” or “Restricted.” They have grown accustomed to seeing such signs, so accustomed that, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, non-“Aryan” Americans, they take no notice of them and, in taking no notice, accept them. In the much less pleasant cottonseed-oil towns of the Deep South Americans have grown accustomed to seeing signs reading anything from “White” and “Colored” to “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here,” and, unless they are non-Caucasian or, perhaps, northern Americans, they take no notice of them. There were enough such signs (literally and figuratively) in pre-Nazi Germany, and there was enough non-resistance to them, so that, when the countryside bloomed in 1933 with signs reading “Juden hier uneiwünscht, Jews Not Wanted Here,” the Germans took no notice of them. So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier.
It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people’s temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution.
It is in this nonlitigable sense, at least, that the Germans as a whole were guilty: nothing was done, or attempted, that they would not stand for. The two exceptions were euthanasia, which was abandoned, and the pagan “Faith Movement” of Alfred Rosenberg, which was aborted.
Local hoodlums could beat up Communists or Social Democrats, desecrate Jewish cemeteries or smash Jews’ windows by night; the local police, overseen by the Gestapo, would make a routine and invariably unsuccessful investigation of the assault; and the ordinary demands of decency would be satisfied. The Kronenbergers, being decent folk, would, perhaps, turn over in their beds—and sleep on.
The burning of a synagogue was something else; it approached, closely and almost dangerously, the point at which the community might be awakened. If not sacrilege, it was, after all, lawless destruction of valuable goods, an affront to the German property sense (much deeper than ours) and, no less, to the responsibility (much sterner than ours) of the authorities to uphold the law. When the synagogue was burned in Kronenberg, local SA men (including Tailor Schwenke, my friend) were used incidentally; but the arson was planned and directed by outsiders, from a big city forty miles away. In the pattern of American gangsterism’s importation of killers from New York to Chicago or vice versa, the local officials were helpless and, by transference, the community, too.
The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio. Everybody attended local celebrations of national occasions—hadn’t the schools and the stores always been closed for the Kaiser’s birthday?—so you attended, too. Everybody contributed money and time to worthy purposes, so you did, too. In America your wife collects or distributes clothing, gives an afternoon a week to the Red Cross or the orphanage or the hospital; in Germany she did the same thing in the Nazi Frauenbund, and for the same reasons. The Frauenbund, like the Red Cross, was patriotic and humanitarian; did your wife ask the Red Cross if “Negro” plasma was segregated from “white”?
One minded one’s own business in Germany, with or without a dictatorship. The random leisure which leads Americans into all sorts of afterhour byways, constructive, amusing, or ruinous, did not exist for most Germans. One didn’t go out of one’s way, on a day off, to “look for trouble”—there less than here. Germans were no more given to associating with nonconformist persons or organizations than we are. They engaged themselves in opposing the government much less than we do. Few Americans say “No” to the government—fewer Germans. None of my ten friends said “No” to the Nazi government, and only one of them, Teacher Hildebrandt, thought “No.”
Men who are ever going to say “No” to the government are for the most part—not uniformly—men with a prior pattern of politically conscious impulse. But such men were, in Hitler’s Germany, either Nazis or anti-Nazis. If they were Nazis, they said “Yes,” with a will. If they were anti-Nazis, their past record, like the teacher’s, hung over their heads. Far from protesting, these, the only Germans who might have protested in quantity, had the greatest incentive of all to conform. They were like men who, in McCarthy-ridden America, had been Communists in their youth, who hoped that their past was safely buried, and whose sole concern was whether or not their names turned up in the day’s un-American activities testimony. Of all Americans, they would be the least likely to participate now in protest or opposition. “I never got over marveling that I survived,” said Herr Hildebrandt. “I couldn’t help being glad, when something happened to somebody else, that it hadn’t happened to me. It was like later on, when a bomb hit another city, or another house than your own; you were thankful.” “More thankful for yourself than you were sorry for others?” “Yes. The truth is, Yes. It may be different in your case, Herr Professor, but I’m not sure that you will know until you have faced it.”
You were sorry for the Jews, who had to identify themselves, every male with “Israel” inserted into his name, every female with “Sarah,” on every official occasion; sorrier, later on, that they lost their jobs and their homes and had to report themselves to the police; sorrier still that they had to leave their homeland, that they had to be taken to concentration camps and enslaved and killed. But—weren’t you glad you weren’t a Jew? You were sorry, and more terrified, when it happened, as it did, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands, of non-Jews. But—weren’t you glad that it hadn’t happened to you, a non-Jew? It might not have been the loftiest type of gladness, but you hugged it to yourself and watched your step, more cautiously than ever.
Those who came back from Buchenwald in the early years had promised—as every inmate of every German prison had always had to promise upon his release—not to discuss his prison experience. You should have broken your promise. You should have told your countrymen about it; you might, though the chances were all against you, have saved your country had you done so. But you didn’t. You told your wife, or your father, and swore them to secrecy. And so, although millions guessed, only thousands knew. Did you want to go back to Buchenwald, and to worse treatment this time? Weren’t you sorry for those who were left there? And weren’t you glad you were out?
“So war die Sache. That’s the way it was.” Where the community feels and thinks—or at least talks and acts—pretty much one way, to say or do differently means a kind of internal exile that most people find unattractive to undertake, even if it involves no legal penalty. Oh, it isn’t so bad if you have been a lifelong dissenter or radical, or a known criminal; you’re used to it. But you—you and I—you’re used to saying “Hello” to everyone and having everyone say “Hello” to you. You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community’s. But are the community’s attitudes respectable? That’s not the point.
We—you and I—want the community’s approval on the community’s basis. We don’t want the approval of criminals, but the community decides what is criminal and what isn’t. This is the trap. You and I—and my ten Nazi friends—are in the trap. It has nothing to do directly with fear for one’s own or his family’s safety, or his job, or his property. I may have all these, never lose them, and still be in exile. Somebody somewhere in the community (it doesn’t matter who or why) is telling somebody else that I’m a liar or a cheater—or a Red. Tomorrow somebody whose closer acquaintance I should never have cultivated—I have never liked him, never really respected him—will pass me without saying “Hello” to me. I am being exiled at home, isolated. My safety, unless I am accustomed to being a dissenter, or a recluse, or a snob, is in numbers; this man, who will pass me tomorrow and who, though he always said “Hello” to me, would never have lifted a finger for me, will tomorrow reduce my safety by the number of one.
In what you and I call the blessings of life—including uncritical acceptance by the whole of the undifferentiated community—every one of my ten friends, excepting Tailor Schwenke, who had once had his own shop and was now a school janitor, was better off than he had ever been before; and not just they and their families, but all their friends, the “whole” community, the widows and orphans, the aged, the sick, and the poor. Germany had been what many Americans would call a welfare state ever since Bismarck, the reactionary Junker, introduced social legislation to stave off social democracy. In the collapse after the first World War, and again in the collapse at the end of the 1920’s, the Weimar Republic could not maintain its social services. Nazism not only restored but extended them; they were much more comprehensive than they had ever been before or, of course, than they have been since. Nor were they restricted to Party members; only “enemies” of the regime were excluded from them.
The war was hard, although not, until the bombing became general, anywhere near as hard as the first war, in which the German government had not anticipated the blockade and the civilian population ate acorns; this time, the conquered countries were starved and the Germans were fed. But my friends do not mean 1939–45 when they speak of “the Nazi time.” They mean 1933–39. And the best time of one’s life is, in retrospect, all the better when, as in Germany after 1945, one supposed that he would not see its like again.
The best time of their lives.
“Yes,” said Herr Klingelhöfer, the cabinetmaker, “it was the best time. After the first war, German families began to have only two children. That was bad, bad for the family, the marriage, the home, the nation. There is where Germany was dying, and that was the kind of strength we believed that Hitler was talking about. And he was talking about it. After ’33 we had more children. A man saw a future. The difference between rich and poor grew smaller, one saw it everywhere. A man had a chance. In 1935 I took over my father’s shop and got a two-thousand-dollar government loan. Ungeheuer! Unheard of!
“The good development had nothing to do with whether we had a democracy, or a dictatorship, or what. The form of government had nothing to do with it. A man had a little money, a chance, and he didn’t pay any attention to any system. Inside the system, you see the benefits. Outside it, when you are not benefited by it, you see the faults, I suppose. I suppose that’s the way it is in Russia now. That’s the way it is everywhere, always, nicht wahi? ‘Das danken wir unserm Führer. For all this we thank our Leader,’ the kids all said in school. Now they say, ‘Das danken wir den Amerikanern.’ If Communism comes, they’ll say, ‘Das danken wir dem Stalin.’ That’s the way men are. I couldn’t do that myself.”
But he did it.
Herr Klingelhòfer counted his blessings. Who doesn’t?
This might be, I suppose, pro-Nazi propaganda. It is also a fact, in so far as men’s attitudes are facts and decisive facts. No Occupation could make—or had made—anti-Nazis out of my friends. The evidence they had before their eyes for rejecting that period of their lives that was spent under National Socialism was wholly inadequate. And it was hard to see how any “recovery” under any German government in any foreseeable future (still less, under any Occupation) could make it adequate. At best, until such time as men (or at least these men) changed the root basis of their values, “things” could only some day be as “good” as they had been under Hitler. What we call freedom is not, even if they had all the freedom we have, an adequate substitute, in my friends’ view, for all that they had and have lost. Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.