An essay in the New York Review of Books looks at the day-to-day lives of ordinary Germans as Hitler rose to power.
In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer decided to focus on ten people, different in many respects but with one characteristic in common: they had all been members of the Nazi Party. Eventually they agreed to talk, accepting his explanation that he hoped to enable the people of his nation to have a better understanding of Germany. Mayer was truthful about that and about nearly everything else. But he did not tell them that he was a Jew.
In the late 1930s—the period that most interested Mayer—his subjects were working as a janitor, a soldier, a cabinetmaker, an office manager, a baker, a bill collector, an inspector, a high school teacher, and a police officer. One had been a high school student. All were male. None of them occupied positions of leadership or influence. All of them referred to themselves as “wir kleine Leute, we little people.” They lived in Marburg, a university town on the river Lahn, not far from Frankfurt.
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He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”
Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “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.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, tells a similar story. At the end of World War II, the personnel who staffed the death camps went home and resumed their lives. As the horrors of the camp were revealed, it caused neither they nor their families any discomfort; those Jews had to be killed, they would explain, because they were dirty and wouldn’t do as they were told.
This is all a bit much to swallow, and has the feeling of ex post facto rationalizations. But, then, many contemporary Americans know nothing about their own country’s history, know nothing about the Enlightenment ideals that gave it birth, and are oblivious to the indecencies of the Trump administration; they have no idea they are the proverbial frog in the proverbial pan of heating water. They are the ignoramuses who are exploited and used by demagogues — like Donald Trump.