Milton Mayer: Understanding Nazis

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

I've been greatly moved by a book I just read, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45, by journalist and academic Milton Mayer.

Mayer wrote that in 1935 he'd unsuccessfully requested an interview with the new Chancellor of Germany, Adolph Hitler.  But after the war he'd come to see that "...Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions.  Then I wondered if Adolf Hitler was, after all, the Nazi I wanted to see.  By the time the war was over I had identified my man: the average German."

Knowing there was no such person, Mayer set out in 1950 to live in Germany for a year, and get to know Germans who had lived through the Nazi years.  He settled in Marburg (called "Kronenburg" in the book), a university-town of 42,000 in Hesse, central West Germany (at the time).  His intention was to develop a friendship with the ordinary men he met there, and get to know them in friendly visits to their homes, and their visits to his.  Mayer wrote that he wanted "...to bring back to America the life-story of the ordinary German under National Sicialism..."

He was aware that there would be problems in befriending Germans.  First that he was an American, whose troops occupying West Germany were widely seen as "conquerors:" and second that he was Jewish, though he'd become a Quaker.  For purposes of befriending people in Marburg and encouraging them to be candid in their conversations with him, he didn't divulge his ancestry.

Mayer felt he succeeded in developing a friendship with the ten ordinary Marburgers on whom the book is based, except perhaps one.  They were deliberately a mixed group: a teacher, a tailor, a butcher, a local policeman.  Mixed too in their acceptance of Nazism.

One had been a local Nazi leader, but all the others had only joined the party in connection with their jobs.  The local leader was later convicted of involvement in the burning of the city's synagogue, and served prison-time.  But for all the others, the evil that befell their nation was largely tangential to their daily lives.

Beyond their culture's antipathy toward Jews, only one man admitted to participation in official anti-Semitism (before Jews were taken into "protective custody" and sent to a regional holding facility, after their synagogue was burned on Kristallnacht), saying he had passed a lifelong Jewish neighbor with only a nod, rather than his usual "Good evening, Herr Schmidt."  Even the policeman, ordered by his state's government to assemble local Jews for transport to their facilities, served them tea in his office as they came to agreement with him that they would be safer under state protection.

Only the teacher, although a party-member, resisted the Nazi regime in any way.  Contrary to party instructions, he quietly assigned his German Literature classes a few classic works by Jewish authors.  And of all Mayer's friends, he alone expressed regrets for his tacit acceptance of Nazism.

Mayer wrote too that he also had two assets in befriending his ordinary Germans: "I really wanted to know them.  And another, acquired in my long association with the American Friends Service Committee: I really believed that there was 'that of God' in every one of them."

I was especially impessed by Mayer's "Foreword," perceptive of how absolute political evil insinuates itself into the lives of ordinary people: and prescient in its warning about that possibility in America.

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"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends.  My newspaper training found that of something else in them, too.  They were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts.  I liked them.  I couldn't help it.  Again and again, as I sat or walked with one or another of my ten friends, I was overcome by the same sensation that had got the way of my newspaper reporting in Chicago years before.  I liked Al Capone.  I liked the way he treated his mother.  He treated her better than I treated mine.

"I found--and find--it hard to judge my Nazi friends.  But I confess that I would rather judge them than myself.  In my own case I am always aware of the provocations and handicaps that excuse, or at least explain, my own bad acts.  I am always aware of my good intentions, my good reasons for doing bad things.  I should not like to die tonight, because some of the things that I had to do today, things that look very bad for me, I had to do in order to do something very good tomorrow that would more than compensate for today's bad behavior.  But my Nazi friends did die tonight; the book of their Nazi lives is closed, without their having been able to do the good they may or may not have meant to do, the good that might have wiped out the bad they did.

"By easy extension, I would rather judge Germans than Americans.  Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany . . .It was what most Germans wanted--or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want.  They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.

"I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion.  I felt--and feel--that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man.  He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions.  He might be here, under certain conditions.  He might, under certain conditions, be I.

"If I--and my countrymen--ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.  For there is no harm that anyone else can do to a man that he cannot do to himself, no good that he cannot do if he will.  And what was said long ago is true: Nations are made not of oak and rock but of men, and, as the men are, so will the nation be."
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I also give here a quote from Mayer's Wikipedia profile.  As a "public intellectual" of his time, he was involved in various controversies.  This summary of one seems to well summarize his lifelong championing of social change:

"Before a group at a War Resisters League dinner in 1944, he denied being a pacifist, even while admitting that he was a conscientious objector to the present conflict. He opted for a moral revolution, one that was anti-capitalistic because it would be anti-materialist. About this time, he began promoting that moral revolution with his regular monthly column in the Progressive, for which he wrote the rest of his life. His essays often provoked controversy for their insistence that human beings should assume personal responsibility for the world they were creating."

                                            --  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Mayer