Monday, January 28, 2013

“How The World Was Lost”




From:   they thought they were free”, Milton Mayer, 1955    pp. 176-180



     Another colleague of mine brought me even close to the heart of the matter – and closer to home. A chemical engineer by profession, he was a man of whom, before I knew him, I had been told, “He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European.”  One day, when we had become very friendly, I said to him, “Tell me now—how was the world lost”
                                                                                                                                                                         
     “That,” he said, “is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how. 

      “I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of ‘total conscription.’  Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity.  I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to ‘think it over.’  In those twnty-four hours I lost the world.”
     “Yes?”  I said.
     “You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another.  Wherever I went I should be asked why I left the job I had, and, when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment.  Nobody would hire a ‘Bolshevik.’ Of course I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean.”
     Yes,” I said.
     “I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country, in any case, and I could have got a job in industry or education somewhere else.
     “What I tried to think of was the people I might be of some help later on, if things got worse (as I believed they would).  I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews and ‘Aryans,’ too, who might be in trouble.  If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation.
     The next day, after ‘thinking it over,’ I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that, by the words with which the oath began, ‘Ich schwöre bei Gott, I swear by God,’ I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience.  My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath.  He said, ‘Do you take the oath?’ and I took it. That day the world was lost, and I was the one who lost it.
     “Do I understand,” I said, “that you think you should not have taken the oath?”
     “Yes.”
      “But,” I said, “you did save many lives later on.  You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be.” (My friend’s apartment was, until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, a hideout for fugitives.)
     “For the sake of the argument,” he said, “I will agree that I saved many lives later on. Yes.”
     “Which you could not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935.”
     “Yes.”
     “And you still think that you should not have taken the oath.”
     “Yes.”
     “I don’t understand,” I said.
     “Perhaps not,” he said, “but you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that, really.  Americans have never known anything like this experience – in its entirety, all the way to the end.  That is the point.”
     “You must explain, “I said.
     “Of course I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and in helping my friends was in the future, and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact.”
     “But,” I said, “the hope was realized. You were able to help your friends.”
     “Yes,” he said, “but you must concede that the hope might not have been realized – either for reasons beyond my control or because I became afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and was simply fooling myself when I took the oath in the first place.
“But that is not the important point. The problem of the lesser evil we all know about; in Germany we took Hindenburg as less evil than Hitler, and in the end we got them both. But that is not why I say Americans cannot understand.  No, the important point is – how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis, would you say?”
     “Six million Jews alone, we are told.”
     “Well,that may be an exaggeration. And it does not include non-Jews, of whom there must have been many hundreds of thousands, or even millions.  Shall we say, just to be safe, that three million innocent people were killed all together?’ 
      I nodded.
     “And how many innocent lives would you like to say I saved?’  
     “You would know better than I,” I said.
     “Well,” he said, “perhaps five or ten, one doesn’t know.  But shall we say a hundred, or a thousand, just to be safe?”
     I nodded.
     “And it would have been better to have saved all three million, instead of only a hundred, or a thousand?”
     “Of course.
    “There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million.”
     “You are joking,” I said.
     “No.”
     “Or that others would have followed your example?”
     “No.”
     “I don’t understand.”
     “You are an American,” he said again, smiling. “I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it.  Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of potential influence.  Thus the world was lost.”
     “You are serious?” I said.    
     “Completely.”       

How the world was lost -1935


From The 1955 Book by Milton Mayer "they thought they were free", p. 176

       Another colleague of mine brought me even close to the heart of the matter – and closer to home. A chemical engineer by profession, he was a man of whom, before I knew him, I had been told, “He is one of those rare birds among Germans—a European.”  One day, when we had become very friendly, I said to him, “Tell me now—how was the world lost” 
     “That,” he said, “is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how.”

open up Milton's book at Amazon, "look inside" with search term "chemical engineer" to learn how.

http://amzn.to/V03nE1

Milton Mayer: They Thought They Were Free THE GERMANS, 1933-45


They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45  


An Excerpt:

But Then It Was Too Late


"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.
 "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

Full excerpt, "But Then It Was Too Late"

 


Milton Sanford Mayer (1908-1986) was a journalist and educator. He was the author of about a dozen books. 

He studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but he did not earn a degree; in 1942 he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window." He was a reporter for the Associated Press, the Chicago Evening Post, and theChicago Evening American. He wrote a monthly column in the Progressive for over forty years. He won the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism. 

He worked for the University of Chicago in its public relations office and lectured in its Great Books Program. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Hampshire College, and the University of Louisville. He was an adviser to Robert M. Hutchins when Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. 

Mayer was a conscientious objector during World War II but after the war traveled to Germany and lived with German families. Those experiences [Primarily very extensive relationships he formed with ten individuals, centered around involvement with the burning of a synagogue on Nov. 8, 19349- which they didn't know] informed his most influential book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.

The review, from his daughter:

187 of 196 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The "M" in my name stands for "Mayer." March 31, 2008
Format:Paperback
It is wonderful to see so many thoughtful and incisive reviews of my father's book. A few details that might interest you: 1) None of the "unimportant Nazis" he interviewed knew he was a Jew, which he was. 2) The book wasn't published in German for years after its original publication (we spent 1951 in the small town which Milton Mayer calls "Kronenberg," where he wrote the book, which was published shortly afterwards). 3) His German was awful! And, he said, this was a great aid in the interviews he conducted: having to repeat, in simpler words, or more slowly, what they had to say, made the Germans he was interviewing feel relaxed, equal to, superior to the interviewer, and this made them speak more freely. "Sehen Sie, Herr Professor Mayer, SO war die Sache," very patiently. ("You see, THIS is how it was...").
He made one small, but dreadful mistake: There is a very common name in German, to which Milton Mayer added a suffix--because, with the suffix, it was the name of a great family friend (in fact, my boyfriend four years later) and used it fictitiously for one of the interviewees.. However: with the suffix, it's a very RARE German name, and, having given the general location and size of the town together with the rare German name, he really identified the interviewee as-our family friend-- who was quite upset. (He never told my father this, though.)
My father was always a superlative interviewer; he said as little as possible, aside from encouraging the interviewee to go on talking. If someone seemed to be avoiding a subject he was really interested in, he would repeat the name of the subject the interviewee had abandoned, and look terribly keen and respectful.
When my father was about 14, a wind blew in one of his ears while he was camping out, paralyzing one nerve in his face. For the rest of his life, he could only open, while speaking, one side of his mouth (and he had a very diabolical grin), and could never raise both eyebrows--always, he was raising one eyebrow! This gave him a very wise look, somewhat ironic at the same time, and made him appear even smarter than he was.
My sister and I occasionally exchange "Misms." Things he used to say from time to time, some inherited from his father, and others from God knows where. Here are a couple (try them; they are very effective in many convrersations):
"I left it in my other suit."
"Been to the city and seen the gaslights."
I don't think I have anything to add substantively to what has already been said in the excellent reviews, aside from these few personal details. Milton Mayer died in 1986, and is survived by several real and step children, real and step grandchildren, and two great grandchildren (at least), all of whom, like him, are pacifists.

The Table of contents are here:

An excerpt from

They Thought They Were Free:  The Germans, 1933-45 by  Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

""What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people"

"
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

Full excerpt here