They Thought They Were Free

Alternative Titles

• A German philologist explains how dictatorship hides inside daily busyness
• The corn grows over your head: how Nazism crept past educated Germans
• Resist the beginnings, consider the end — and why almost no one could
• The Leipzig judge who acquitted an innocent Jew straight into the Gestapo

Key Takeaways

• A German philologist, interviewed after the war by Milton Mayer, argues that the defining feature of Nazi rule was a steadily widening gap between government and people, achieved not by a dramatic seizure of power but by 'gradual habituation' to being governed by surprise, by secret deliberations, and by appeals to information too complex or too security-sensitive to share. Trust in Hitler personally helped reassure those who might otherwise have noticed.
• Each step of the regime was disguised as a temporary emergency measure, an act of patriotism, or a real social reform, so the underlying drift went unseen. The philologist compares it to a farmer who never sees the corn grow until one day it stands over his head — by the time the change is visible, it is complete.
• Even the educated were rendered unable to think by sheer volume of activity: meetings, conferences, ceremonies, questionnaires, bibliographies, lists, community 'expectations.' Mayer's friend the baker put it the same way — 'one had no time to think.' The dictatorship, the philologist insists, was 'above all diverting,' and many were unconsciously grateful for the excuse not to confront fundamental questions.
• He invokes the Latin maxims Principiis obsta and Finem respice — 'resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end' — but warns they are nearly impossible to apply in practice: to resist the first small step, you must already foresee the final outcome with certainty, which ordinary (and even extraordinary) people cannot do. Everyone instead clings to the hope that 'things might' not get worse.
• He retells Niemöller's confession — first they came for the Communists, then the Socialists, the schools, the press, the Jews — and uses it to argue that men like himself, who sensed what was happening, are the greater offenders than the rank-and-file Nazis, precisely because they knew better and still did nothing.
• Inaction is sustained by a specific psychological trap: you wait for one great shocking event that will let you act alongside thousands of others, but it never arrives, because every step (B to C to D) is only marginally worse than the last. Colleagues call you an 'alarmist,' the regime intimidates you, friends drift away or submerge in work, and small dissenting circles wither — leaving even those with doubts feeling isolated and unreal.
• Realization, when it finally comes, is triggered by something small — for him, his toddler son saying 'Jewish swine' — and it collapses years of self-deception at once. The outward forms of life (houses, shops, jobs, concerts, holidays) are unchanged, which is precisely why the transformation went unnoticed: the spirit changed while the forms reassured. 'When everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.'
• By that point you are 'compromised beyond repair.' The philologist sees only three options: suicide (a few chose it), adjusting one's principles to fit the new reality (many tried, some succeeded), or living the rest of one's life in shame — which he calls the closest thing to heroism still available, and more common among Germans than the world acknowledges.
• He illustrates the trap with a Leipzig judge, neither Nazi nor anti-Nazi, who in 1943 acquitted a Jewish defendant of a non-racial charge because the man was innocent — knowing that conviction would have sent him to ordinary prison and saved him from Party 'processing,' deportation and death. The Party seized the man at the courthouse door; the judge was destroyed by the impossibility of the choice and was himself arrested after the 1944 Putsch.
• Once war began, the calculus hardened: any lack of public enthusiasm counted as 'defeatism,' Goebbels openly promised a post-victory 'orgy' to settle accounts with the insufficiently loyal, and resistance became indistinguishable from betting on Germany's defeat. War also supplied the cover under which the regime finally dared the 'final solution' it had long talked about but not attempted — meaning, contrary to Allied hopes, that war against Hitler did not help the Jews but enabled their extermination.

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