What no one seemed to notice ...
was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people ... And it became always wider ... the whole process
of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think
anyway ... Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about ... and kept us so busy with continuous changes
and 'crises' and so fascinated ... by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time
to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us ... Each step was so small, so inconsequential,
so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted', that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all
these 'little measures' ...must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field
sees the corn growing ... Each act ... is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
You don't want to act, or even talk, alone... you don't want to go out of your way to make trouble ... And it is not just
fear ... that restrains you, it is also genuine uncertainty ... And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead
to this, and you can't prove it ... But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with
you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the
jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you
made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the
people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed... You have accepted
things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father ... could never have imagined."
Milton Sanford Mayer
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945"
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