In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. “I can tell you,” my colleague went on, “of a man in Leipzig, a judge. They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. 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. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. 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. The world you live in-your nation, your people-is not the world you were born in at all. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.Īnd one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

They thought they were free quotes