Article by Kaye Lee
An excerpt from They Thought They Were Free – The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer
But Then It Was Too Lat
"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after 1933,
between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap
was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You
know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that
this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in
civilian defence, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing,
to do with knowing one is governing.
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 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."
Excerpt from the Article
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