"But I didn’t want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent..."

Somewhat off-topic (but not entirely), from my reading stack

I read Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free (1955) this week—a book about interwar and WWII-era Europe that I somehow missed as a teenager who burned through hundreds of such books. Though Mayer loses the thread almost completely at the end, to the point of arguing for racial essences (at least when it comes to Germans, although the comment about Germans taking siesta like communion was on point), it was fascinating...  

He follows the lives of 10 ordinary men in Marburg, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and as he explores their perspectives (what they knew and didn't know, valued and didn't value) he keeps asking: for what are men’s lives? "The laws are hateful to those who hate them, but who hates them?” "That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it—from its victims and opponents whose world was outside the Nazi community… These people saw life in Germany in non-Nazi terms... There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy." Even after the war, many of the men looked back on the 1930s as the best time of their lives: "“We could know each other in those days." 

And he explores the pressures of "mitschwimmen," or swimming along. Nazism appealed to the ambitious and also offered a refuge to the politically suspect. One of the men, a teacher, anti-Nazi by disposition, joined the party to deflect scrutiny of his socialist past, which constantly threatened to be revealed. This teacher talked about how a chill settled over educators at the gymnasium level, while their colleagues at primary schools succumbed rapidly to the new ideology: ‘Speed is an instant so short that a grade-school teacher hasn’t time to change his politics.’ He speculated that primary-school teachers, who must know a little bit of everything but don't have the opportunity to develop deep expertise in any one subject had little ground to challenge Nazi ideology. Who were they to say what was right or wrong or plausible or implausible? So real expertise in some subject area can be protective -- it can give you ground to stand on.

As for what was taught in the classroom, he observed that “everything was not regulated specifically, ever." But without a clear list of prohibitions to give an idea of where the land mines were buried, teachers became ever more cautious about what terrain they strayed into:

“Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary, the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”

Looking back, the teacher described the terrible turmoil he experienced before he joined the Nazi party: 

 “I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning... But I didn’t want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent… after the decision [to join the Nazi party] it was better, always better. I enjoyed doing those little things at school, ‘defying’ the Party, not because what I did was right (that, too, of course) but because I showed I was clever and, above all, because I ‘belonged.’ I belonged to the new ‘nobility,’ and the nobility can get away with certain things just because they are the nobility; merely getting away with them proves that they are nobility, even to themselves. So I slept.”

Mayer writes that "responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with."

A German academic colleague, haunted by his own inaction, said:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic Germans’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day that a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head… Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, ‘Principus obsta’ and ‘Finem respice’ — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see,  the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might...  And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. 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 ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people--is not the world you were born in at all. 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… 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.”