Sunday, February 04, 2007

"They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer

Here is an exerpt from They Thought They Were Free - The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer.

"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 not 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."