John’s Reviews > They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 > Status Update

Finished the audio version. Btw I initially couldn’t find an affordable copy of this book, but have since found it as a reprint from 2017, from University of Chicago Press. It’s expensive for a paperback, but worth the $18 I paid.

9:52:35. C32. “We are late in discovering the essential resemblance of communism & nazism, diverted perhaps by the advanced condition of the Germans, perhaps by the confusion of Soviet communism with democratic socialism, perhaps by both.”

Ch22: Jews = Germans. So similar. Being beset in fact and fancy has produced in Jews & the German nation the compensatory assertion of superiority and messianism. Each must save the world. But neither is evangelistic. Conversion, which implies humility, and love, which implies submission, has no place in either’s mission. The remaining alternative is mastery. Mastery, of course, for the sake of the mastered.

Amazing: The Jew would have to do, if he could be distinguished from the German.”

Authoritarianism/fascism needs a devil.

8:09:33. Ch21. “I think that what worried policeman Hoffmeister &… was their own common knowledge. The achievements of Jews in every field in which Germans excelled gave rise to an essentially schizoid condition n my friends. The inferior race, the Jews, was also, like the Germans themselves, superior…”. See prior entry.

Ch21:“The inferior race, the Jews, was also, like the Germans themselves, superior. The gypsies would have made a better devil for german racism, if only the devil were not, by definition, superhuman as well as inferior. The gypsies were adequately inferior, but not in German terms superhuman. They were quite literally, such poor devils. The Jew would have to do, if he could be distinguished from the German.”

I heard about this on the Rachel Maddow show in a momentary aside. I was never able to find any kind of text version of this book, but found audio at least. This one of the best books I’ve ever read on authoritarianism. It approaches the subject not from theory, but from the experience of 12 ordinary Germans. “Little people” as the author describes them, and as they describe themselves.