They Thought They Were Free

Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. They interviewed 10 Germans who talked about what it was like during the transition from normal to crazy Nazi nightmare.  How it happened and how so many people went along with it.

I could not find this on bitchute, rumble or odysee. And yes there are a lot of ominous parallels to today.

39 Replies to “They Thought They Were Free”

  1. Yes…except that they try and make a connection between the Nazis and Trump, when in actuality it should be the (Democrat) left. Nice try though.

  2. The guy who posted this on youtube thought that trump was the fascist. Kind of ironic, he posts a video that he swears aligns fully with his thought provoking statements, not understanding that he is actually helping those whom he claims to abhor.

    Don’t know if he made the video, just that he posted it. Regardless, every lefty out there swears their compassion justifies their actions whatever their actions are.

    1. “not understanding that he is actually helping those whom he claims to abhor.”

      They never consider that, do they. Not only do they enable, they create.

      1. A lot of the blame can be laid at our feet. First, we allowed a functioning primary education system – on both sides of the border – to be replaced by a leftist indoctrination system, lorded over by unaccountable unionized government bureaucrats. Secondly, we are happy to go along with calling the National Socialist Party of Germany the “Nazi Party.” It is at least 20 years past time for all conservatives to call these dangerous totalitarians what they were – and what they are trying to become here: National SOCIALISTS.

        Be proud, use the word. Call them what they are = “Socialists.” Hitler and the rest of his fun bunch weren’t exactly extolling the values of free enterprise and individual empowerment, yet Trump and the rest of us are endlessly called a Nazis. “Nazi” has become just another meaningless leftist pejorative, same as racism.

        Last time I was called a Nazi, I looked at the idiot like she was an idiot and said “you think I’m a Socialist?!” She got all flustered and asked me what I meant and I told her she just compared me to the National Socialists in Germany, where did she get the idea I was a Socialist. She of course called me other names and stomped off.

        Another problem we have on both sides of the border is that the political parties that claim to represent us aren’t exactly extolling the values of free enterprise and individual empowerment either. Good luck and Godspeed up there, too bad about Canada Day.

        1. “First, we allowed a functioning primary education system – on both sides of the border – to be replaced by a leftist indoctrination system,”

          This is one of the common conceits. Why are pedophiles attracted to the priesthood? Unsupervised access to children. It does not matter what the intentions of the Catholic church were. It does not matter how long it “functioned correctly” for. The relevant points are that it exists, and that it provides an opportunity. It may take 3 minutes for the bad actors to spot the opening. It may take 3 centuries. It is inevitable that eventually the weakness will be found and exploited.

          Now we come to “gate keeping is bad”. It once again comes down to a simple truth. You have to watch the gates, or the barbarians are going to come in. Even if you are watching the gates, a mistake will be made, and a barbarian will eventually be let in. At that point, it becomes about recognizing that a mistake was made, and correcting it.

          So “gate keeping is bad”, it now becomes clear is a tactic that your enemy wants you to adopt. They will be watching their gates, but yours will henceforth be unguarded. Nice trick you can pull, if you get your enemies to believe you their friend, and they start taking your advice.

          So feel free to apply a “purity test”. Truth, honesty; these do not mind being questioned.

  3. This eye witness report of a German about the developments from 1933 to 1945 (why 1945?) seems strange and untruthful to me. The National Socialists reached the peak of their power very rapidly not gradually, their crimes started rapidly not gradually and their intentions were clear since Hitler‘s „Mein Kampf“. You would have to have been an illiterate or an idiot not to have a pretty good picture of what they were up to: war and the violent persecution of their perceived political enemies. Passivity and herd like behavior are much stronger forces than not seeing what is happening. Almost everybody is seeing what is happening at the moment as well: the world is beeing taken over by China and Western politicians, especially North American politicians are selling out the freedom of billions for millions of dollars into their private accounts. It’s always easy to think and say that „resistance is futile“ when it might be costly.

    1. When you say rapid, you must of course mean over a period of years. There was no overnight transformation. That is why even kristallnacht was a memorable, shocking event – 5 years after the nazis were elected. 5 Years. Not shocking enough though, as the germans had been slow boiled for long enough to be numb-shocked by it.

      Dumb-asses always think that they will recognize evil when they see it, that everyone else will recognize it too, and then we’ll all act to stop it. They don’t know their history, especially today’s youth who barely know what a nazi is except that trump supporters must of course be nazis.

      Evil never announces its intentions, it never comes to power promising to eradicate speech, thought, freedoms, and eventually life. Rather, it always promises to protect them – but the key is that it rarely does this by protecting individual rights but always group rights, many groups, but always groups. It always sells itself as the most beautiful, caring, compassionate thing……but for the right groups.

    2. Agree. This is ideologically driven drivel. I also think it is concocted as the story told is implausible to anyone who has heard the stories of German Jews who survived.

  4. Bullshit. The Democrats and their minions Black Lives Matter and Atifa are exact duplicates of the German Nazi Party. They rioted all summer and stole an election. Look how easy it is for people who imagine themselves to be liberal. The Nazis had the Jews, the Democrats had Trump.

    Naziism was a minor change for Germany. Germany did not have a long history of liberal democracy. Germans love being told what to do. Angela Merkel even has a lot of goose in her step. Just like everyone else, Germans hated the Jews. Germany had long been where the European powers met to fight their wars. The emergence of Germany as a world power upset the balance and it was attacked and destroyed. WWI was the stupidest war ever fought. The Nazis were essentially more the norm in a world with maybe a dozen democracies. They just carried their message to a perverse perfection.

    1. Hitler was a corporal fantasizing about being a General. Dumas could have kept all his conquered lands. France gave up, British needed 20 years to get back.
      America didn’t want to be involved, neither did the Russians.
      He didn’t have enough sense to steal an election.
      Declared war on America & Russia without having a single 4 Engine bomber. I could continue,
      But if the dam Democrats and Socialist are that stupid. The only fear we have to be afraid of is their accidentally dropping a hydrogen bomb on Washington D.C. and blowing up all the Casinos in Atlantic City.

  5. I had a family member say that they are protected from the “germy” customers now in her work place. I am now considered “germy,” being unvaxxed. Dirty.

    1. Why do I never see c-36 mentioned.. worst most danger leg. in my lifetime.. Hardly ANY mention!

  6. “To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it…unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness…”

    Agreed, the video was intended to be a warning about Trump. It was uploaded September 2020 and Trump appears two or three times. But the video fails to heed its own very ominous warning, Biden and his cronies are a much more insidious threat to our rights and freedoms. Who’s afraid of a dottering old man.

    And in Canada, who’s afraid of a snow board instructor who likes to play Mr Dress-up.

  7. Ominous parallels was mentioned.

    A difficult read, but worth the effort. This should probably be in reader tips, my post, that is.

    Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff is the book.

  8. Was it a “craze”? Why did an entire country fall under the Nazi party’s influence? I believe it was what the people wanted and needed at that time.
    So many years of suffering under the WWI treaties signed, that had put Germany and it’s allies into an unrelenting national poverty. Almost anyone in 1940’s Germany willfully welcomed this strong leader, and one that cared deeply for his country. Hitler’s policies were abhorrent, at least where the Jews were concerned, but they promised a furture for the German people who had been without for so long.

    1. No economics, nor the Versailles treaty was responsible one bit for German post war difficulties.
      None.
      Zero.

      Germany was bankrupt.
      Germany killed off its most productive people, young men, by the millions.
      Germany warped its industries, finance and politics to war.
      Germany greatly destroyed its neighbors young men and the economies and finances from the UK to Moscow.

      Rightly, with any type of good program, Germany, and Europe would of taken 20 years to BEGIN to recover.

      Hitler came power in 15 years.
      All the WW1 internal German power centers were still incontrol, and had learned nothing.

      This was the main reason for Churchill and FDR in insist on unconditional terms, because of the cease fire, the armistice ( not victory ) in WW1, and not destroying the post war German political, industrial, military and finance leadership and institutions.

      Versailles was nothing.

      1. “Versailles was nothing.”

        Bullshit. Germans saw themselves as nothing other than victims in WWI. They did not start it yet were forced to crippling reparations for generations.

        1. And that was a self-serving lie. Germany deliberately started the war, and deliberately refused to pay for it, expecting to exact the cost from the states it defeated. By losing, it bankrupted itself. Versailles had nothing to with it. When Germany under Gustav Stresemann decided to deal honestly and realistically with the mess they were in, they did quite well, and met their obligations under Versaille without the slightest difficulty. But other forces in Germany had other ideas.

    2. Hey, a novel concept to government and voting.
      If you are a consumer or dependant of government, any personal support programs, any payments from government or agencies thereof without work or requirements to receive a payment. NO VOTE. You are leeches, do not pay bills.
      If you have not paid “any” net tax in last year, or years. NO VOTE
      Dependence creates basis for vote to continue and expand/retain dependence payments.

      How’s about folks that PAY THE BILLS, get the say. After all, without them, no money to “redistribute” and “hand out” .

      Hand up, support, raise up, improve, educate. I’m fine with.

      Hand outs without any measure, merit, requirements, or personal responsibility. NO Way, done with that socialist experiment. DONE, I AM SO Done.

      Just saying.

  9. The process of the descent is the same regardless who is called good or bad.
    I have been saying this for awhile.
    If you want to see how people, good German people descended into Nazism.
    Look around you in our society, look in the mirror.

  10. I own a book written in 1955 by Milton Mayer, “They Thought They Were Free”. (How and why ‘decent men’ became Nazis – the life stories of ten law-abiding citizens…in Germany) Disturbing! Take notice!

  11. Yet in the video it showed references to Trump rallies and Donald Trump, as though that were evil. The left never sees their own despotism.
    Great speech, terrible video.

  12. I recomend…
    Victor Klemperer Diaries. Day to day life from 1933-1945, of a 1/64th Jew who lived in the open, with the star. He and his wife missed the bus to the train station because of the Dresden bombing, living with homeless until liberation.

    Wages of Destruction.
    Tooze.

    Vampire Economy.
    Possibly online.

  13. The unvaccinated are the new Jews. I even read an article where a man waiting for a kidney transplant urges that everyone get vaccinated so he can get his transplant. The unvaxxed have caused the delays. It’s very convenient for government to have this scape goat to blame for everything wrong with your health care system. It’s the unvaxxed.

  14. The Germans thought they were going to get France. If I lived next door to France I’d want it too. France has sexy women, good food, and sublime wine. Germany has ….. Mercedes cars, zaftig blonde and fried stuff.

    1. @Thud Muffle:
      You left out a sublime food, German sausages with sauerkraut.

  15. Very interesting, and ominous indeed. And in drawing parallels to Trump the author of the video proves the point that when you are in the middle of one of these periods, it is difficult for most people to see what’s going on around them.

  16. Idiot thinks Trump and his supporters are the fascists. Anyway, the video wants you to think the transformation is like frog boiling and maybe it is but it seems to me that the Germans loved them some Hitler and Nazism and were quite enthusiastic about it.

  17. Given that in the world today, there are perhaps three communist countries, North Korea, Venezuela?, and Cuba and the rest are all variants of fascism, defined as statist-control of variously owned means of production and suppression of the individual. China is a fascist economy ruled by a Stalinist leader and communist party. There are no (free market) capitalist nations that I know of. Ignoring the subliminal clips of Trump, which are irrelevant to the subject, we are closer to the more advanced fascism than most people could imagine. Resistance to Gun control and censorship are almost all that remains of liberty and a liberal society. We all saw what has happened to so-called rights to gather and travel during the Covid Stalinism some of which persists. Name the crisis (last one Covid, next one, climate?) and we are there and legislatures and supreme courts will do nothing while executive edict is the sole source of and or limit of law. Take the concentration camps and war machine away from the Nazis and put on a happy faced façade and what country today doesn’t fit?

  18. Listening to my old MONO Buffalo Springfield lp’s today … and was struck (once again) how the lyrics of the 60’s … speaking of “fighting the man” … are relevant all over again.

    Paranoia strikes deep
    Into your life it will creep
    It starts when you’re always afraid
    Step out of line, the man come and take you away

    We better stop
    Hey, what’s that sound?
    Everybody look – what’s going down?

    It’s almost as if Stephen Stills foresaw FEAR and PARANOIA being used by THE MAN to control the public. Foresaw the Deep State Health Bureaucrats manipulating the minds of the citizens at behest of the “Reset” politicians. And if the FEARFUL public step out of line … ?

    Yet, I can predict that Stephen Stills supports the interlocking Directorates of BIG Tech/Social Media silencing all protest against “THE MAN”. Silencing and banning FREEDOM. How sad … the 1960’s voices of FREEDOM have become the passive silence of acquiescence to government CONTROL.

  19. It is available on Audible. It’s been a couple of years, but I don’t remember the actual book reading tried to connect to Trump. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that was a part of it.

    Fascism is on the rise in Canada and the US, and it’s ugly twin, Communism is too. There isn’t a lot of difference between the two when it comes to liberty.

    1. “Fascism is on the rise in Canada and the US, and it’s ugly twin, Communism is too. There isn’t a lot of difference between the two when it comes to liberty.”

      Quoted in Niall Ferguson’s ‘The War Of The World’:

      “There are two breeds of Bolshevism…..there is nothing to choose between the philosophies of Moscow and Berlin.”
      Duff Cooper, British politician, August 23, 1939.

    2. // I don’t remember the actual book reading tried to connect to Trump //
      It was first published in 1955.
      The latest print in 2017 has a critical afterward by historian Richard Evans.
      No mention of Trump.

  20. That video is crap.
    Trump wasn’t the candidate who referred to fellow citizens as deplorable.

  21. From the comments.

    marc biff: So you conflate MAGA with the rise of Nazism?

    (Video Uploader) Thought Bandit – Provoking Ideas and Wisdom: Yes. The comparison is apt. Both were white nationalist death cults led by xenophobic demagogues. The only difference is that nazism was allowed to go to its natural conclusion.

    Good Grief.

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