They Thought They Were Free

[Russell Kanning]

I read a very good excerpt from this book by Milton Mayer in my book from "The Voluntarist".
A German engineer says that "the day the world was lost" was when he took the oath to the government in 1935. The first day he said no, but after thinking about it for a day he decided he could help others down the road better if he was still acceptable to the system and had his job.
He hid people in his apartment until 1945, but he still felt he (along with everyone else in his situation) let the world down by going along that day.
It is interesting to read what a person, who went through the whole process, would have done things differently.

I will try and find the excerpt, but The Voluntarist website is a bunch of pdf's.

Here is another part from an interview from a High German professor:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

and especially here:
"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

[Raineyrocks]

Wow, that was so true and it's been happening all around everybody for years.  For instance, look how the govt. has basically made smokers out to be bad people and have told businesses that they can't allow smoking in their own business.  It's really not that small of an issue when you look at the entire scheme of what's been happening with our liberties.

I don't understand this part of it though:

"The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."
 
Can you explain that to me?  For some reason,  I'm not grasping what he is saying in this paragraph.

[Russell Kanning]

they started doing the worst stuff, when they were at war