The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1941)
I DARE SAY —
How Nazi are you?
By Florence Fisher Parry
Bobby Burns was right:
We canna see oursels as ithers see us.
How would anyone dare accuse any one of us of being a Nazi at heart? Or of having a Nazi temperament? Of employing a Nazi method in our behavior toward our fellow men, in our conduct of home? But wait a minute! Is there any of the Nazi in you?
Does Prague seem far away to you? Paris? Athens? Budapest? When you pick up the paper and read of the executions of hostages and the martyred deaths of patriots, does it take you to the spot where they’re shot, where they’re hanged, where they’re guillotined? Do you say to yourself: This but for the grace of God could be happening to ME?
Or could it happen to you? Would you have the strength, the courage, to die for your country?
Oh it would be easy, perhaps, in battle. But to be trapped in a cell and wait for the hour and stand ready for the ax to gall, the rope to strangle.
That is being done every day in conquered Europe. Hitler thinks he will win that way. He holds that human beings can be cowed until their spirit is gone and nothing remains but slavish fear and submission. This is his avowed concept of human nature. It is the principle upon which Germany operates this war.
Worked at home
The technique was developed and put in practice upon Hitler’s own people long before the war began. He tried it first at home and it worked; it worked magnificently. It seemed to suit the Teutonic temperament. It was a very simple device. He simply created a system whereby force and fear were given ideal opportunity to function at their best. He created a system of graduating authorities, by which every person in Germany could lord it over someone under him, while at the same time being lorded over by someone above him. It was very simple.
You could both look up to someone and look down on someone. You might have to endure indignities from the man over you, but you could take it out on the person, even more insignificant than you, whom you had authority over, and so could shove around.
Now this system worked so beautifully upon the German people that it was instantly embodied into the whole structure of conquest. With this one difference: The conquered people would be placed and remain at the bottom of the scale. There would be no one under THEM. This made it perfect for the Nazis. In the New Order in Europe, every Nazi would hold authority and there’d be plenty of slaves for even the least of them to kick around.
Now everything would have worked out beautifully and Hitler’s plan of petty and graduating authorities would have solved the whole problem of law and order in the conquered countries, if only the people of the conquered countries had behaved themselves and reacted in the good old German way.
But they didn’t. They did at first. Under the first impact of shock and panic, most human beings behave much the same way. But afterwards, to Hitler’s astonishment and rage, they began to revolt! They formed underground rebellions. They sabotaged and formed guerilla armies. They even seemed willing to die for all this: Stand up and be shot, hanged, beheaded!
Their downfall
This miscalculation on the part of the Nazis, this seeming inability to approximate the temper of other people, is going to defeat them in the end more surely than any other factor. They just don’t seem to be able to size up other people. They just seem incapable of imagining any other behavior but their own. They honestly don’t believe that people are persons and not reconditioned robots.
Now the Nazis think – they really believe – that they can put down rebellion by murdering hostages. If that alone doesn’t demonstrate their complete inability to approximate human nature other than their own, what does? But it worked with us, they keep saying. And that’s where they’re not smart. They see the whole of humanity in the image of themselves.
We might take a lesson from it, you and I. We might take warning. We’re not like that, we say smugly; but aren’t we?
Come now, how Nazi are you? Do you like to show your authority? Do you like to bully? Are you afraid of the person “over” you? Why that’s the Nazi system! That’s their technique at home, abroad; the technique of someone lording it over someone else, all the way down the line…
It’s going to be their undoing. It’s going to win us the war.
It’s not going to work. For it flouts human nature.
Give it no place here!