Reading the comments on my Ukip columns, I finally understand the Nazis

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Lord Pearson and Damian Green discuss Ukip and the Tories” startat=81]

Listen

[/audioplayer]Like many, I’ve always been a bit baffled by the story of the rise of Nazism. The Germans I’ve met have appeared to be human beings like any other: in no signal way a different breed from my own countrymen.

Yet these are the great-grandchildren, grandchildren and children of a generation that was taken in by Adolf Hitler; or, worse, carried him forward; who supported (many of them) the Nazis; who knew or guessed what was happening to Jews, homosexuals and other minorities; who must either have turned a blind eye or positively encouraged what was happening.

How could they have? I’ve tried to insert myself into that era, imagine how it must have felt, picture a society in economic turmoil and gripped by personal insecurity, and think myself into a 1930s German frame of mind. I’ve rehearsed all the allowances that can be made: ignorance, despair, excitement at a leadership that seemed to offer hope and glory. I’ve even asked myself whether there could have been a scintilla of justification for believing at the time that one’s country was being debauched by international Jewry. Pushing my imagination as hard as I can, I’ve tried to feel how this madness might arise among a people such as my own.

But I’ve always failed. Clinging to the belief that the Germans cannot be very different, I’ve nevertheless been unable to suspend the here and now: to feel how it must have felt to them at the time.

Until now. In what I’m going to say there’s a very great danger of overstatement — or of being read in that way. So let me be absolutely clear at the outset.