Atrocity arrives gradually enough that witnesses can rationalize each step

Larson's central observation is that the transition from a flawed democracy to a genocidal police state did not happen as a single visible break but as a sequence of small escalations, each of which could be explained away as an aberration, a temporary excess, or the growing pains of a young government. Ambassador Dodd repeatedly witnessed beatings, arbitrary arrests, and legal harassment of Jewish citizens, yet consistently interpreted these as isolated incidents rather than symptoms of a coordinated program. This wasn't stupidity; it reflected a natural cognitive tendency to anchor judgments to a prior baseline of normalcy and to require overwhelming, undeniable evidence before updating a deeply held worldview. Diplomats, journalists, and ordinary Berliners all experienced this drift, adjusting their sense of the acceptable a little at a time until horrors that would have seemed unthinkable a year earlier were treated as background noise. Takeaway: the danger of authoritarian consolidation lies less in a single dramatic event than in the numbing accumulation of small ones.