My Opa who lived under Hitler's rise to power in the old country said exactly the same thing.
He understood what happened and said what I have been saying for the last couple of years - our nation was overthrown in a coup.
I call it a velvet coup, but as Opa says - "the people in the old country went along with it and refused to believe what the naysaysers at the Munich Post were warning. We really thought that it was not possible for the things they were saying to happen".
The difference between the mindset of the people in the Soviet Union and those in Nazi Germany is that populism and Nationalism made tyranny appealing and seen as a duty.
There is no law for those in power, only for those of us they want to crush.