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They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933–45

Enlarged

With a New Afterword by Sir Richard J. Evans
“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
 
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
 
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
 
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Read an excerpt.
An audiobook version is available.


384 pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | © 2017

History: European History

Political Science: Political Behavior and Public Opinion

Psychology: Social Psychology

Sociology: Collective Behavior, Mass Communication

Reviews

“Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. [It is} dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch.… In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.… When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt … that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not ‘by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.’”

Cass Sunstein | The New York Review of Books

"A timely reminder of how otherwise unremarkable and in many ways reasonable people can be seduced by demagogues and populists."

Richard J. Evans, author of | The Coming of the Third Reich

"Mr. Mayer's book is the fruit of a year which he passed in a German university town; it is composed of what might be called a series of meditations upon discussions which he held chiefly with ten former Nazis. Why had these men - including among them a baker, a tailor, a teacher and a policeman - become Nazis in the first place? Why had they participated in the crimes of the movement? How do they feel now after defeat and after the 're-education' of the occupying forces? Mr. Mayer's answers are sensitively worked out."

NY Herald Tribune

"[Mayer] wrote earnestly without an offensive earnest tone. He took stances without posturing. There is art in that."

The Washington Post

"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening...never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider as in Mr. Mayer's report."

The New York TImes

"Mayer is a journalist. He is also a man of convictions and a courageous man. Though he is an American, a Jew, and of German descent, he emphasizes that Nazis are--after all--human beings, that most of us have not acted very differently from most of them under comparable circumstances...Mayer's comparisons with American behavior in the matter of the deportation of Japanese citizens during the war on the one hand, in matters concerning the Jenner and McCarthy proceedings on the other, must be shamefacedly accepted."

American Sociological Review

"[Mayer] was a conscientious objector during World War II and was a leading voice in the pacifist movement."

Chicago Tribune

Table of Contents

PART 1. TEN MEN

Kronenberg
November 9, 1638 
November 9, 1938


1. Ten Men
2. The Lives Men Lead
3. Hitler and I
4. "What Would You Have Done?"
5. The Joiners
6. The Way to Stop Communism
7. "We Think with Our Blood"
8. The Anti-Semitic Swindle
9. "Everybody Knew" "Nobody Knew"
10. "We Christians Had the Duty"
11. The Crimes of the Losers
12. "That's the Way We Are"
13. But Then It Was Too Late
14. Collective Shame
15. The Furies: Heinrich Hildebrant
16. The Furies: Johann Kessler
17. The Furies: Furor Teutonicus

PART II. THE GERMANS

Heat Wave

18. There Is No Such Thing
19. The Pressure Cooker
20. "Peoria Über Alles"
21. New Boy in the Neighborhood
22. Two New Boys in the Neighborhood
23. "Like God in France"
24. But a Man Must Believe in Something
25. Push-Button Panic

PART III: THEIR CAUSE AND CURE

The Trial
November 9, 1948

26. The Broken Stones
27. The Liberators
28. The Re-Educators Re-Educated
29. The Reluctant Phoenix
30. Born Yesterday
31. Tug of Peace
32. "Are We the Same as the Russians?"
33. Marx Talks to Michel
34. The Uncalculated Risk

Acknowledgements
Afterword by Richard J. Evans

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