他们以为他们是自由的

by Milton Sanford Mayer, 米尔顿·迈耶, 王岽兴 (Translator)

米尔顿·迈耶，德裔美国犹太人，身份复杂的著名记者和专栏作家。二战时他曾是一名拒服兵役者。“正派的人”如何且为何成为纳粹，这个问题吸引他在战后旅居德国，并与当地的德国家庭共同生活长达十年之久。他由此了解纳粹统治下普通德国人的生活故事，也催生了这本极具影响的书：《他们以为他们是自由的》。

十位曾在纳粹时期生活过的小人物是其主要受访者。在他们的讲述下，纳粹主义不仅是一种政治体制或意识形态，更是十分适合一战后德国人气质和心态的世界观。纳粹征服了伟大的和平庸的德国人的心灵，也压垮了他们。迈耶精辟地写道：德国对纳粹主义的积极性很明显就是“小人物变疯了”。

本书堪称一份研究第三帝国时期德国生活的微观社会人类学报告，它最有价值的贡献是向人们展示了一幅观念的图景：纳粹体制如何在普通德国人的层面以及德国社会内部发生作用。这些极具颠覆性的内容引人深思，关乎德国人，更关乎我们每个人自身。

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, World War II, Germany, Audiobook, War

345 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Milton Sanford Mayer, a journalist and educator, was best known for his long-running column in The Progressive magazine, founded by Robert Marion LaFollette, Sr in Madison, Wisconsin.

Mayer, raised a Reform Jew, was born in Chicago, the son of Morris Samuel Mayer and Louise (Gerson). He graduated from Englewood High School, where he received a classical education with an emphasis on Latin and languages. He studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but did not earn a degree; he told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942 that he was "placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window." He was a reporter for the Associated Press (1928-29), the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago Evening American.

During his stint at the Post he married his first wife Bertha Tepper (the couple had two daughters). In 1945 they were divorced, and two years later Mayer married Jane Scully, whom he referred to as "Baby" in his magazine columns.

At various times, he taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Louisville, as well as universities abroad. He was also a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Mayer's most influential book was probably They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, a study of the lives of a group of ordinary Germans under the Third Reich, first published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press. (Mayer became a member of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers while he was researching this book in Germany in 1950; he did not reject his Jewish birth and heritage.) At various times, he taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Louisville, as well as universities abroad. He was also a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Mayer is also the author of What Can a Man Do? (Univ. of Chicago Press) and is the co-author, with Mortimer Adler, of The Revolution in Education (Univ. of Chicago Press).

Mayer died in 1986 in Carmel, California, where he and his second wife made their home. Milton had one brother, Howie Mayer, who was the Chicago journalist that broke the Leopold and Loeb case.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

They Wanted It; They Got It; And They Liked It

Milton Mayer was that rarest of writers: a journalist who knew his job was to create interesting facts; and a philosopher who knew that facts are meaningless without a theory, a coherent narrative, that connects them. His phenomenological analysis of ten Everyman Nazis was remarkable but largely unremarked when it was first published in 1954 during the Red Scare of McCarthyism. The book may be even more relevant today in understanding the Red Scare of a different sort: Trumpism.

Mayer's central conclusion is profoundly simple: "Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions." It is easy to forget that Hitler was democratically elected and that his regime was a Rechtsstaat, a constitutional state in which the exercise of governmental power is constrained by the law. But perhaps few know what Mayer discovered in his year of interviews in post-war Germany, that the 'average' German working stiff not only welcomed the rise of Hitler but looked back fondly to the rule of National Socialism as the best days of his life. Nazism was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it."

In the same way it's easy to forget that Donald Trump has been elected by a people, perhaps not by a majority but by enough of them. And despite his demonstrated racism, misogyny, narcissism, vulgarity, and incompetence, he still demands the loyalty of those who elected him and even of those who have been humiliated by him. As Mayer points out, "Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so when they must reject it, they deny it." This is precisely what the American people are doing at the moment, rejecting responsibility for a situation that they created and want still.

They Thought They Were Free is a prophetic book in an authentically biblical sense: it articulates a fundamental flaw in democratic society, namely that such societies, like every other, from time to time embrace pure evil without even becoming aware of it. Perhaps William Burroughs was right, the evil in North America was there waiting before the first European settlers, even before the first inhabitants. It has now become part of the national character. The self-absorption of the American people ensures that this evil can only fester and grow until it bursts like a boil. God help the rest of us when it does. Americans will undoubtedly find someone else to blame.

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.”

“By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action (in my ten friends’ cases, they would not have, I think); but that is another point.”

The author of this book is an American journalist who spends a year or so in post-Nazi Germany, in a small non-industrial town. He regularly meets with ten Germans whom he calls 'my ten Nazi friends.' Their conversations and the author's conclusions are at the heart of this book, first published in 1955.
Mayer’s account based on these exchanges is replete with psychological insights and relevant observations. One of them concerns our ability, or rather inability, to pay attention to important events as they take place. The author concludes that unless one possesses a high degree of political awareness and acuity, it is hardly possible to live in the process and be able to notice.
One of the central lessons of the book is that some things start taking on their true meaning when they are viewed from a distance. Those things may turn out to be crucial in one way or another.
People can be oppressed without knowing that they are oppressed. Many who happen to live under a totalitarian regime continue to live normal lives.
As Mayer points out, “it is local conditions, even under totalitarianism, which govern the application of public authority to the individual.”

The author is determined to try to look at things the way these ten Germans did during twelve years of Nazism. They continued to profess most of their views, albeit with some qualifications, after the downfall of Nazi Germany.
It does not mean that Mayer sympathizes with their point of view but he comprehends many aspects of it. The author admits that had he been in their shoes he might have felt and behaved as his ten friends did.
"I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I."
Sometimes all that is required of most people is that they do nothing, as one interviewee astutely observes. Sometimes, a courageous act involves having to say "No" to a small change announced by the regime.

Mayer distinguishes between collective shame (or responsibility) and the notion of guilt. The latter can never be collective.
"Collective shame may be possible, but it cannot be compelled. Shame is a state of being, guilt a juridical fact. A passer-by cannot be guilty of failure to try to prevent a lynching. He can only be ashamed of not having done so."

One of the problems that hampers the ability to see things adequately and to predict their consequences is that changes often happen step by step.
"If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

What most people do is think about themselves and their families, about making enough money and being treated fairly.
The book also questions the problem of empathy, or more precisely the limits of empathy that have been inherent in different societies throughout history.
What is true for those whom we consider decent people like ourselves is not true for those whom we are accustomed to regarding as outsiders.
Having empathy does not unfortunately equate to applying it to all the strata of the population.

In this light, one dialogue between the author and one of his 'Nazi' friends seems to be noteworthy.

“You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God’s care; I am not being light when I say this—that not a person ‘fell,’ fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party’s caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles.”
“Except,” I said, “‘inferior races’ and opponents of the regime.”
“Of course,” he said, “that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, ‘over the fence,’ and nobody thought about them.”

Being educated does not mean a bulwark against tyranny.

“My education did not help me,” he said, “and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men’s.”

I had a hard time with certain ponderous passages of this book but overall found it an enlightening read. However, the paragraphs where the author enlarges on such notions as “the German spirit” or “the German character” were challenging to get through. I found them nebulous and not that helpful.

All in all, They Thought They Were Free provides some valuable glimpses into how most people tend to interpret things that are happening around them.

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've seen the rise of Nazism described as a "warning from history" on many occasions.

Well this book is that warning, written in clear and concrete terms soon after the events occurred by people who experienced them directly, most of them Nazi sympathizers.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Many of the interviewees say the same thing - unless you are more politically astute than average you won't notice the gradual wearing down of your rights and expansion of government propaganda.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

I was introduced to this book through Reddit in the r/politics subreddit where, I am pleased to see, it is often quoted by people who are aware of the dangers of the current populist regimes such as are seen in Trump's America. But the question remains, whether it is too late to do anything about it.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

More quotes can be found at this link.

[Helga · Rating 5 out of 5]

What would you have done?

In this book the author interviews ten ordinary German citizens he calls ‘his friends’ to understand their reasons for joining the Nazi party and the change in their attitudes toward their Jewish friends and neighbors.
Out of many books I have read on the subject of the Third Reich and post WWII Germans, this book is the best. It is thorough, meticulously researched and at the same time engaging.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across this book by accident. It was on GR Friend's to-read list and the title and theme somehow got me interested. No regrets here! The book, published ten years after WW2, is truly surprising for a reader in the 21st century. I've read several books with witnesses' accounts but this one is exceptional. Through lives of ten 'little men' we learn how ordinary people, living in a small town, are drawn into the totalitarian system and how they reflect upon nazism some years after the war. The reasoning behind their actions is what keeps me reading and thinking about the book while not reading it. For me, it is a measure of a good book. I guess this book is food for thought if you consider all the shifts taking place in the contemporary world.

[Jan Rice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blast from the Past
The problem with old books is that, unless they were written by geniuses, and sometimes even if they were, old books are a mixture of genuine insights and misconceptions geared to their times. This book is no exception. It's a favorite book of a friend who was urging that it be read by our small Jewish book-study group. What persuaded me to concur was that we'd just read Extracted: Unmasking Rampant Antisemitism in America's Higher Education, by a local dentist (retired) writing about the shenanigans at Emory University in an earlier era. For that author, the culprits were specific reprehensible individuals. My impression was that Mayer would be taking the opposite view, emphasizing the society as a whole rather than particular individuals. Although to some degree that's a chicken versus the egg question, Mayer's viewpoint was as I expected.

The book was published in 1955. Apparently somebody thought this would be a good book to re-release in the time of Trump. I got the 2017 edition and eventually benefited from the afterword by the British historian Richard J. Evans.

The author's methodology was to interview ten German men, "little men," all in one small town. He befriended them and became part of their community. It's intriguing to me that Mayer's venture was supported in part by principals of the famous Frankfurt Group, including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

But the ten-men approach to the book didn't help me much with organizing and understanding what I was reading, since I had a hard time keeping them straight. Instead, I was getting something out of each chapter despite some problems and confusions.

Mayer knew it's easier to judge others than oneself.

He saw that antisemitic beliefs were commonly accepted.

If a policy or position was too costly, the Nazis couldn't pursue it. A group had to be stigmatized as outside the social bond, as enemies; otherwise, common decency made their ill-treatment too costly. After the war, most of his respondents still leaned toward the belief that the Jews deserved what they got.

Most of his respondents did not know until 1945 that Nazism was evil, nor did they know it in the '50s. Nazism was still okay with them, except for its excesses. For many, the Nazi era was the best time of their lives, the time that they felt most alive and less separated by class standing. They were lifted by being part of a movement. Mayer tells this story to illustrate the breadth and power of the mood: early on, a Jewish girl at the cinema while watching a Nazi parade march across the screen is telling her mother : "Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi."

People can carry only so much responsibility. Responsibility shirked is responsibility denied. And the individual will be or become blind to his responsibility.

Silence about what was happening and division between people allows the process to go forward.

No one knew what was happening. They didn't voice it to each other. They didn't even tell themselves what was happening. Later, ignorance became an excuse.

Everyone was swept or sucked into the system. Once in, resistance made things worse, not better.

The change was gradual. Individuals couldn't see what was happening. Few outside the system protested what was happening. Few outside Germany protested.

Antisemitism was the distinguishing mark of Nazism that separated it from other versions of totalitarianism. Jews were scapegoats for the Great War, the difficulties of democracy, joblessness and inflation.

In reaction to Jewish conversion and intermarriage, antisemitism adopted a racist strategy, that is, the rationale changed but the hate remained the same.

When asked how Christians could have become genocidal, the respondents said it was their duty to destroy the enemies of Christianity. Contradictory rationales co-existed, for example, the Jews are filthy, and the Jews are obsessed with cleanliness. The beliefs were impervious to education.

I am not persuaded that the Germans got what they wanted or that Nazism took them over "with a whoop and a holler." That latter expression shows the cutesiness that shows up in Mayer's writing, possibly a style typical of the times.

Overall he puts forth hypothetical explanations as if they are certainties, for example, social restrictions and conclusions as paving the way to genocide. Hardest to swallow are contentions about the national characteristics of Germans, which to today's ears sound like profiling. Per Evans, some of Mayer's views reflect wartime propaganda.

He also jumps to conclusions regarding the presumed causes of those presumed national characteristics. Americans as more tolerant of accepting responsibility than Germans. Americans as able to talk to each other, unlike Germans. Americans as accepting of the messiness of democracy, unlike Germans. All you have to do to spot a fallacy or two is look at Americans today.

Mayer is very judgmental. He doesn't credit the power of institutions or the importance of context. Even with Jews: after emancipation, according to Mayer, they were committing cultural suicide by apostasy and intermarriage yet without lessening antisemitism.

He sees individuals but not the seas in which they are swimming. I am not saying people are exculpated by their contexts, yet people are social animals and not understandable out of context. Despite his pronouncements, Mayer eventually does describe the tortures of conscience that some of his German characters experienced.

It's both interesting and disconcerting to read his judgments on both the Allies and Germans circa 1955 in light of how Germany turned out: much better than expected!

Secondary sources can be preferable to reading old books; it's good to have a teacher. But reading old books can sharpen the mind and encourage comparison and contrast.

I wonder what someone 50 or 75 years from now would think about what gets written today.

[Daniel Villines · Rating 4 out of 5]

In contemporary times, this book has surfaced more than once in conversations. It's been touted as a means to obtain insight into the segment of society that is apparently blind to the chronic contempt for the legal, ethical, and moral principles that is being perpetrated by our current president here in the United States.

While reading They Thought They Were Free I indeed found threads of commonality between the Germans of Nazism and the Americans of Trumpism. There existed then, as exists now, various psychological behaviors common to both -isms: the need to be accepted by peers, the apparent collapse of class in favor of a common cause, and the creation of a hero-figure that embodies ideas of self-perfection. These behaviors all played a part in the spread of Nazism throughout Germany of the 1930s and they translate well to Trumpism of the present day.

However, this book also does a good job in bringing to light a powerful difference. Mostly all nations of the 1930s, Germany included, lived in a world where foreign interaction, information, and social relationships were relatively static. Access to education in Germany was severely limited. And Germans lived in a relatively closed society that was isolated by language as well as by a technological inability to widely distribute and receive information.

Americans of today, and people all over the world, live in conditions that are just the opposite of those of Germany in the 1930s. They have direct access to science. They can evaluate credentials, judge integrity, and compare sources. Americans have no excuse but to know things and to be responsible for the things they know.

Today, the tools to evaluate the detriments to society that were caused by Nazism are easily obtainable. While in the past almost all Germans may have served as useful idiots to the Nazi regime, the present American contemporaries of Trumpism are eagerly practicing willful ignorance, which could be considered the final perversion of the legal, ethical, and moral principles of society.

The above comparisons and contrasts are mostly included in the first part of a three-part book. Beyond the transition of Germans to Nazism, the second part of the book explores the geographical position of Germany within the European continent and provides reasons for Germany’s aggressive behavior over the centuries. While not as pronounced as the parallels presented in the first part of the book, parallels can be drawn between a 1930s Germany that was surrounded by multiple militant nations and the American "heartland" surrounded by the populous east and west (left) coasts. If Germany became tribalized and militant as a result of these pressures, then conservatives in the heartland may find similar reasons to pursue similar paths.

The third part of the book is predominantly relevant from a historical perspective. It covers post-war Germany and the pressures applied by the victors of WWII on the losers; especially under conditions where communism was a constant danger during the Cold War. Given that the Cold War has come to an end, relevance with today’s political climate is limited.

Lastly, there is a school of thought that frowns upon comparisons of Nazi Germany with anything current. The thought is that the Nazis were such a aberration in history that any comparison is a violation of the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to absurdity") or commonly identified as an "appeal to the extreme." While this may be valid when considering generalities such as Trumpism will lead to Nazism, specific comparisons should indeed hold valid.

Nazism was an absolute dictatorial and authoritarian system of government. Thus, the quantity of accurate comparisons that exist between Nazism and Trumpism should serve as an indication of society’s relative distance from the absolute. After all, we Americans still think we are free.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortly after the war Milton Mayer, an American Jew of German heritage, and his wife, Jane, moved into a mid-sized German city. Concealing his religious background, Mayer passed as an authentic, returning German and was thereby afforded an easy intimacy with the inhabitants. What he was aiming for was some insight into how Hitler came to power and how Germans of all walks of life thought of his regime. He apparently got it.

I've approached the German experience from 1933 to 1945 with similar questions and believe that They Thought They Were Free has given me more plausible insight into their thinking than any other book I've ever read.

First and foremost, the majority appear, circa 1950, to have felt that the reign of the National Socialist Workers' Party was, except for the war, generally good. While the rest of the capitalist West was in depression, German living standards improved and jobs became available. Capital improvements were evident and national pride had been restored. Beyond this, however, was something more subtle. The Nazis were, from their perspective, democratizing. Were once class distinctions had divided the population, now people had more equal opportunites and felt more generally connected to one another. Indeed, Mayer cites one person, a man of an aristocratic background, who himself felt relieved of alienating formalities by the leveling effect of National Socialist leadership.

Mayer himself converted to Quakerism during his lengthy stay in Germany researching this book and went on to become prominent in world pacifist circles.

[Robert Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

You should read this book if you think that you are free.

This is an old book, originally published in 1955, but it is more relevant today than ever before. Today the U.S. government openly arrests people without probable cause, detains them indefinitely without trial, tortures them, assassinates citizens and non-citizens alike with "predator" drones, and spies on everyone, all in the name of "freedom." What is the reaction of the American people? Most of the mainstream media fails in reporting the flagrant abuses and largely ignores the important issues (if you don't believe me, ask yourself why we know more about where Edward Snowden is and what will happen to him rather than the large scale, indiscriminate, and grossly unconstitutional spying that he reported).

And what about the ordinary person? He rushes to throw out the little actual news that is reported as he frantically searches for the sports section of the newspaper.

In this book, Milton Mayer tells a chilling tale about a creeping totalitarianism that most did not notice until it was too late. People were too distracted to even notice an "ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people."

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security....

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

You should read this book if you think that you are free.

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seven years after the collapse of Hitler's regime, Milton Sanford Mayer, an American Jewish journalist of German heritage, traveled to Germany in an effort to understand how and why Nazism had developed in Germany. He spends a year in a small Hessian town (whose identity he disguises by calling it Kronenberg). Here he works to develop contacts with "kleine Leute", i.e. ordinary Germans who enthusiastically or reluctantly embraced the Nazi cause. He wanted to understand why they had done so. And through repeated interviews with 10 ordinary Germans, he concludes that he did develop "a little better" understanding of why they chose Nazism. But he also walked away afraid for his country, the United States: " I came back a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt and feel -- that it was not German man that I met, but man" (19). In short, he recognized that Nazism was not the product of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg); under the right conditions, it could happen anywhere, including the United States:

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...(196)."

Given the book was first published in 1955, it is of course dated in some respects. However, this warning to future generations of Americans that their nation is not immune to authoritarianism is timely in the current political climate of nationalist populism:

"The [Peorian] individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, it's first function the preservation of all its members. Every normal personality of the day becomes an 'authoritarian personality.' A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 percent or so of the population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously" (296).

Kronenberg, Germany in the future could be Peoria, Illinois. As Mayer's friend pointed out the challenge faced by average Germans at that time, and by peoples across the world today, as governments are taken over by authoritarian, corporatist, or populist/nationalist regimes is how do you recognize and resist. As one former Nazi that Mayer interviewed noted:

"I do not see, even now [how we could have stopped it]. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?"

Let us hope that we realize before it is too late the liberties and rights that are being pushed so roughly to the side in multiple nations, including the United States.

[boxer_dogs_dance · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a lengthy essay that contains interviews with ten former Nazi supporters.

The interviews were fascinating. The overarching essay structure of the book was of its time and not as compelling to me.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it a little difficult to rate this book. The first part, relating personal interviews with former Nazi party members was fascinating (and a little troubling when looking at some of the events in terms of modern developments.) The second half of the book, though, read like an attempt at psychoanalysis of an entire country's population that just didn't work for me (although he did admit there might be "a few exceptions" to some of the generalizations.) The final section made a lot of predictions about Germany's political future which, in today's context, were interesting. It seemed like Mayer was almost saying that Germany would never be able to take care of itself and would always require supervision by another nation. Again, a lot of very broad generalizations that may have made some sense in the context of the Cold War. It would be very interesting to hear his thoughts now.

[Don Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

They Thought They Were Free-the germans 1933-45
Milton Mayer – author. Published by the University of Chicago Press


First published in 1955 the book has the advantage of being a collection of recollections about the conditions of life in the small town of Kronnenberg. The citizens of Kronneberg were of the most conservative of ordinary people. In fact they were not even Germans, according to ‘real’ Germans. Kronnenberg was in Hesse. Its people were sometimes referred to as blinder Hesse – Blind Hessian – when needing to call some one backward or stupid.

Milton Meyer interviewed ten members of this community, as he said in his forward “It was the newspaperman’s fascination that prevailed. . . and left me dissatisfied with every analysis of Nazism. I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him.. . . In 1935 I spent a month in Berlin trying to obtain a series of meetings with Adolf Hitler…..but without success. . . Then I travelled in Nazi Germany for an American magazine…..for the first time (I) realized that Nazism was a mass movement and not a tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions…By the time the war was over I had identified my man: the average German.” He goes on to explain that “I never found the average German, because there is no average German. But I found ten Germans sufficiently different from one another in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis.”

Mayer begins his book with a short historical over view of Kronneberg. The date is November 9, 1638 and all is well in Kronnenberg. The town watchman is calling out the hour and walking the streets of the town. The picture is of a very old and very proud people and town. Times have been hard. “Pestilence and famine recur in Kronnenberg – as where don’t they? – and where there are Jews, what is one to expect?” As this scene unfolds the reader becomes aware that the German people have long had a dislike and distrust for the Jew. As far back as one can remember – problems follow the Gypsy and the Jew. Next the history lesson brings us to November 9, 1938. The scene is pretty much the same. But this night November 9, is “the greatest of all Nation Socialist Party celebrations. January 30 (the day the Führer came to power) and April 20 (the Fuehrer’s birthday are national celebrations. November 9 is the Party’s own.”

One of the themes that sounds so familiar to my American ears is that this is a quiet country town. Small in size and population. Described as “. . .old and changeless, off the main line and the Autobahn, is conservative even for Hesse. But its very conservatism is a better guaranty of the Party’s stability than the radicalism of the cities, where yesterday’s howling Communists are today’s howling Nazis and nobody knows just how they will howl tomorrow. A quiet town is best.” Kronnenberg had a Catholic Church, a Protestant Church and a Jewish Synagogue. It was the Synagogue that would signal the change that was settling over the Nation. November 9, 1938 – it was burned to the ground by a group of local members of the Party at the Command of the head of the SA Kronnenberg.

Having lived in both large metropolitan cities, Tulsa, my birthplace in 1942 and Oklahoma City where my undergraduate B.A. degree was earned and in such towns as Enid – where I earned my graduate degree M.Div. and Ada, Okemah and Covington and presently in a place that has the desire to be metropolitan but has yet to achieve that status, I can attest to the ‘stability’ of the small community. Oft times comfortable in the seclusion from the ‘hustle and bustle’ and ‘business’ of places with more people and diverse views. It’s just a better, less confusing, existence when one does have to be bothered with the ideas of a ‘big city.’

Kronnenberg was such a small town.

Attempting to review this book thoroughly would take more time and space than I have inclination to invest. So, I am going to pick and chose my high points – with the hope that you, the reader, will have your interest aroused.

Before diving into my review I want to state my only criticism of this work. Mayer, it seems to me, presumes to describe a vastly diverse population using his interviews of ten very specific ‘ordinary germans’ supported by other research that serves as a frame work for his book. Seems to be a bit like coming to rural Oklahoma and selecting ten diverse individuals of conservative mindset and trying to understand why the State is run by Republicans. I realize there is or ought to be a discernable difference between rural conservatives in Oklahoma and rural conservatives in Germany – but then, again, maybe not.

To the points of interest – and since I am driving – they are my points of interest.
Germany was and is a country on the defensive. Mayer traces this characteristic back to the date 9 A.D. and 1555 in the twice plundering of Rome. “In year 9 the Germans expelled the founders of secular Europe; in 1555 they cut themselves loose from the Weltanschauung which the age of the Mediterranean fused in Italy from the Greco-Hebraic break with Syria and Egypt.” Mayer in his research points to the history of German Nationhood going back to 1871 when a sort of forced unity was enacted by Prussia over dozens of sovereign German States. It was here that the diverse nature of the population originated. Not even the language was unified, but a Mischmasch as it was called by Leibniz.

This diverse character contributed to a separateness that eventually led to a Nationalism that was the door through which the NSDAP was able to enter. As Mayer, at one point, writes, “Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.”

Geographically Germany had, sense anyone had memory, been on the defensive. National security required a strong defense. Theirs soon became an offense for defense.
Nazism did not show up in the life of the ordinary German as a theory. It first engaged the ordinary German as ‘practice.’ It – “Nazism, as it moved from practice to theory has to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own – that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line.” It is an unfortunate fact of history that Adolf Hitler was correct when he observed that Germany was encircled and, of necessity had to defend herself. That defense was to go on the offense.

The practice was to infiltrate every fiber of the ordinary germans life with the power and control of the State. That did not always manifest itself in brute force – but oft times in much more subtle ways. Joining the Party often meant having a job. Joining the party could mean gaining new status, though that sometimes had a negative outcome. It wasn’t the big man Hitler that spread the Party line through out Germany. It was the countless numbers of ‘little Hitler’s’ that were the source of Nazism success. It was only for the ordinary german to go about their daily lives and not get in the way. I was sort of reminded of the admonitions heard in the US of A when catastrophe strikes – natural or man made – “Go about your Business” “Don’t worry” “Go shopping, Go out to Eat” “Do what you always do to occupy yourself.” In Germany, in these days it was not for the ordinary german to be concerned about anything – the State would take care of them.

Mayer discusses, at length the topic of how the Jewish people were part of the German experience off and on through the history of the Nation. Anti-Semitism was nothing new for the ordinary german. As in most developing Fascist or Totalitarian States there must be a scapegoat on which all the blame for all that is wrong, can be placed. Germany had more than just the Jew. There were the troublesome Gypsy Bands – that were reviled and hated. There were the Russians, whom many ordinary germans blamed for the Jewish problem. . . . “they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only Communism but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course. The Jews, the Gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations.”

Needing a scapegoat, upon which to load all of the problems, one had only to look next door or across a convenient border and the Big Men in the Nazi Party did just that.
Mayer wrote, at the end of one of his chapters: “I asked my friend Simon, the “democratic” bill-collector, what he liked best about Hitler. “Ah,” he said at once, “his ‘So –oder so,’ his ‘Whatever I have to do to have my way, I will have my way.’ “

This in no way adequately covers a review of this book, but it is my hope that some interest has been created. Milton Mayer has written a book that tells a story. It is a story that is as timely today as it was when he first wrote it.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book ten creepy Nazis got to justify and defend their atrocious beliefs and behavior and not even one thought they did wrong. We are so doomed as Americans.

We get the government we deserve. MAGA is never wrong they can always blame someone for when they get it wrong. I laugh when people say ‘Americans are better than the Nazis and there is nothing to worry about.’ Southerners justified slavery; Germans justified race purity. The privileged justify their superiority at the expense of the non-privileged. The Bible endorses slavery, genocide and misogynism, white evangelicals support Trump at 82% level for a reason.

The ten Nazis know the Jew can’t be trusted and it wasn’t 6 million murdered it was only 1 million according to them and far more Germans died, they didn’t lose the war since they were betrayed, Hitler was right except there weren’t enough true believers, the Russians were worse meaning the Germans weren’t guilty.

MAGA believes what they are told and for them vaccines don’t work, Trump won in 2020, tariffs aren’t taxes, windmills are useless, Hitler made some good points, and transgender people can’t possibly exist. Ideology trumps science, and atrocities are justified if it makes them feel good. Feelings matter when it justifies hate. The ten Nazis would fit right in to Trumpism.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, sad, and troubling. The author, a Jewish American, lived in Germany after World War II, in the 1950s, as a professor at a small provincial college. This book is an account of his many conversations with ten different German men about their experiences and memories of the pre-war, war, and immediate post-war periods, and their attitudes about the Nazis and their actions. They knew he was American, but not that he was Jewish.
Unsurprisingly, they almost uniformly minimized the scale and nature of the Nazi regime's crimes, and most claimed to have known little or nothing about what was going on (although things they said at other times about the arrests and disappearances of local members of the Jewish community contradict that.) In some cases, their stories changed almost every time he talked with them. Most felt no guilt or qualms about having supported the Nazis or been active in the party's actions, even against neighbors.
They were also deeply cynical about the Cold War, its impact on the then-two Germanies, and the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. They seemed to see little or no difference among the western democracies, the Warsaw Pact, and the fascist powers before and during the war.
They talked a great deal about the supposedly unique German character and its superiority to other nationalities. The author speculated about a national character and how it might have made Germans especially susceptible to falling under Hitler's spell. However, looking at history, that argument is weak - one of the important lessons, I believe, is that no society is immune to this kind of perversion and free of the need for reflection and self-questioning.
One thing that surprised me was that even a decade or so after the war ended, many of the Germans insisted that Hitler had been a good man and a great statesman. When asked about the atrocities of the Third Reich, they insisted that these had been perpetrated by Hitler's senior officials but that he himself had known nothing about them. Given Hitler's penchant for micromanagement, this idea is absurd, but they clung to it.
Unsurprisingly, the author's anger and disgust are quite clear at many points in the book. I was, as a result, puzzled and intrigued by his also taking pains to emphasize that he considered these Germans personal friends before, during, and after all the conversations he relates.
Finally, the most depressing aspect might be that for the most part they didn't even seem to have learned anything - I got the impression that if they found themselves in a similar situation again, the whole thing might unfold again in a similar way. A bleak commentary on human nature.

[Susanna Sturgis · Rating 5 out of 5]

They Thought They Were Free was first published in 1955. In 1966 it was reprinted with a new foreword by the author. I read it for the first time as a college undergrad and activist in the early 1970s. It exerted a lasting influence on my emerging view of the world. Perhaps its most important lesson was this: People who are content with, or at least resigned to, the status quo have no need of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or the right to not incriminate oneself. More, many USians are suspicious of anyone who invokes these rights: who but a guilty person or a traitor would need them?

Having recently seen Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film Hannah Arendt and read (or reread) Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, I decided it was time to go back to Milton Mayer's book, to see what it had to say about the times we're living in. The answer, I think, is "a lot."

Mayer, Jewish and of German descent, had visited Germany as a boy. Traveling in Germany as a journalist in 1935, he writes in the foreword to the first printing, he "for the first time realized that Nazism was a mass movement and not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions." This is what he sought to understand when, seven years after the war ended, he went to live in West Germany with his family. They Thought They Were Free is built on his interviews and conversations with "ten Germans sufficiently different from one another in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, some millions or tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis."

The book opens with the burning of the town's synagogue on what came to be known as Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, an arson in which at least one of Mayer's informants played a part. Another, a member of the volunteer fire department, was on the scene and immediately recognized that the fire was not accidental. The news reaches the others in various ways, including the policeman, who the next day is ordered to carry out an order requiring that all male Jews between the ages of 18 and 65 be taken into protective custody.

Yet these events remain on the periphery of the lives of these "ordinary" men. Through their lives and reflections Mayer explores the perhaps startling paradox: With the exception of the high school teacher, "the other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it."

"Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds." So Mayer muses, and so the reader nervously begins to think of the things she doesn't notice because she doesn't encounter them in her daily rounds. With Nazism had come employment and stability, both in short supply in the post–Great War years.

"That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it – from its victims and opponents . . . There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy." Mayer notes, without forcing the comparison, that something similar might be said of the U.S. during the McCarthy era, during which he was writing.

The Germans who "thought they were free" took their cues about right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable behavior, from the community around them. If no one else is making a fuss, is there anything to make a fuss about? In any case, "they had their own troubles" and weren't looking for more. "A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity." Thus few USians protested the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, and even the Supreme Court said it was OK.

"National Socialism," Mayer writes, "was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government – against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving." Representative government was new in Germany when the Nazis came to power. It is much older in the U.S. and presumably has correspondingly deeper roots, yet I suspect similar currents are at work here today, a weariness of the hurly-burly, a desire to throw all the rascals out and start afresh – if only someone would tell us how to do it.

History has continued to unroll, or perhaps unravel, since They Thought They Were Free was published in 1955, and since Mayer wrote his new foreword in 1966. (Mayer died in 1986.) Both the Cold War and the rearmament of Germany are old news, and the German national character, if there is one, has continued to evolve, with several more decades of representative government under its now-reunified belt. But this book remains thoughtful and thought-provoking, not least for observations like this one:

"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consequence, not the cause, of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists.
"Freedom is nothing but the habit of choice. . . ."

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a rather strange situation to be reading a piece of journalism published in 1955, and where said piece of journalism is designed to never have been read beyond the 1960s. After finishing this book, I finally understand the notion of when libraries "update" their non-fiction catalogue. Because this book certainly needed one.

I honestly thought this book would be a lot more disturbing as it would delve into the psyche of those who *knew* about the Holocaust, and other related atrocities, and either sat by - or cheered it on - as it happened. (I mean look at any political Twitter post and you have hundreds of morons praying for a second Holocaust while denying the first one) Instead, this book centers around ten men from a small German town whose worse offence is burning down a Synagogue. The general gist is that the quality of life for the average German was quite good compared to both before, and after, the Nazi Regime. I don't know to the extent that was true as 1) this book was written in 1955 and 2) pretty much everything came face value from interviews with these ten men.

Outside of exploring the lives of these ten men and their feelings surrounding it, the last two sections tack on Mayer's own analysis of the 'German character' built from centuries of social development. He takes on a very deterministic attitude to the German people, stating how the Nazis could *only* have happened in Germany (and perhaps also Russia). But if you, like me, have the ability to look out the window, that is very much not true.

Many pseudo-academic journalists love to take a very narrow view of European countries by reducing them to a single clause, which is then compared to the very heterogeneous America as a baseline from which all other countries are read from. Here the example are numerous, with Americans being assumed to be the only readers of this book. While yes, America is very much criticized in terms of German Occupation and Anti-Communism, it is almost baffling that there was zero mention of the pro-Nazi 'America First' movement, leading up to America declaring war on Germany. To think that Nazism was bound to happen in Germany (and apparently going to again?), but not in America is mind-boggling.

There is information in here that is worth reading, but it's time to address the absolute worst thing about this book. The writing. I would downright say that the writing is bad and literally unreadable at points with poor grammar (which was maybe on purpose?). The entire book is littered with purple prose and sentences which begin and end with the same statement in an attempt to lengthen the paragraphs. It's clearly trying to put some deep analysis with emphasis on certain points which comes across as: "The cat was indeed a cat, indeed, this cat was very much cat-like in a way that non-cat were non-cat-like."
The most readable parts were the actual interviews from the mouths of the men themselves as those were sentences that ordinary people could say and comprehend.

In conclusion, this book belongs in the archives and should not be recommended to people, outside of academics trying to write up their PhD thesis.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, but it does take a bit of effort to stay engaged in what's going on. The author's style isn't very direct until later in the book.

This book really opened my eyes to how the Germans were manipulated very carefully by the National Socialist movement. It serves as a chilling reminder that this could happen to anybody, that anything less than standing on principle regardless of the consequences makes a people vulnerable to usurpation and slavery.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, if not a bit frightening. Frightening because you can really see that tyranny can happening anywhere and at any time. It really puts you in the shoes of ordinary Germans. Would I really stand up to tyranny if it meant the death of my wife and children?
Also interesting is that many Germans referred to the "30 Year War" WWI and WWII were, in many Germans' minds, the same war.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes a man a Nazi?

That's the question asked by Milton Mayer in this fascinating book. He seeks to answer it through interviews with ten members of the National Socialist Party between 1933-45. Each of these men participated, in some way or another, in the greatest horror of the twentieth century. And it would be comforting to us to suppose that they must be monsters. That *only* a monster could participate in such a horror. But the truth is something far more disconcerting.

I can't help but share a somewhat lengthy excerpt from chapter 13. But please read the book yourself - at least part 1, which is focused on the interviews. The second and third part are focused on questions about the "German character" and post-war Germany and hold up to contemporary interest considerably less well, in my opinion.

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head...

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty...”

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.”

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terribly upsetting book to be reading on the eve of the 2024 election. It was really disturbing to learn that many of the adherents of the Nazi regime really had no compunctions about being members of it so long as they were the beneficiaries, and seemed unable to comprehend that fascism was indeed fascism so long as they came out on top. It really had all too many upsetting parallels to our current predicament, with all too many individuals willing to vote away their rights if they are promised that others will be punished. At times, reading this book became overwhelming and made me sick to my stomach to realize how all to easy it is for creeping fascism to force people into social control, step by creeping step.

Given that there were indeed a number of problems with Mayer’s analysis, I think it was really helpful to have Richard Evan’s afterword at the end to provide some larger context to things that Mayer may have overlooked or not accounted for immediately after the war that influenced his analysis.

[gemma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany—not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.
I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt—and feel—that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here, under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.”

A brilliant look into how nazism succeeded in Germany, through studying not government or policy but the people who lived it. This book is incredibly relevant, and it is my belief that everyone could benefit from reading it.

There exists a belief that nazism is a unique creation, only possible in Germany. This belief extends to the idea that Germans are quite singular in their capacity for brutality, and that something as horrific as the Holocaust could not possibly happen in a more "civilized" country. Part II of this piece is dedicated to discovering what it is about the German people that allowed for the creation of nazism - however, even Mayer admits that by studying Germans as a unique specimen, we reinforce the idea that they hold a certain "spirit" that is special, singular, and separate from the rest of the world. In doing so, we reinforce the foundations of nazism.

Mayer's interviews with his ten nazi friends displays not that the Germans were unique, but rather just how common they were. This is to say, how easy it is for a country to fall into fascism. It details certain elements to look out for, yes, including the usage of scapegoats to cultivate a society of hate and fear, the suppression of academics, the removal of free speech, etc. However, Mayer's ten friends tell us that above all, nazism required that they simply do nothing.

“The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio.”

In this, we are shown that the maintaining of a democracy is not something to take for granted. It requires constant vigilance, and effort. A consistent theme throughout the novel is Mayer's ten friends asking, "well, what would you have done?" This question is a difficult one. The Germans were certainly facing complicated, dangerous circumstances. In a way, we are, too. This question is not a new one, especially not in America. Mayer draws many parallels between Germany's treatment of Jews and Romani people, and America's treatment of African Americans and the Japanese. It's a question that is uncomfortable, and often ducked. But with everything going on, I think it's time to finally answer the question. In the face of a crumbling republic, the rise of hatred and fear, and the knowledge that in order to be safe and comfortable all you must do is nothing at all, what would you do? What will you do? And if you do choose to do nothing, how long will it be until keeping your head down is not enough, and you're the target?

“What I really want, since (while I want to let my friends off in my magnanimity) I do not want to have to reproach myself some time later with having let them escape the consequences of their unheroism, is for each of them to have cared enough at the time to have thrown himself under the iron chariot of the State, with its wheels rimmed with spikes. This none of my friends did, and this I cannot forgive them. They did not care enough.”

Note - this book is a product of its time. While Mayer is critical of America, the belief that it is "civilized" in contrast to Germany's "primitive" state is constant. It is also a reflection of the fact that it was written during the Cold War, and as such seems to equate socialism with nazism. Despite this, Mayer's insights are still immensely impactful and poignant, which definitely allows me to extend him a level of forgiveness.

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first became aware this book existed in 2003 or 2004 when I saw this quote on a blog:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

It struck me as such a scarily accurate paragraph about post 9/11 America that I have long remembered it and finally gotten around to reading the entire book from which it is taken.

It's a barnburner. One of the best political books I've ever read, especially the first two-thirds or so. (The last third is pretty aimless and increasingly far afield, but I'm going to ignore that). Originally published in 1955, the idea is that Mayer lives in a German town and befriends 10 ordinary people who were members of the Nazi party, gradually getting them to discuss the events leading up to the war and learning what they honestly thought and their reflections on themselves and Germany.

The book is absolutely chilling. The power of self-delusion on display is incredible, with the men interviewed being thoroughly unable to reconcile the moral atrocities of the German state with their own political beliefs and actions. They mostly, in fact, remember the Nazi era as one of the best times of their lives, when they were united with national purpose and afforded relatively privileged places in society. And if a few "excesses" were carried out, if a few people took things a little too far, well that certainly doesn't mean that nothing good came out of Hitler's Germany.

But Mayer doesn't let the reader off that easily either, posing serious questions about what exactly we expect an ordinary person to do in the midst of a societal upheaval where one person alone doesn't have much power to alter the course of history. Do we expect a person to risk their life? To risk lack of professional advancement? To risk their children being made fun of at school? What level of resistance is the yardstick by which we ought to measure someone's actions?

Earlier this year I also read Hitler's Willing Executioners, another book about the role of ordinary people in carrying out Nazi policies, and together these are an excellent pairing to help a person get a handle on what is happening at the kitchen table level of German society as Hitler and his cohort of deformed monsters developed national policies.

It goes almost without saying, but these books have a frightening resonance these days as many of my countrymen reveal a part of themselves that I wouldn't have guessed was lurking inside, and we hurtle toward a future where not much is certain except many of the worst impulses of our people are increasingly being displayed as though they were virtues.

If the earlier block quote caught my ear during the Bush years, perhaps this one most sums up the feelings of the Trump years:

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

I guess it speaks to my pessimism about where this country is heading, regardless of the outcome of the election in November, that this book speaks so strongly to me. Read it yourself and see if you agree. I hope with all my might that a few years down the line someone can read this and laugh at my alarmist nonsense, though I fear that the Mayer may sound more like a prophet and less like a loon.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile]]

DNF at 16%/b>

No thanks, not feeling it.

[Jack Waters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mayer's book was perhaps the first (or at least the most respected) postwar inquiry into how ordinary Germans swiftly allowed (and indeed became) Nazis. It focused on ten associates of Mayer in one city (Marburg, though he calls it Kronenberg), which wasn't entirely representative of Germany as a whole as it was probably tinged with more citizenry Nazism to more of an extent of other cities (an example: the city destroyed, then burned, a synagogue before the SS arrived to order its conflagration). It shows how easily one can avoid or assume moral culpability after a creeping atrocity. The city was a college town, so only the university (but not the whole university) and the hardcore Social Democrats held out until the end. I imagine the city to be similar to the Utah cities of Orem/Provo -- a college town with most progressives being University-based surrounded by an overwhelming number of conservatives who'd be more willing to open the door to Nazis.

"Hitler was a simple soldier, like millions of others, only he had a feeling for masses of people, and he could speak with passion. The people didn’t pay any attention to the Party program as such. They went to the meetings just to hear something new, anything new."

"Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line."

The small snapshot sample of "ordinary" Germans shows how frog-in-a-pot quickly so-called reasonable citizens can be seduced into outright inhumanity and genocide -- "The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come".

Written in the mid-1950s, Mayer seems to have had bleaker predictions for the future of the German people than we have seen in recent decades -- "But maybe nothing can be done for the Germans, in which case, whatever anyone else does, we should let them alone. The proposition that anybody can do anything about anybody else is absolutely indemonstrable. Doctors of the body abound, but there are no doctors of the soul, or psyche." The way Germans have owned up to their history and have made overt attempts to atone for the travesties would probably make him proud. Indeed, even in modern-day "Kronenberg" (Marburg), 24 different Stolpersteines -- bronze memorial plaques -- are placed on the sidewalk in front of the homes of the 55 (who could be named) Jews who were deported and murdered by the Nazis.

"Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

Do something. Do the right thing. Before it's too late.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book as an American in 2025 feels like watching a coal-mine canary die: You are being handed life-saving information & must act immediately to avoid disaster.

Mayer, a Jewish American journalist, traveled to Germany in the 1950s to study working-class Nazi men. As he describes in the 1966 Forward:

As an American, I was repelled by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. As an American of German descent, I was ashamed. As a Jew, I was stricken. As a newspaperman, I was fascinated. It was the newspaperman's fascination that prevailed—or at least predominated—and left me dissatisfied with every analysis of Nazism. I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what he had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me.

The ten Nazis Mayer interviewed and befriended ranged from emphatic believers (fanatika) to people with anti-Nazi beliefs who joined the party out of fear ("March violets", e.g., the high school professor). Part I involves his interviews on their experiences and motivations; Part II describes the unique aspects of the German national character that may have contributed to the national slide into fascism; and Part III describes the fallout of the war, the Nuremberg Trials, and the American Occupation. Personally, I found Part I (70% of the text) to be the most interesting and useful, particularly the interviews with Herr Hildebrandt (the high school professor), the unnamed chemical engineer, and the unnamed philologist.

Part I

The narrative starts with Mayer’s reconstruction of Kristallnacht in Hesse and how that event was experienced (or participated in) by his ten Nazi friends. Kristallnacht was a moment precipitated by a German culture acclimated to generations of pervasive antisemitism, much like anti-Black racism in the United States. Kristallnacht should have been a moment that woke up anti-Nazi Germans to the seriousness of the Nazi threat, but it wasn’t. Like Mayer describes later on in an interview with the Nazi professor:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not?--Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. […]

It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked[…] But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next[…]

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident[...] collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in--your nation, your people--is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves[...]

You have gone almost all the way yourself[…] without any effort on your part. […Y]ou live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father[...] could not have imagined.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). […] You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late.

The interviews of Part I reveal many of the oppressive tactics of authoritarianism, most of which are based on cultivating uncertainty and fear. People in uncertain circumstances self-censure and "obey in advance" to protect themselves and their loved ones at the expense of anyone else. It causes fractures in communities and sows distrust. For example, again from an interview with the Nazi professor:

"Was [that book] forbidden?"

"Not that I remember. But that is not the way it was. Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher's discretion[...] That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious."

People will rationalize anything to avoid having to confront the enormity and seriousness of what is happening.

"Many [said...] that, since National Socialist rule was here,[…] they would join it and reform it from within. But to be effective, they would first have to be accepted--"

"Oh, 'effectiveness,'" I said. "That I heard from my friend the teacher. For the sake of being effective he did everything required of him, and of course he wasn't effective. He knows that now. But then he had hopes of being able to oppose the excesses--"

"Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to 'oppose the excesses', about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day."

The Nazi regime also used a tactic that we call "flooding the zone,” which relies on the brain’s natural response to overwhelm, which is to shut down:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. […]

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. […]

It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time to think. There was so much going on.

[…] The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. […] Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about--we were decent people--and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it--please try to believe me--unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Extremist political parties use flooding the zone, also called “muzzle velocity” by Steve Bannon, to quell resistance to some of their policies. People shut down under overwhelming conditions, finding it easier to look away.

Part II

I can’t litigate the accuracy of the arguments in Part II, which deal with the unique pressures (Drücke) and national character of German citizens, because I’m not familiar enough with their history. It seems to be an unconvincing argument to me, based on similar national behaviors seen worldwide in the decades since WWII—I lean towards thinking that Germany was not unique in the pressures that warmed it to authoritarianism and imperialism. (Part III describes the earliest developments of what would become American Cold War imperial policy, but at the time the book was written, the U.S. was riding high on the sensation of being "the good guys".) The "German Spirit" Mayer describes seems a lot like American Exceptionalism to me, but ironically, that might be my American perspective talking ("I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me?").

Part III

A passage on the purpose of the destruction of war, presented without comment because the parallels are too obvious:

On May 9, 1945, Germany was a world of broken stones. On May 9, 1945, there were no more Nazis, non-Nazis, anti-Nazis. There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich--the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build.

Those stones were the houses--not the munitions plants or the switchyards, but the houses. In the city of Worms, the railroad roundhouse stood miraculously untouched; and a half-mile away stood a whole row of walls that were once apartment houses[…] And so it was everywhere in Germany, for the war was a war against houses. One raid knocked one-third of Freiburg over; Dresden was destroyed in twenty-four hours. And Hamburg! And Munich! And Rotterdam! Warsaw! Coventry! Stalingrad! How could Americans understand? They couldn't.

Americans[…] how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. "Strategic bombing" was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit railroads and power plants and factories--and houses. Right up until the total collapse of steel fabrication at the end of 1944, the Germans had four rails in the yards for every rail in use; within two to six hours after a yard was hit, it was moving again. But sleepless workers weren't moving so fast, and terrified workers were moving still slower, and workers whose homes were gone (and maybe a wife or child) weren't moving fast at all.

[…I]t isn't a man's life and his work that yields the bomb its big dividend but his accumulated reason for living and working. In the first case, he's only a dead enemy. In the second, he's a live ally. In the war that came--for the first time--to the "war men" of Germany, the parlor was the prime military installation and the pictures on the parlor wall the prime military objective. If the bomb hits the factory worker's parlor, it can let the factory go. The way to win wars is to hit the pictures on the worker's, the miner's, the soldier's parlor wall. And a bombardier who lets go from a mile or two up, or even five, can hardly miss.

Miscellaneous Topics

Chapter 10; the sovereign citizen
Chapter 10 discusses the concept of the "sovereign citizen" in the United States, but it is not at all the "sovereign citizen" of today. It’s a very funny disconnect. The critique of the German sounds completely accurate to today’s audiences:

Those two words do not go together. The idea is not a German idea. It says that the citizen is the ruler, but there are millions of citizens, so that would be anarchy. There could be no rule. A State must have a Head, not a million or fifty million or a hundred million Heads. If one of your 'sovereign citizens' does not like a law, do you allow him to break it? If not, your 'sovereign citizen' is only a myth, and you are, like us, ruled by real rulers. But your theory does not admit it.

Chapter 11: Collective Guilt

As I thought of my ten Nazi friends in the light of my talks with the philologist and the engineer, it occurred to me that the concept of collective guilt is at bottom a semantic failure. What is really involved is collective shame. Collective shame may be possible, but it cannot be compelled. Shame is a state of being, guilt a juridical fact. A passer-by cannot be guilty of failure to try to prevent a lynching. He can only be ashamed of not having done so.

Even a sovereign, self-governing citizen, such as an American, cannot be guilty of failure to try to prevent an act of State. It would be Nazism itself to take Americans off the street and charge them, in connection with, say, the bombing of Hiroshima, with having violated the Hague Regulations, to which their government, whose sovereign citizens they are, was signatory. Still less than a sovereign citizen can the subject of a dictatorship be guilty of an act of State. And, when the State requires him, personally and individually, to commit what he regards as a crime, and the penalty for his refusal to do so is very heavy, the common law acquits him on the ground of duress. "I was lucky," said Herr Klingelhofer, the cabinetmaker. "I didn't have to do anything wrong."

Collective shame is something else, but it requires not merely the fact of sovereign citizenship but the most delicate sense of it. I did not discover much collective shame among my ten friends. The President of the West German Federal Republic had called upon them to feel it and had used that very expression, "collective shame." But how does one call, effectively, upon people to feel ashamed?

God, this question is so resonant now. How do you convince people to feel shame? Some U.S. political parties have lost the ability to feel shame entirely, so shaming isn’t an effective strategy to suppress dangerous behavior.

What I really want, since (while I want to let my friends off in my magnanimity) I do not want to have to reproach myself some time later with having let them escape the consequences of their unheroism, is for each of them to have cared enough at the time to have thrown himself under the iron chariot of the State, with its wheels rimmed with spikes. This none of my friends did, and this I cannot forgive them. They did not care enough.

Chapter 19; on the responsibilities of an average citizen

[One of Mayer’s non-Nazi German friends] "Our situation differs from yours the way city life differs from the country. Ours is intensely complicated and difficult, sophisticated, so to say, while yours (at least until very recently) has been almost pastoral, primitive in its clarity and simplicity. Ours is much less readily intelligible to us than yours is to you, and our 'average citizen,' therefore, feels more inadequate than yours to deal with it."

But the nonpolitical, or, more accurately, politically nonconfident, German, who minded his own business and confined his business to his Fach (which means both pigeonhole and specialty), was just as prevalent in business, industry, and finance, in education, in the church, and in the press as in tailoring, baking, or cabinetmaking.

I disagree with the concept that the U.S. was "less complicated" in the 1950s—I think the European perspective on the U.S. is a bit patriarchal and the U.S. perspective at the time was, again, riding high on the sensation of being the good guys in WWII, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality. Still, even if it was true in the 1950s, it’s certainly not true now. Americans definitely feel the sense of politics being "too complicated" for the working class to understand.

Various Complaints

The author and his interviewees have the patriarchal attitudes of Euro-American men in the 1950s. There are only a few passages where that jumps out and is obnoxious, but it’s still worth noting.

There are a few random sinophobic comments throughout. Only in two or three spots, but still. The worst offender, I think, is at the beginning of chapter 32: "The occidental who deplores the renunciation of might and right implied here must narrow his eyes to an oriental squint and keep them on the ball."

[Andrei Vylinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, if uneven book I can't get out of my head for the last two years or so: no matter how hard I try, the reality around me is trying even harder to keep it relevant, and succeeds.

Anyway, it is an insightful and engaging account (and even, quite unexpectedly, an understanding one, though Mayer certainly isn't lenient with anyone or overlooks anything, he's just judging his ten Nazi friends the way he would judge himself) of how ordinary Germans succumbed to the Nazi rule and managed to live through it and enjoy it and fail to notice it was evil. It is also quite an old book, i.e. it is not built around stories of resistance, overlooked minorities, or fringe cases that would illuminate the nature of the thing in question, but goes straight for it and tells the story of ten 1) really ordinary 2) men 3) who all either benefitted from the regime or at least weren't hurt by it. And it is a really, really helpful book on mass psychology under authoritarian/totalitarian rule - especially, and I can't stress this enough, if you read it not as a story of things long gone but try to look at the world around you through its insights. I mean, I couldn't but compare the thoughts and sentiments of the protagonists with those of Belarusians in 1994-2020 or Russians in 2000-2022 and have been haunted by thoughts about their similarities ever since. And it's not the only comparison you can make these days, I guess.

There's one caveat, though: all of the above is in the first half of the book. The second part, Mayer's speculations on the deeper sources of the Nazi regime, is interesting but looks rather superfluous today, with the wealth of books on the topic we have now. And the last part is a curious prediction which we, with the benefit of hindsight, can only see as plain wrong, though it is still useful to remember that it wasn't wrong yet in the 1950s, when it was written, or in the 1960s, when the book was reissued, and it is still less wrong than you might think even now, because it wasn't the generation of his protagonists who actually repented but their children in the 1970s. Which is a sobering thought: when people are poisoned this way, they never recover completely, some part of their psyche remains poisoned forever, and it is still a useful book if you want to understand what they are like and how they think.

[Blaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interviews with ten "ordinary Germans" from the 1930's in the first part of the book were fascinating, reminding us how our we and neighbours can so easily adapt to changes in politics, and how oppression can become acceptable and normal. The analysis in the final two parts was weak, amounting to little more than stereotypes about the German national character and beliefs about their unsuitability for real democracy. But here and there the essential message comes through: that followers of demagogues and dictators are just like you and me.

[Charlene Mathe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Milton Mayer writes wonderful profiles of ten Germans who lived through the Third Reich. His analysis is very human; compassionate, yet to some extent damning. I liked Mayer in these chapters, but liked him less in the opening and closing chapters when he writes, not so much about the individuals caught up in the war, but about the nations involved and especially the United States. Mayer joins other Blame-the-USA critics in imagining some better(undetermined) solution to winning WWII than bombing Dresden and Tokyo, let alone Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Mayer is a wonderful writer and thinker. I'd like to read his other book, What Can a Man Do? If you have a chance to read They Thought They Were Free, you will not be disappointed!

[Andy Fever · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a hard one to review as it is in a small part, great and in large part, patronising nonsense. The final few chapters are very interesting with the exception of the American exceptionalism, but the interviews with his '10 nazi friends' just feel fictional. He does use some terrible prose as well like 'The German nation needed to drink to lighten itself and what else does nations drink but blood?' It must have sounded clever in his head.