They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

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Overview


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

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226525839
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 11/28/2017
Edition description: Enlarged
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 98,490
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Milton Mayer (1908-86) was the author of What Can a Man Do? And coauthor of The Revolution in Education. He wrote for the Progressive, Harper’s, and other outlets.

Table of Contents

Part I. Ten Men
Kronenberg
November 9, 1638
November 9, 1938
1. Ten Men
2. The Lives Men Lead
3. Hitler and I
4. "What Would You Have Done?"
5. The Joiners
6. The Way To Stop Communism
7. "We Think with Our Blood"
8. The Anti-Semitic Swindle
9. "Everybody Knew." "Nobody Knew"
10. "We Christians Had the Duty"
11. The Crimes of the Losers
12. "That's the Way We Are"
13. But Then It Was Too Late
14. Collective Shame
15. The Furies: Heinrich Hildebrandt
16. The Furies: Johann Kessler
17. The Furies: Furor Teutonicus
Part II. The Germans
Heat Wave
18. There Is No Such Thing
19. The Pressure Cooker
20. "Peoria Über Alles"
21. New Boy in the Neighborhood
22. Two New Boys in the Neighborhood
23. "Like God in France"
24. But a Man Must Believe in Something
25. Push-Button Panic
Part III. Their Cause and Cure
The Trial
November 9, 1948
26. The Broken Stones
27. The Liberators
28. The Re-educators and Re-educated
29. The Reluctant Phoenix
30. Born Yesterday
31. Tug of Peace
32. "Are We the Same as the Russians?"
33. Marx Talks to Michel
34. The Uncalculated Risk
Acknowledgments
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