Saturday Review - Walter L. Dorn
"Writing as a liberal American journalist of German descent and Jewish religious persuasion Mr. Mayer aims—and in the opinion of this reviewer largely succeeds—at scrupulous fairness and unsparing honesty. It is this that gives his book its muscular punch."
New York Times Book Review - Hans Kohn
"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening."
New York Herald Tribune - August Heckscher
"Once again the German problem is at the center of our politics. No better, or more humane, or more literate discussion of its underlying nature could be had than in this book."
Christian Science Monitor - Ernest S. Pisko
"It is a fascinating story and a deeply moving one. And it is a story that should make people pause and think—think not only about the Germans, but also about themselves."
The New York Review of Books - Cass Sunstein
Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. [It is} dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch.… In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.… When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt … that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not ‘by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.’
The New York TImes
"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening...never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider as in Mr. Mayer's report."
Chicago Tribune
"[Mayer] was a conscientious objector during World War II and was a leading voice in the pacifist movement."
The Washington Post
"[Mayer] wrote earnestly without an offensive earnest tone. He took stances without posturing. There is art in that."
American Sociological Review
"Mayer is a journalist. He is also a man of convictions and a courageous man. Though he is an American, a Jew, and of German descent, he emphasizes that Nazis are—after all—human beings, that most of us have not acted very differently from most of them under comparable circumstances...Mayer's comparisons with American behavior in the matter of the deportation of Japanese citizens during the war on the one hand, in matters concerning the Jenner and McCarthy proceedings on the other, must be shamefacedly accepted."
The Coming of the Third Reich - Richard J. Evans
"A timely reminder of how otherwise unremarkable and in many ways reasonable people can be seduced by demagogues and populists."
NY Herald Tribune
"Mr. Mayer's book is the fruit of a year which he passed in a German university town; it is composed of what might be called a series of meditations upon discussions which he held chiefly with ten former Nazis. Why had these men - including among them a baker, a tailor, a teacher and a policeman - become Nazis in the first place? Why had they participated in the crimes of the movement? How do they feel now after defeat and after the 're-education' of the occupying forces? Mr. Mayer's answers are sensitively worked out."
From the Publisher
"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening." ---New York Times
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening." —New York Times
JANUARY 2018 - AudioFile
First published in print in 1955, this audiobook uses interviews with Germans who joined the Nazi Party as a way of understanding what made people follow Hitler and trust that he had Germany’s best interests at heart. It’s a frightening story of how people can slowly be deprived of their rights and liberties and still not recognize the danger. Narrator Michael Page has a formal, mannered British accent that fits the tone of this research project, and he does a fine job varying his reading. Page also commits to character voices, though some of his interpretations miss the mark. Still, his attempts do personalize an account that is more correct than emotional. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
