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    They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
    Unavailable
    They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
    Unavailable
    They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
    Ebook401 pages7 hours

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

    By Milton Mayer and Richard J. Evans

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateNov 28, 2017
    ISBN9780226525976
    Unavailable
    They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
    Author

    Milton Mayer

    Milton Mayer was an educator, journalist, and editor who worked with Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago. A prolific writer, among his numerous works are What Can a Man Do? and If Men Were Angels. John H. Hicks was Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst until his retirement in 1986. Studs Terkel was a journalist and author of several best-selling oral histories. He was a student at the University of Chicago when Robert Hutchins was president. 

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    • 3/5
      This book was published in 1955. The author in Germany after the war befriended ten 'ordinary' Germans and talked to them a lot. Discouragingly, he found all ten thought Hitler was a good thing for Germany, and even long after the war all still held that view except for one who changed his mind as to Hitler because of his getting into the War. Nor did they disapprove of Hitler's policy as to the Jews, although most felt that the evil done to the Jews was not known or approved by Hitler. But all or most approved of what was done against the Jews. This is what led me to read the book, to see what Germans thought after the war. But the book also spends a lot of time discussing American policy in regard to Germany after the war, most of which discussion did not excite my attention since it has been made obsolescent by events. The author of course had no idea that the USSR would fall and that Germany would be reunited without the USSR's approval. That part of the book is of only historical interest. I think this is Mayer's most famous book and it is the only book by him I've read. But in olden times I read many articles by him, including the article in 1941 in The SaturdayEvening Post entitled "I Think I Will Sit This One Out.," which I still remember and which I disagreed with when I read it at age 13 or so.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Everyone should read this book!! Wars aren't cut and dry, and there are many signs that are missed. We look back at WWII and wonder how any one could have followed Hitler but, as this book will show, it was pretty darn easy. It's also super scary how this book reflects current life in US America.

      1 person found this helpful