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They Thought They Were Free
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 | Milton Mayer
5 posts | 7 read | 9 to read
First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayers 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. 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.--from Chapter 13, But Then It Was Too Late
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Schwifty
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In the 1950s, Mayer lived for a year in Marburg, Germany and held numerous interviews with ten “little men” of the lower middle class to learn their motivations for joining the Nazi party, their experience inside it and in Germany during the Nazi years and their assessment of it in the post war period. It‘s a personal book filled with observations by Mayer and anecdotes, regrets and rationalizations by his interlocutors.

Schwifty However there‘s a caveat or two. His speculations and meandering thoughts about the German national character if there could be such a thing are dated and seem totally off base 70 years later. Not only that, the book was supposed to be a project to discover why ordinary German citizens tolerated totalitarianism, yet the citizens of Marburg were socially and politically atypical, so this was not a good ordinary snapshot. 2y
Schwifty But the brief window into the minds of Germans trying to live a day to day existence inside Nazi Germany bombarded by propaganda and cowed by suspicion was still worth reading. 2y
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Biohaz74
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Mehso-so

Interesting read about what the normal Germans thought during world war 2 6/10

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shawnmooney
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shawnmooney
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shawnmooney
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This is from a 1955 book about Germans looking back on how fascism slowly crept into their lives and overtook their nation. These quotes are chilling for me. I will post two more. These quotes are going around Twitter at the moment, which is how I found out about the book.

The e-book is available on Scribd, by the way.

BookishMarginalia 🤔😳 8y
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