They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Sanford Mayer

 They Thought They Were Free by Milton Sanford Mayer


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This nonfiction study of the authoritarian experience was first published in 1955 based on interviews with ten ordinary Germans after WWII who were ex-Nazis and had lived through the initial euphoria of "the best time of their lives" but were now experiencing post-war miseries. Recent American political events has caused interest in this book to increase. Could something be learned from their experience?

The book is divided into three parts with Part One containing the most comments about the interviewees and their responses to questions about their experiences. In Part Two the author explores generalizations that some people believe about different nationalities, and Part Three contains a review of the shift in attitudes toward ex-Nazis with the advent of the Cold War and fear of Communism. 

References are made to the ten interviewees throughout all three parts of the book, but Part One contains most of the book's observations pertinent to current American politics. The following excerpts are taken from Part One.
“So, in the body politic as in the body personal, nonresistance to the milder indulgences paves the way for nonresistance to the deadlier…”

“It is actual resistance which worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point which the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people’s temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution” (56).

“…The German community…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” (57).

“…The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at that time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to?…Who but an ardent Christian, of the sort that takes Matthew 5 seriously, would undertake the risk of inquiring; who, if injustice were to be discovered by inquiry, would undertake the penalty of protesting? I am sorry to say that none of my friends was that ardent a Christian” (126-27).
The interviewees were not as repentant as most of us today would wish. They still thought Hitler was a good leader who had made some mistakes. Nine of the ten interviewees made numerous anti-Jewish remarks. Some of them confidently stated that they could identify who was Jewish from their appearance. The author who was interviewing them did not inform them of the fact that he was Jewish.

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