They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, 378 pages

Journalist Milton Mayer visited Germany in the '30s, reporting on developments there and attempting, unsuccessfully, to get an interview with Hitler.  He returned a decade later to a very different Germany, now occupied by the Allies.  This time, instead of staying in Berlin, he settled in the town of Marburg, where, with some difficulty, he befriended and extensively interviewed ten men who had lived through the Nazi era.  The results form the basis of They Thought They Were Free.  

The first half of the book concentrates on the interview subjects and their experiences, the second half on Mayer's own analysis of Germany and the German people.  The former is far more interesting than the latter, especially given the passage of time.  The personal testimony of the ten men, all of whom had joined the Nazi party at some point, some before but most after Hitler's rise to power, provides a compelling witness to how gradually "decent" men were convinced to accept the unthinkable, how the acceptance of lesser outrages today can lead to the acceptance of greater crimes tomorrow, and how easy it is to ignore injustice when it is happening to someone else.  Movingly, two of the subjects recall moments before the war when they deliberately avoided Jewish acquaintances, not out of fear of being associated with them, but out of shame at their own complicity in the rising tide of anti-Semitism.

The second portion of the book is dominated by Mayer's own views on the effectiveness of the Allied occupation, which are extremely pessimistic.  While the experience of subsequent decades seem to contradict this, it is perhaps worth asking how much the German character has actually changed beyond the rejection of militarism.  Unfortunately, the analysis in this section also raises the suspicion that Mayer's conclusions predated (and therefore partially predetermined) his experiences.