In the early 1950s, the author-journalist Milton Sanford Mayer lived in a small Hessian town he called “Kronenberg”, where he met and befriended ten Germans who had been Nazi Party members (he didn’t tell them he was Jewish). Their many conversations, which centered on their lives and attitudes during the Third Reich, formed the basis of Mayer’s first book, “They Thought They Were Free”. His intention was to learn how the Germans got that way – as a cautionary lesson for us. At that time America’s preeminence as Guardian of the Free World was indisputable; he could not have imagined then how much things would change in just half a century. The most valuable & enduring lessons of this compact 344-page book concern how individuals and societies can change under the pressure of combined reality and illusion.

Mayer’s ten Nazis were typical small-town citizens of the sort you find everywhere – in this town, of course, their lives took some unexpected turns:

1) Karl-Heinz Schwenke: a former tailor and Sturmfuehrer, now a janitor. One of the true believers who loved his snappy uniforms, he was involved in the SA’s torching of the local synagogue on November 9, 1938 (Kristallnacht) and served 3 years in prison for it after the war.

2) Gustav Schwenke: a former tailor’s apprentice who later became a private in the Military Police – his first steady job, which enabled him to get away from his messed-up family.

3) Carl Klingelhoefer: a cabinetmaker, member of the Volunteer Fire Dept., & vestryman of the Parish Church; ironically, he & the VFD responded to the synagogue fire.

4) Heinrich Damm: a country boy, former salesman, later office manager for the local Nazi Party HQ, he was one of the “March violets” who flooded into the Party after the 1933 election.

5) Horstmar Rupprecht: a high school student and Hitler Youth leader.

6) Heinrich Wedekind: a baker and Party manager for his block; in his own words, “a jolly Stormtrooper”. Like many Germans, he had a copy of "Mein Kampf" (who hadn’t?) but had never opened it (who had?)

7) Hans Simon: a bill-collector and Cell Leader (lowest rank in the Party); one of the earliest Party members.

8) Johann Kessler: a former bank clerk, later a Labor Front inspector and a renegade Catholic in the Nazi Faith Movement.

9) Heinrich Hildebrandt: a high-school teacher, one of the few cultivated Nazis who really knew literature & music. Unbeknownst to the locals, he was a former anti-Nazi (till 1933) who read foreign books & newspapers and lived in constant fear that his past would catch up with him.

10) Willy Hofmeister: a plainclothes detective who investigated the synagogue arson (no arrests resulted at that time). Later on he was ordered to round up Jewish males between 18 & 65 for “protective custody”.

Except for the teacher, none of them had traveled abroad as civilians; none had ever known or talked with a foreigner, read the foreign press, or wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so. These nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent & honest men, did not know Nazism was evil, not even after the war. Throughout the '30s, they knew only the benefits of the system – indeed, they regarded 1933-39 as the best years of their lives. The “bad news” didn’t reach them (that was enemy propaganda, after all); they certainly weren’t troublemakers, nor were they interested in them. Everyone was too busy with his own problems.

The book is not a series of interviews, but incisive essays filled with excerpts from many conversations. Mayer describes the wide variety of motives for joining the Nazi Party and the differences in American and German attitudes regarding the citizen and the state, which partly explains why the Germans were not impressed with American attempts to democratize them after the war. Note that the older survivors were born under monarchy, and the Nazi Party appealed to those who were fed up with the corrupt Weimar Republic and wanted to “throw all the bastards out”. They also found it ironic that the Americans now needed Germany as a bulwark against Communism, since militant anti-Communism was one of the Party’s original selling points.

These men also revealed much about their anti-Semitism, which in their case needed no government-sanctioned “race theory” to justify it. Interestingly, the Jews they knew personally were “good ones” – but when these Jews either left town or disappeared, no one gave it much thought. In any case, the common refrain was, “What would you have done?” Indeed, that is the kicker.

Two chapters contain eloquent quotations by one of Mayer’s colleagues from the University of Frankfurt that are so chilling in their relevance that they alone make this book essential reading. For example:

“It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked – if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

The book is still in print. Your library should have at least one copy. I can say unequivocally that this is one of the most important books of the 20th Century. Read it while you can. Remember the great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice – “Resist the beginnings” and “Consider the end.” That is, if you’re not too busy.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are.”

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Thanks to msmorvay for the 4th Annual Resurrecting the Oldies Book Write-Off. Other entries are linked at her book review.


Recommended: Yes