Exploring the Lives of Germans During Hitler's Regime: They Thought They Were Free (1933-1945)

Amazon Customer: Excellent, must have and read

United Kingdom on Jul 01, 2021

Greasy: It all started with signs in shop windows, telling people who could and could not enter. The Nazis compelled professional people to cooperate with their own enslavement through endless workplace regulations. They created a dystopia for their own people, by making enemies of those who decried their actions, and set the general public against them. The burned synagogues and appointed people who the Jews trusted to round them up. Many walked calmly, straight into confinement. They were reassured by their local, policemen, town officials, religious leaders and social authorities. Calmly they chatted with those bringing them it as both they and those appointed to round them up, were told it was for their own protection. Public safety is always the alibi of incoming murderous totalitarian regains. In 2021 are all Germans in the year 1939.

Australia on Jun 19, 2021

csStudent: Born in the late 20th Century and being pretty removed from the events of WWII, I've often wondered what exactly happened in Germany that lead to the holocaust. I like how the author went about gaining his insight from ordinary folk in an ordinary town. However, I'm not sure if ten people from one town can truly present the entire picture. I believe someone wrote of this in the afterward and I did agree with the critical assessment. Still, I think it helps an outsider like me understand better what happened and what to watch for so history does not repeat itself.

United States on May 12, 2021

Customer and Reader: The author frames this book in a brilliant way, and he let's each of his "ten friends" describe Germany, socialism, antisemitism, Hitler, and life as it was thought of BY the German people before, during, and after WWII. I learned a much better way to study and think about "the motion of hisory", and the the thought processes of ordinary people when their governments perpetrate atrocities. I will forever be grateful for this book.

United States on May 07, 2021

John Gerrard: I gave this work a four. Although well researched, it was a heavy and awkward book to read. Meyer draws out many truths about Germany, Germans and Naziism.

Canada on Apr 11, 2021

M Clark: First published in 1955, it tells the story of 10 Nazis in a small town near Frankfurt. The author spent a year in the town in 1952 and actually befriended the men and capturing their intimate stories. It was republished in 2017 with a new Afterword that describes the methodology used with an appraisal of the accuracies of the stories.

Germany on Mar 15, 2021

Sol Ohcnar: All observers of history ask "How could so many Germans support the atrocities of the Third Reich?" By interviewing small merchants, librarians, bakers and tradesmen, the author pulls out thoughts and emotions of small town citizens from the 1930's. He discovered that they had felt humiliated by WW I and the successive governments that did not appear able to guide the German people to a better life. Old grudges about minorities reappeared as scapegoats and once the movement started, people became afraid to object. They lowered their gaze and even ten years later many could not yet accept the human cost of their acquiescence.

United States on Jan 18, 2021

Paul Streumer: "WE HAD NO TIME TO THINK." GERMANY 1933-1945

We cannot afford not to understand it, but Nazi Germany (1933- 1945) has always puzzled its historians. How could so many of such a civilized and well educated people as the Germans believe in Nazism? Initially most of these historians were outsiders, so the characteristics and the practice of Nazism, with at its depth the extermination of the Jews, struck them with full force. But inside Germany at the time, its full range did not become clear at one stroke. (And the ideology itself also evolved.) People got accustomed to it, in small steps. Most of these steps did not seem much. And one must eat, pass examinations, get a job, get married. They found themselves just normal, small people in a normal, small German town.

Milton Mayer did most of his research by living in such a small German town in 1952, where he made friends, whose stories he told. For some, but certainly not all, it was clear that, sure, things had gone unacceptably out of hand. But then, “[H]ow easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.” There always was a new crisis, a new success, a new reform. It was “the gradual...

United Kingdom on Jul 29, 2018

abby: "They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it."

In 1952, American journalist Milton Mayer moved his family to Marburg, Germany, a small town near Frankfurt. There, he set about to answer the question plaguing the world since Hilter's rise in 1933: how did a modern, western democracy fall prey to Nazism? Mayer was from German decent himself and a Jew, and he decided the answer to this quandary might lie in the "little man." Mayer met with ten such men in Marburg, men who had average jobs and lived average lives. In the book, he calls them his friends. Tailor. Police officer. Baker. Schoolteacher. What Mayer discovered, and documented in his book, was the story of how fanaticism can overtake us all.

"[They] did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now."

Even in all the turmoil, the poverty and the destruction of the post-war period, eight of his ten friends were unapologetic about their support for National Socialism. They remembered it as the best time of their lives, the time a "little guy" like them kept a job and even have money for a vacation now and again. Most were...

United States on Jan 12, 2018

KPowChick: The writing style is very conversational and easy to read. Even though it was written over 50 years ago, the examples Mayer uses illustrate excellent parallels between German society and American society. It is critical of both societies, and yet still empathizes with us "little people." I think it also shows that with the right kind of circumstances, totalitarianism would have flourished in the USA as much as it did in Germany.

Almost every paragraph of this book had me pause and think of an exact situation going on today. An example is a man who will not be persuaded by facts about the number of Jewish citizens in power... during this section, "alternative facts" kept flashing in my head. We are living in the same reality, just with different terms and phrases to describe this reality. It's just re-branded. Hopefully in ten years we are not being interviewed by a foreigner who wants to know "how could this happen?"

United States on Dec 21, 2017