They Thought They Were

By Milton Mayer

They Thought They Were Free is Milton Mayer’s unsettling attempt to understand how ordinary people slid into Nazism and why it didn’t feel like a slide at all while it was happening. The book was written in 1950s as a series of interviews mixed with personal takes and observations. Mayer isn’t interviewing monsters or ideologues. He’s talking to ten men from a small German town, people who saw themselves as decent, practical, even apolitical. This is not a story of sudden fanaticism, but of incremental comfort, belonging, and moral drift.

For Mayer’s friends, Nazism didn’t arrive as brutality. It arrived as normalcy. Jobs returned. Children went to summer camps. The Hitler Youth kept kids busy and off the streets. For many, it genuinely felt like life was getting better. And since none of them had foreign friends, read foreign newspapers, or trusted reports from “Germany’s enemies,” they heard nothing credible about the regime’s crimes. Bad news, when it existed, was always distant, exaggerated, or suspiciously hostile. Like most people, they judged the world by the lives they personally led and those lives, at least at first, felt lighter.

The horrors were real, but abstract. They happened to “nobody,” somewhere else, handled by authorities. Just as we leave “trouble on the streets” to the police, Mayer’s friends left it to the State. Most citizens rarely encounter the State directly, and so its worst actions remained invisible. What filled that space instead was something else: anti-Communism elevated into a kind of unquestionable faith. Communism became the ultimate threat—poorly understood, but powerful enough to justify everything. Nazism, to them, wasn’t aggression; it was salvation.

Thinking changed in ways that reached all the way into the classroom. Intellectuals were recast as unreliable. Academics were humiliated and displaced by “reliable” party men. Expertise became suspect; loyalty became sufficient. But the capture of education was not uniform, and Mayer is careful about this.

Elementary schools were taken over completely and explicitly. There was no ambiguity. Curriculum, textbooks, songs, stories—everything was saturated with Nazi ideology. Children learned race before they learned civics. Even arithmetic was repurposed: math problems casually involved Jews lending money at exploitative interest rates, turning prejudice into something as neutral-seeming as subtraction. By the time children reached adolescence, the moral framing of the world had already been quietly set.

High schools and universities, interestingly, were often given discretion. And that discretion, Mayer argues, made things worse, not better. Teachers were not told exactly what to say—but they knew exactly what not to say. Fear did the work that orders did not. Wanting to avoid anything that might be interpreted as disloyal, educators self-censored. They chose the safest material, the least controversial texts, the most obedient interpretations. Over time, this produced an education system that was even more conservative than one imposed from above. Silence replaced inquiry. Avoidance replaced thought.

The result was a culture that praised non-intellectual virtues—duty, purity, labor, blood—while quietly hollowing out the habits of independent thinking. Universities were pushed to the margins. Education itself was brought into popular contempt. Germany was not merely silencing its thinkers. It was preparing to cut off its own head.

Religion, too, was transformed—but not uniformly. Mayer draws a sharp contrast between Protestant and Catholic responses. Protestant churches, decentralized and historically accustomed to close alignment with the state, proved far more vulnerable. Many Protestant congregations absorbed Nazi ideology with little friction, blending nationalism, obedience, and racial ideas into a vaguely Christian frame. Over time, Party ceremonies took on the emotional shape of religious services, increasingly substituting for church itself.

The Catholic Church, by contrast, was more resistant—not because Catholics were morally superior, but because Catholicism was structurally different. It was centralized, hierarchical, and answerable to Rome rather than the German state. This made it harder for Nazism to fully absorb. Catholic institutions resisted longer, negotiated more openly, and at times openly clashed with the Party. But Mayer is careful not to romanticize this. Resistance had limits. Catholic leaders often focused on protecting their institutions rather than confronting the regime’s broader crimes. Survival came before confrontation.

What ultimately mattered more than doctrine was belonging. Even priests who recognized the danger often followed their congregations into Nazism rather than abandon their people. Nazism was simply too socially magnetic. When the masses moved, many religious leader - Protestant and Catholic alike moved with them.

Again and again, Mayer records the same refrain: I was nothing—then I was needed. For men humiliated by unemployment or social insignificance, Nazism offered dignity and purpose. Even those who opposed it felt its pull. One anti-Nazi recalls sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend when a Nazi parade appeared onscreen. The friend’s daughter whispered, almost ashamed, that if she weren’t Jewish, she might want to be a Nazi too. The appeal was emotional, not ideological. Outsiders, Mayer suggests, consistently underestimate this.

What made all of this possible was not sudden cruelty but gradual acclimation. Mayer’s most famous passage explains why the “one great shocking moment” never comes. If the worst act of the regime had followed immediately after the first small one, millions might have recoiled. If mass gassing had followed shop stickers. But history doesn’t work that way. Instead, there are hundreds of steps, each only slightly worse than the last. Step C doesn’t feel much worse than Step B. And if you didn’t resist at B, why start at C? Each step prepares you not to be shocked by the next.

This is where self-deception does its real work. You wait. You tell yourself the next step will be the one that matters. You don’t want to act alone. You don’t want to “make trouble.” Uncertainty restrains you. And then one day—often triggered by something small and personal, like a child casually repeating a slur—you realize it’s too late. The weight of rationalization collapses all at once.

That moment reveals the deeper transformation. The world still looks the same: the houses, the shops, the jobs, the meals, the concerts. The forms are untouched. But the spirit has changed completely. Because people mistake form for substance, they don’t notice the change while it’s happening. Everyone is transformed together, and so no one feels transformed at all.

Perhaps the book’s most chilling moment comes when Mayer’s German friend turns the moral mirror back on him—pointing to the mass internment of Japanese Americans. Did you know anyone affected? What did you do about it? When Mayer admits he did nothing, the friend simply says, “There.” The implication is devastating: passivity is not unique to Germans. It is human.

By the time the end is visible, the beginnings are long past.

Mayer closes with two old maxims: Resist the beginnings and Consider the end. But his hard-earned conclusion is that resisting beginnings requires foresight—and foresight is precisely what ordinary life trains us not to practice.

Its no fun living in times in many parts where this book reads like contemporary reporting. The Minnesota protests felt like we might have taken a slight detour from this book.