It’s been more than seventy-five years since the Nazis were defeated and
Auschwitz was liberated. Seventy-five years is a long time—so long, in
fact, that while many still learn of the horrors of the Holocaust, far
fewer understand how the murder of the Jews happened. How were millions
of people systematically exterminated in an advanced Western nation—a
constitutional republic? How did such respectable and intelligent
citizens become complicit in the murder of their countrymen? These are
the questions Milton Mayer sought to answer in his book They Thought
They Were Free.
In 1952, Mayer moved his family to a small
German town to live among ten ordinary men, hoping to understand not
only how the Nazis came to power but how ordinary Germans—ordinary
people—became unwitting participants in one of history’s greatest
genocides. The men Mayer lived among came from all walks of life: a
tailor, a cabinetmaker, a bill-collector, a salesman, a student, a
teacher, a bank clerk, a baker, a soldier, and a police officer...<<<
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