“Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. [It is} dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch.… In 1951, he returned to Germany to find out what had made Nazism possible.… When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt … that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not ‘by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.’”

Cass Sunstein | The New York Review of Books

"A timely reminder of how otherwise unremarkable and in many ways reasonable people can be seduced by demagogues and populists."

Richard J. Evans, author of | The Coming of the Third Reich

"Mr. Mayer's book is the fruit of a year which he passed in a German university town; it is composed of what might be called a series of meditations upon discussions which he held chiefly with ten former Nazis. Why had these men - including among them a baker, a tailor, a teacher and a policeman - become Nazis in the first place? Why had they participated in the crimes of the movement? How do they feel now after defeat and after the 're-education' of the occupying forces? Mr. Mayer's answers are sensitively worked out."

NY Herald Tribune

"[Mayer] wrote earnestly without an offensive earnest tone. He took stances without posturing. There is art in that."

The Washington Post

"Among the many books written on Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich, this book by Milton Mayer is one of the most readable and most enlightening...never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider as in Mr. Mayer's report."

The New York TImes

"Mayer is a journalist. He is also a man of convictions and a courageous man. Though he is an American, a Jew, and of German descent, he emphasizes that Nazis are--after all--human beings, that most of us have not acted very differently from most of them under comparable circumstances...Mayer's comparisons with American behavior in the matter of the deportation of Japanese citizens during the war on the one hand, in matters concerning the Jenner and McCarthy proceedings on the other, must be shamefacedly accepted."

American Sociological Review

"[Mayer] was a conscientious objector during World War II and was a leading voice in the pacifist movement."

Chicago Tribune