Description: How do people become acclimated to fascism? What leads them down the slippery slope from rational intentions to atrocious actions--and how does that slope get greased? Milton Mayer's eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism among ten everyday Germans between 1933 and 1945 is still sobering--and more timely than ever. These ten men were average Germans who all became Nazis. But how? Mayer shows how the gradual habitation of people to a government that they do not feel they can predict, understand, or influence led to global catastrophe.
Brief description:
Milton Sanford Mayer (1908-1986) was a journalist and educator. He was the author of about a dozen books.
He studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but he did not earn a degree; in 1942 he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window." He was a reporter for the Associated Press, the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago Evening American. He wrote a monthly column in the Progressive for over forty years. He won the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism.
He worked for the University of Chicago in its public relations office and lectured in its Great Books Program. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts, Hampshire College, and the University of Louisville. He was an adviser to Robert M. Hutchins when Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Mayer was a conscientious objector during World War II but after the war traveled to Germany and lived with German families. Those experiences informed his most influential book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45.
Review Quotes: "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"