About the Author

Milton Mayer (1908-86) was the author of What Can a Man Do? And coauthor of The Revolution in Education. He wrote for the Progressive, Harper's, and other outlets.

Reviews

"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" (6/28/2018 12:00:00 AM)