they thought they were free

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 is a nonfiction book by journalist Milton Mayer that explores how ordinary Germans became supporters and enablers of Nazism between 1933 and 1945. Mayer focuses on ten “average” Nazi Party members in a small Hessian town and uses long interviews with them after the war to show how everyday people slipped, step by step, into accepting and participating in a dictatorship.

What “They Thought They Were Free” Means

The title points to the central paradox: these men believed they were free citizens even as they lived under a totalitarian regime that stripped others of rights and, eventually, of life. Mayer argues that because changes came gradually, were justified as emergencies or patriotic necessities, and often brought real social benefits (jobs, order, national pride), many Germans never recognized how unfree they had become until it was far too late.

How Fascism Creeps In

Mayer and the scholars writing about his work emphasize a pattern of slow, almost invisible escalation rather than a single dramatic “switch” to tyranny.

Key dynamics he highlights:

• Gradual habituation : People got used to “being governed by surprise,” with decisions made in secret and explained as too complex or too dangerous to share fully.

• National security pretext: Leaders claimed the situation was so complicated or perilous that information had to be withheld, which widened the gap between government and public while being framed as responsible leadership.

• Step-by-step normalization: Each new restriction or abuse (Step C) did not look dramatically worse than the last one (Step B), so it felt unreasonable to “make a stand” at any given moment.

• Busyness and distraction: Ordinary work, party activity, and community rituals kept people occupied so they “had no time to think about fundamental things.”

• Waiting for a big shock: Many potential resisters waited for one great, unmistakable crisis when “tens or hundreds of thousands” would protest together, but that moment never came.

An illustration that commentators often quote is the farmer metaphor: you do not see corn growing from day to day, but one day it is suddenly over your head. In the same way, small, accepted changes accumulate into a transformed political and moral landscape.

Core Themes and Warnings

Commentary on the book, including later essays and introductions, treats it as a warning about how any modern society can drift into authoritarianism.

Major themes include:

• Ordinary complicity : Mayer’s ten subjects are not sadistic fanatics; they are clerks, tradesmen, and minor professionals who see themselves as decent and respectable.

• Moral self-deception: They rationalize each compromise as temporary, necessary, or “not their responsibility,” only later realizing how far they have gone.

• Loss of shared reality: Over time, people live in a world of “hate and fear” without recognizing it as abnormal because everyone around them has changed together.

• Universal applicability: Historians note that Mayer’s account has periodically resurged in popularity whenever people in other countries fear democratic backsliding or rising extremism.

One especially striking anecdote described in later discussions involves a professor who only fully grasps the moral collapse when his small child casually repeats an antisemitic insult; that “minor incident” collapses his defenses and shows him that “everything has changed” around him.

Why It’s Trending Again

Newer editions and recent articles show that They Thought They Were Free continues to be reissued and re-read, often with new forewords that place it in present-day context. Writers and bloggers in the 2020s have revisited passages about gradual, bureaucratic authoritarianism, quoting Mayer’s warnings about small steps, emergency measures, and secrecy whenever public debates flare up about democratic erosion, surveillance, or extremist politics worldwide.

In short, “they thought they were free” has become shorthand in online discussions and forums for the idea that people can feel politically and personally free while, in reality, they are slowly adapting to a system that is taking that freedom away.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.