November 2025 Book Club: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945

Join Alumni Philodemica's Book Club as we meet to discuss They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945  by Milton Mayer. Book Club to happen via Zoom: https://georgetown.zoom.us/j/96022853520

Book description: They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of…