Sir Richard J. Evans
They Thought They Were Free is a remarkable book, virtually the first serious postwar investigation of how ordinary Germans became Nazis and how they viewed the history of Hitler’s Third Reich in retrospect. It speaks to us from another time, with words and ideas that are vivid and painful—and can have vital contemporary resonance.
The author, Milton Sanford Mayer, a professional journalist, was born in Chicago on August 24, 1908, the son of parents who were active in Reform Judaism. After receiving a classical education at Englewood High School, he studied at the University of Chicago from 1925 to 1928 but left without taking a degree after being disciplined for throwing beer bottles out of a dormitory window (“failing,” he said, with evident regret, “however, to hit the Dean”).1 After Mayer left, he worked for the Chicago American, an afternoon paper that was part of the William Randolph Hearst stable. Sold on street corners, it was noted for its aggressive reporting, sensational stories, and racy style. Here, Mayer learned to write in the populist, rather personal English that is such a striking feature of They Thought They Were Free.
Mayer’s life changed when he read the 1935 commencement address of University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who exhorted his listeners not to be satisfied with a safe life or a quiet one, but to go out into the world determined to break the bonds of conventionality. Mayer wrote to Hutchins asking how he could free himself from having to work for Hearst, and Hutchins offered him a job as a tutor in a great books or “Western civilization” class, a post Mayer filled with such effectiveness that he was later promoted to assistant professor even though he did not have a degree.
At the same time, Mayer began contributing essays to papers and magazines as a freelance journalist; one of the most celebrated of these was a diatribe against taking part in World War II, published on October 7, 1939, in the Saturday Evening Post under the title “I Think I’ll Sit This One Out.” He lived in the Hull House social-work settlement, and toward the end of the war he joined the Quakers, sharing their essential optimism about human nature and their abhorrence of violence and warfare. Mayer became a frequent columnist for the liberal-pacifist monthly The Progressive and an active member of the American Friends Service Committee. At one meeting he spontaneously proposed the title “Speak Truth to Power” for a pamphlet they were about to publish; the phrase immediately entered the language and has remained current ever since.
Mayer believed that individuals should always stand up for their rights against the overmighty state. Why, he wondered, had this not happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s?2 He had visited the country in 1935 but not found a satisfactory explanation. A degree of enlightenment came from Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, an eminent German nuclear physicist who had stayed in Mayer’s home during a visit to Chicago. After the war Weizsäcker increasingly focused on moral issues, eventually becoming a Christian pacifist. Conversations with Weizsäcker and correspondence with James M. Read, a fellow Quaker who was Chief of Educational and Cultural Relations of the United States High Commission for the Occupation of Germany, led Mayer to the idea of living for a time in a “typical” small German town and getting to know a man who had formerly been a grassroots member of the Nazi Party.3
The aim would be “the delineation of the personal conditions under which the ‘little’ man anywhere becomes involved in the development of totalitarian evil, and the ways in which he assumes or avoids moral responsibility for his participation in it.”4 Through the good offices of Read, who organized the funding of the project from the high commission, and on the recommendation of Hutchins and Weizsäcker, Mayer was put in touch with the Institute for Social Research, a center of left-wing sociology and social theory that, after having been forced to relocate to the United States by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, was in the process of reopening in Frankfurt am Main.5 Over many months in 1950, Mayer hammered out the main features of the project in correspondence with Max Horkheimer, a leading figure at the institute who appointed him a Visiting Professor there, during its first full academic year of operation (1951–52). Mayer had further discussions at the institute with Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock (the institute’s director), and Theodor Adorno, probably its best-known figure, after he arrived in early August 1951.6
The members of the institute were interested in Mayer’s proposal above all because during and after the war they had published a number of studies that attempt to account for the rise and triumph of Nazism. The best-known of these, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), was written by a team led by Adorno, using Freudian concepts to identify the kind of individual who had become a Nazi and to link this to a broader social and historical analysis. It was swiftly translated into English and had a formative influence on postwar American sociology. (The influence of this work is obvious in Mayer’s book, particularly in its account of the relationships of some of its subjects with their fathers.) Mayer’s proposed project seemed to Horkheimer and Adorno to be a potentially important case study by which some of their theories could be tested empirically.7
As Mayer wrote in September 1952, in his final report to the institute,
The project involved living with my family in, and as a member of, a small and as nearly possible typical German community for one year. I was to seek out a (again, as nearly possible) typical German of small status and study his development as a National Socialist, with special reference to his historical conditioning as the source of moral (innerliche) conflict in his National Socialist career. My final report was to be a history of this man, to be prepared for publication as a book upon my return to the United States.8
From August to December 1951, Mayer tried in numerous conversations, travels through West Germany, and correspondence “to locate this kind of man through persons who might know, or know of, such a man.” But he did not succeed. In January 1952 he settled with his wife and children in a selected small town not far from Frankfurt and, with the “devious assistance” of a local pastor, identified an ex-Nazi who had been convicted for his part in burning down the local synagogue during the Reichskristallnacht, the nationwide pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, “and who was applying for re-admission to the Evangelical Church,” which he had left during his National Socialist career. By getting to know the man’s son, himself a former member of the SS, Mayer established contact with the father.9
Initially, Mayer felt that this man, a tailor whom he first dubbed “Gerhard Schultz” (“Gustav Schwenke” in this book), would be the ideal subject for his project and wrote up a summary biography, which he presented to the institute in January 1952. His father Friedrich (“Karl-Heinz Schwenke”), born in 1881, also a tailor, had suffered from boycotts imposed on his business in the 1920s because he had become a Nazi, and “Gerhard” was forced to beg to survive during the Depression of the early 1930s, before he joined the Nazi storm troopers. He became a policeman and was sent to Austria in 1938 following the country’s incorporation into Hitler’s Reich. Badly wounded in the final stages of the war, he alleged that his father had been tortured by the Americans until he confessed to having taken part in the Reichskristallnacht pogrom and was then imprisoned from 1948 to 1951. “Gerhard Schultz” did not agree with all of the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis but felt they had done something to crack down on what he regarded as Jews’ financial exploitation of Germans (he kept the categories of “Jews” and “Germans” rigidly separate). Overall, he was grateful to the Nazis for rescuing Germany from economic collapse, as he saw it, and providing people like himself and his father with a decent living. “Gerhard Schultz and I,” Mayer concluded, “agree that the best contribution to German science could be made by my recording the experience of the two generations”—in other words, of himself and his father.10
However, Adorno and Horkheimer persuaded Mayer that it was still unclear how revelatory the “Schultzes” were going to be, and that the resulting study might be too superficial. Meanwhile, other Evangelical pastors helped locate more ex-Nazis, while a circle of German Quakers put Mayer in touch with a group of former followers of Hitler who met regularly “for the purpose of self-examination.” They in turn located another former Nazi in Mayer’s chosen town. “A Gymnasium [high school] student, who helped take care of our children,” Mayer reported, “led me to another, one of his teachers; a housemaid of a friend of ours led me to another. These cases led me, in time, to others.”11 There seemed to be a sufficient number of subjects to warrant a larger study than the one originally conceived. Adorno and Horkheimer therefore persuaded Mayer to focus on all ten, as Mayer reported:
My discovery, in January and February 1952, of ten “little” National Socialists, widely diversified in upbringing, religion, temperament, native intelligence, occupation, and personal situation during the rise of Nazism, persuaded my colleagues and me that the project should be revised: I should study these ten subjects as intimately as possible during the six succeeding months; reduce their life stories (including their own view of their lives) to written form, and draw conclusions from the picture, which, all together, they presented.12
The ten men were Hans Steih (“Karl-Heinz Schwenke”) and his son Georg (“Gustav”), Heinrich Moeller (“Hans Simon”), Heinrich Haye (“Heinrich Hildebrandt”), Conrad Killian (“Karl Klingelhöfer”), Heinrich Doerr (“Heinrich Doerr”), Karl-Otto Straub (“Johann Kessler”), Wolfgang Heyer (“Willy Hofmeister”), Ludwig Schweinsberger (“Heinrich Wedekind”), and Wilhelm Bräutigam (“Horstmar Rupprecht”).13
Mayer formulated sets of questions to ask these men, though he did not put the questions formally but let the conversations lead to them, which they did in different ways for each; hence, the same methodology, strictly speaking, was not used in each case, as he reported to the institute—thus, one presumes, departing from the research template that Adorno and Horkheimer had suggested. Mayer’s procedure consisted of a series of social visits to the subjects’ homes, where he was invariably offered tea or coffee or, sometimes, wine, and eventually, in eight cases, a meal. If the subjects had children, Mayer would sometimes bring along one of his own to play; if it seemed appropriate, his wife would accompany him. In almost all cases he also engaged the subject’s wife in conversation. Each interview lasted from two to three hours, with a total of forty hours being the maximum and twelve the minimum. Given the austerity then reigning in Germany, he brought gifts, token at first, then more substantial—mainly food—spending a total of DM 2,000 altogether; in addition, he gave a total of DM 500 to the nearly destitute Steih family.14
Mayer told the men that he “wanted Americans to understand what life had been like for ordinary Germans in the Nazi period” and made it clear he was not acting in any official capacity. He did not tell them, however, that he had access to denazification papers, which contained a complete record of the men’s involvement with the Nazi Party, along with other details. He used them to check the men’s veracity (he found no significant contradictions), and he sought confirmation among non-Nazi acquaintances in the town. And he carefully looked for self-contradictions and evasions in the stories themselves. He did not know German, but, he noted, this was not a handicap but an asset: “This circumstance almost immediately reduced the traditional disparity between the professor and the ordinary German. In the presence of my linguistic superiors, I was a humble and earnest learner, and every one of them was in the happy position of being able patiently to deal with my stupidity.” In seven of the cases he began with an interpreter, one or the other of two German women whose services he had engaged for the purpose; in the other three cases he either conversed in French (Straub and Haye) or was able to follow because the subject spoke very clear German and understood some English (Bräutigam).15
Mayer was also able to reduce his handicap by living modestly and walking to the men’s homes rather than driving there. He invariably mentioned that he was descended from Germans who had immigrated to America for political reasons after the failure of the 1848 revolution, which helped. The men did not approve of his pacifism during World War II, but at least he had refused to fight against Germany. He had thought of revealing that he was a Jew when appropriate in the conversations, but Adorno and Horkheimer advised against it, so he did not. On the other hand, his interlocutors knew he was a Quaker, and they generally regarded the Society of Friends in a positive light. As a Quaker, he was used to conversation in a confessional mode. The men were “unenthusiastic about baring their sin-laden souls” but “in this last respect, I found it not only profitable, but natural, to bare my own to them; we might weep for ourselves together.” In the end, they told him all they could, he thought, and as they had become friends, “the leave-taking, which I have done in the past few days, has been painful.”16
He had initially thought that he would avoid discussing anti-Semitism, but the professors at the Institute for Social Research, “and Professor Adorno in particular, insisted that I should not be able to do so; that anti-Semitism was the very heart of Nazism. And so it proved.” The men in fact all brought it up spontaneously. They loaded their guilt onto it. And, except in the cases of Haye, Straub, and Bräutigam, it did not seem to have diminished since 1945. The centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazism was symbolized above all by the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, in which, Mayer discovered, all his subjects had participated, apart from the younger Steih, who was with the German army in Austria at the time. So Mayer planned to conclude his account with the burning of the local synagogue.
Mayer thought that the Germans had been vulnerable to the appeal of Nazism because of the “non-political, socially irresponsible pattern of German life,” a view that owed much to the novelist Thomas Mann’s famous Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918) but was belied by the extremely high participation rates of Germans in elections since before World War I and by the vibrant political life of the Weimar Republic. Fundamentally, however, Mayer came to think that “what happened to these men could have happened (and could happen) to comparable men anywhere.” This fit in well with the general approach of the institute, which focused less on the peculiarities of German culture and more on universal human traits—such as the authoritarian family—and the way in which they were evident in Germany. Mayer thought that the great religious institutions of the day did not offer any serious resistance to ideologies like Nazism. The only way to stop similar crimes from occurring was through a reshaping of “the spiritual conditions of human life,” as he put it. But he was to revise many of these views by the time he began writing.17
***
Well before the end of his stay in Germany, Mayer began to run out of money, since he had spent his grant of DM 30,000 ($7,140) and more on travel and living expenses for himself and his family; he had also paid a researcher (John Dickinson, an American connected to the institute) to locate and transcribe court records and to compile information on the history of the local Jewish community.18 In May 1952 Mayer obtained a contract from the Association of American College Broadcasting Stations and funding from the Ford Foundation to record twenty-six interviews in English with people across Western Europe about life after the war. The institute provided him with secretarial help but turned down his request for office facilities.19 Mayer told the institute he would not be able to start writing his book until the spring of 1953, by which time he should have obtained advances on royalties from publishers in the United States, England, and Germany, with which he could support himself.20 After completing his research in September 1952, he returned to Chicago and published a series of articles based on some of his interviews in Harper’s Magazine, which provided a basis on which to approach a publisher.
Mayer was met with a favorable response from the University of Chicago Press, where Morton Grodzins, a professor of political science at the university and part-time editor at the press,21 offered him an advance on royalties of $500, a good sum for the time. Mayer told Grodzins that he was writing not “a really academic project report” that would simply deal with each of the ten subjects, but a more popular account that would use them to make larger points about Nazism and its appeal to the German people. He sought Grodzins’s advice on how to structure the book. Mayer wanted to put in more detail about the ten individuals and make “these life histories, or sections of them, appear at relevant points, rather than separated and told as life histories. It does, perhaps, make them much more readable that way, and we might work this one out by, where necessary, simply expanding them at the points where they now appear.”22 Grodzins agreed with Mayer’s suggestion to include a lengthy narrative of the Kristallnacht pogrom. It was now, however, to open the book instead of close it.
On February 3, 1954, Mayer sent the manuscript in. He was pleased with what he had written:
I ran away with it, or it with me. . . . I should like to believe that it is good, and that it adds both depth and life to my subsequent chain of generalizations and animadversions, and that, above all, it is readable.23
Strangely enough, it is not fiction, not one figure or incident in it (except, of course, the drinking party at the Jägerhof in the year 1638). What is fictional, of course, is what the characters thought or said to themselves—and even here I have made the reconstruction from what they and others involved have, in many cases, told me.24
This did not convince all his readers. He had sent the manuscript of the first chapter to “a very smart gal, former Dodd Mead gal,” who had told him that “the way I have cast it, following the hours of the night and picking up my ten Nazis through them; and including some silent reflections on the part of some of the characters—is essentially fiction. And I am writing a non-fiction book.”25 However, Mayer felt that “it is a wonderful opening. It opens the story with a bang. A book should open with a bang.”26
Morton Grodzins agreed that “the opening is a marvelous bang, that it is well written, that it is intensely interesting, that it states the problem beautifully. But, in a sense, it is just too damn slick.” He agreed with the “Dodd Mead girl” about “divesting the book of its fiction-like quality.” He continued:
Mayer has the facts about little men in small towns under Hitler. Nobody else has these facts. Nobody else understands these men as well as Mayer does. Nobody has yet described this kind of person with anywhere near the same amount of firsthand data, interest or interpretive skill. This is the reason that the book should be published. This is why the book will make a big splash when it appears. It will not only be of interest to general readers; but it will, I think, set the professional fact smacking social scientists back on their heels. What is important is what Mayer saw and what Mayer has reflected about what he saw. Nothing else is important.27
It would be unfortunate, therefore, he felt, if the book appeared in any way to be a work of fiction. He and Mayer agreed to remove “the direct descriptions of people’s thoughts” and to make it clear at the beginning that the ten people at the center of the book were real people.28 He agreed, however, that “still it sounds fictional.”29 And indeed it does.
The University of Chicago Press was sufficiently concerned about the statements made and, above all, the judgments arrived at by Mayer in the book that it asked a firm of lawyers to advise on the risk of a libel suit. Mayer, the press told the firm, “has changed the name of the town and altered the names of the people involved, but to anyone who knows the actual town it will be recognizable, and if they know the town well enough they will probably be able to identify at least certain of the people.”30 The legal advice was that the risk was small. Germans were unlikely to sue in an American court, and if the work was not translated into German they would be unable to sue there. And if they did sue in the United States,
You should not have too much trouble with the suit since any plaintiff would have been a member of the Nazi Party (as I read your letter). You don’t have to be a great lawyer to call attention to the fact that a jury in Chicago would not give too much time to a member of the Nazi Party (unless I don’t know Chicago).31
The final product was supported by Grodzins with enthusiasm. He explained to Martin Niemöller, a leading figure in the Protestant resistance to Hitler whom he asked, in vain, to write a brief foreword to the book, that Mayer had
spent many months finding the men he sought; they are numbered by the million, everywhere as in Germany, but how are they to be found, as individuals? Some of Mr. Mayer’s associates thought that, in the nature of the case, his quest must fail; he himself could not have imagined quite how difficult it would be. He was an American, a “conqueror,” and he sought to establish close contact with men to whom close contact with strangers (least of all with “conquering strangers”) was most unusual.
But this was no ordinary American; this was an American who did not hate, and had not hated, his national enemy, who refused to accept the common implications of the very word “enemy.” A lifelong anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, Milton Mayer was able as few of us are, to distinguish the sin from the sinner and to see himself involved in the sin of his fellow-men. And in post-war Germany, he was a man who lived simply, lived generously without wanting to subject the recipients of his generosity to political test, who shopped with his wife in the town market-place, sent his children to the town schools, learned the language (and even the dialect) of the people among whom he was living. He was an American who rode a bicycle!
It is no wonder that he succeeded, this American, this Jew, at whose daily table always sat two or three children whose fathers were classified “unemployable” as ex-Nazi activists. To this American family these children were children. It was easy for their elders to accept the Mayers as “people like ourselves.”32
Thanks not least to Grodzins’s promotion, the book received favorable reviews. “Never before,” wrote Hans Kohn, the eminent historian of German ideas, in The New York Times, “has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider as in Mr. Mayer’s report.”33 It enjoyed a second edition in 1966, and the paperback edition has been reprinted at least eleven times.34 It became a classic and has been widely used in university courses on Nazism, certainly in part because of its unrivalled readability among books in the field.
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The name “Kronenberg” lightly disguised the real name of the town, which was Marburg, a university town on the banks of the river Lahn, as Grodzins told Pastor Niemöller.35 Mayer’s description of the town as it was in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s is accurate enough apart from the altered names. Far from being representative of small towns in the rest of Germany, though, Marburg had a number of peculiar features that made it particularly susceptible to the appeal of Nazism, and Mayer’s claim that the ten men he interviewed were typical ordinary Germans (“In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus”) is misleading. Dominated by the university, its staff, and its students, the town had very little industry and an unusually high proportion of people engaged in the service sector. In 1933, only 23 percent of Marburg’s population were employed in or dependent on employment in industry, as against 39 percent in the Reich as a whole. State employees, including the university’s staff, and their dependents made up 20 percent of the workforce, compared to 8 percent in the Reich. State employees were more than double the percentage found in the Reich, white-collar workers were almost double, while manual workers, at 32 percent, were a far smaller percentage of the workforce than they were in the Reich, where they made up over 46 percent.36
What was strikingly absent was a mass labor movement, one adhering to either the Communist Party or the more moderate leftist Social Democrats. In November 1932, during the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, these two parties garnered a third of the vote in the Reich as a whole, winning even more than the Nazis themselves. The picture was very different in Marburg, where the Communists won only 8 percent of the vote compared to 17 percent nationally, and the Social Democrats 14 percent compared to 21 percent in the Reich as a whole. By contrast, the Nazis scored 49 percent, compared to 33 percent nationally. The middling liberal and conservative parties collapsed in Marburg as they did everywhere else, their votes going to the Nazis. In the elections of March 1933, which were only partially free, the picture was similar. By that time, Adolf Hitler was Reich Chancellor, though he had not yet achieved a monopoly on power. Only the Nazis were allowed to campaign, and most Communists had been arrested or were in hiding, though Hitler allowed the Communist Party to put up candidates because this would weaken the other large working-class party, the Social Democrats. In March 1933 the Social Democrats still won 14 percent of the vote in Marburg, compared to 18 percent nationally, and the Communists 5 percent compared to 12 percent. The Nazis, able to win only 44 percent of the vote in Germany as a whole, won an absolute majority in Marburg, with 57 percent.37
Marburg was thus much more strongly Nazi than many if not most other cities in Germany. This reflected in part its religious composition—Protestant in the main, with a Catholic minority that brought the Catholic Centre Party consistently around 6 percent of the vote in the Weimar years (the Centre Party’s supporters were among the least likely to go over to the Nazis). Most importantly, however, the relative strength of the Nazis in Marburg reflected the town’s peculiar social composition, with a small and largely unorganized industrial working class and a large sector of what one might call lower-middle-class inhabitants—that part of the German population that was more likely than any other to support the Nazis.
Mayer did not include women in his sample of interviewees, even though women could join the Party and still retained the vote under the Third Reich. It is possible that Mayer thought that Nazism was a masculinist movement par excellence or that women were likely to follow their husbands or fathers in their political views in this society. Yet Mayer did not think it in any way necessary to justify his exclusion of women. It is hard to escape the feeling that a man who referred to an intelligent critic of his drafts as “a Dodd Mead girl” and to his second wife, who featured regularly in his column for The Progressive, as “Baby” (until criticism from feminists prompted him to rename her ironically as “Ms. Baby”) simply assumed that in terms of political commitment women were of no account. And yet female voters were a key feature in the Nazis’ electoral successes: they came to participate as much as men in elections, bringing millions of votes to Hitler and their local organizations. In order fully to answer questions about why “ordinary Germans” supported Hitler and what they thought of the Third Reich a few years after it had crashed down in ruins, it would have been necessary to include women as well as men in the survey.
Mayer’s no doubt unconscious decision to include only men in his survey was not just a product of his personal biases. The early 1950s were a period of “family values,” of the reestablishment of family structures after the upheavals of war and depression. With mass unemployment in the 1930s, followed by years of war during which millions of men were killed or taken prisoner, there was a strong drive to reestablish some kind of stability, reasserting the traditional division of roles between men and women. In America it was not until 1963 that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a powerful and cogent critique of the subordination of women and their marginalization in postwar politics. In West Germany it took until the mid-1970s for a new wave of feminism to emerge. They Thought They Were Free was a product of its time in more ways than one.
***
Mayer clearly got to know most of his subjects very well, mixing with them on friendly terms and interviewing them frequently over several months. But were they telling him the truth? In some cases, he suspected not. At the time of his stay in Marburg, prosecutions were in progress for crimes committed in the Nazi era, including the burning of synagogues and the smashing of windows in Jewish-owned shops that occurred during the “Night of Glass Shards,” on November 9 and 10, 1938. Yet in Marburg the first attack on the town’s synagogue had come on November 8, before Joseph Goebbels had ordered the pogrom. The synagogue’s windows were smashed, and people tried to set the building on fire but failed. The next morning two officers of the Security Service of the SS arrived in Marburg and ordered the synagogue burned down. SA Colonel Stolberg went to the brownshirts’ local inn to find men to do the job. Between fifteen and twenty men changed into civilian clothing so as not to be identified as Nazi storm troopers, brought a ladder, and climbed into the building through a broken window. Within a few hours the whole synagogue was in flames. The following morning the remains were blown up. Thirty-one Jewish men were arrested on Hitler’s personal orders; up to thirty thousand were arrested across the Reich as a whole and taken to Buchenwald, to be released some weeks later after promising to emigrate.38
Mayer’s narrative of these events is based on interviews with his ten subjects. It is hardly surprising that none of them admits any direct involvement in the pogrom, but Mayer knew they were not telling the truth. “I am sure,” he wrote (148) “that the tailor, Schwenke, had a hand, and a ready one, in burning the Kronenberg synagogue.” His son’s claim that his father had been tortured to obtain a confession in the trial was clearly false. Others, too, were probably directly involved. The enthusiastic member of the volunteer fire department was telling the truth when he described how he rescued documents and objects from the conflagration, since one of them later found its way into the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.39 But he would also have been aware of the orders that firemen were only to fight the blaze if it spread to buildings owned by “Aryans.” Other interviewees who had been party officials or SA members would also have been closely involved in the pogrom. How they dealt with their involvement in the crimes of Nazism was very strongly colored by their fear of judicial retribution: indeed, in the final part of the book, Mayer quotes from the judgment issued by the local court in November 1948 on the perpetrators of the pogrom, including “Schwenke,” who was already serving a sentence for his part in the events of a decade before. It is certainly possible that in such a small town, where the Jewish population was well integrated into society, the police and others handled the arrests of the thirty-one Jewish men relatively gently, as described in Mayer’s interviews, but if so this was not typical of Germany as a whole, where Nazi storm troopers, sometimes aided and abetted by the police, broke into Jewish houses, beat up those who lived there, trashed the contents, and, in ninety-one cases documented by the Nazi Party itself, murdered some of the inhabitants. Nobody was punished at the time for these crimes. Thus, if Mayer’s ten men are to be believed, the experience of Marburg was not a typical one.40
In one sense Marburg was typical, however, and that was in the rapid progress made in the so-called “Aryanization” of Jewish-owned businesses, which were bought up by or compulsorily transferred to non-Jewish owners or forced into liquidation. There were sixty-four such enterprises in Marburg in 1933: eleven were closed down or bought up within the first few months of the Nazi regime, seven in 1934, eight in 1935, nine in 1936, six in 1937, and five in the first nine months of 1938. By the time of the pogrom, there were hardly any Jewish-owned shops left in the town, which is no doubt why the interviews made no mention of the vandalism on Kristallnacht.41 The men of course denied the essentials of “Aryanization,” though they must, as people active in the economic life of a small town, have known about it and presumably, as members of the Nazi Party, have approved of it. They claimed that the courts had ensured that Jewish businessmen had been paid market value for their properties (126–27), which was not the case: under “Aryanization” Jewish property was almost invariably sold for knockdown prices, and Mayer’s conclusion that his small-town German subjects did not know this strains credulity. “Everyone,” Mayer reported, “knew that Jews were moving away, from 1933 on” (130), and a small minority had emigrated before the outbreak of the war. One of Mayer’s men also observed Jews engaged in forced labor shortly after the beginning of the war, before the deportations began (130). Altogether 267 Jews were deported from the town and its surrounding areas between 1942 and 1943 and murdered in camps in the east. Most of Mayer’s interviewees admitted that this was wrong, however much they blamed the Jews for their misfortunes.
In this, as in many other respects, Mayer’s ten subjects, with the exception of the schoolteacher, had relatively untroubled memories of the Nazi period. But this was not characteristic of most Germans. World War II, the ultimate product of National Socialism, had caused enormous destruction in Germany. More than half a million German civilians had been killed by the carpet-bombing of German cities. Forty percent of the housing stock in larger towns and cities had been destroyed. It took years to clear away the rubble—there were 13.5 million tons of it in Cologne, for example, and incomparably more in cities like Berlin and Hamburg, where some 70 percent of the houses and apartment blocks had been left uninhabitable. Marburg, by contrast, lost only 4 percent of its housing stock, 281 buildings in all, mainly around the railway station, which was targeted by Allied bombers. It was a small town, of little importance in terms of arms production, and so bombers left it largely in peace. Some five million German soldiers, sailors, and airmen perished in the war as well, but this did not seem to have touched Mayer’s subjects either, since none of them mentioned any losses in their families.42 These disasters turned many if not most Germans against the Nazi regime even before the end of the war, but not in Marburg.
Moreover, at the time that Mayer conducted his interviews, the German economy was still weak. No wonder that his interviewees could not envisage a time in the future when there could be an economic recovery (62). The belief of many Germans that things could never be so good as they had been under Nazism would change only in the 1960s, after a period of rapid economic growth known in Germany as “the economic miracle.” A series of intensive interviews conducted with elderly Germans in the 1990s still showed that they remembered the Nazis fondly for ending the economic chaos and disasters of the Weimar Republic—although, in fact, the recovery of the 1930s was almost entirely caused by the headlong rearmament on which Hitler embarked, which was designed for and led to World War II. In this respect at least, Mayer’s ten Nazis were typical.43
They were less representative, of course, in their rejection of the idea that the Nazi dictatorship was a “naked, total tyranny” (47). At the time of the interviews, this is indeed how the Third Reich was viewed by historians and political scientists, not least as a consequence of the Cold War. A major driving force behind the study of Nazi Germany in the 1950s was the belief among Western scholars that it was very much like the Soviet Union under Stalin. Describing the two as “totalitarian” projected an image of the complete regimentation of an entire population that had little basis in reality. It was small wonder that Mayer thought it necessary to emphasize that his interviews did not bear this out. Had he conducted his interviews in, say, the industrial region of the Ruhr, whose inhabitants included millions of former Communists and Social Democrats who had been subjected to far more repression than the conformist citizens of Marburg, he might have obtained rather different answers. A few years later, when historians had begun to uncover the wide variety of levels of dissent and nonconformity that had existed in Nazi Germany, it would not have been necessary to emphasize that Nazism did not impose total uniformity or control on the German people.44
Mayer’s interpretation of what his informants told him about their—and, by extension, the German people’s—need to conform to the institutional imperatives of the Third Reich reflected above all the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, the assimilation of all social institutions into the Nazi Party. If you wanted to continue in the local society or the local soccer club, then you had to join it as a Nazi organization, because there was no alternative. This did not mean, however, that you would be forced to swallow the whole package of Nazi ideology. This was particularly the case with anti-Semitism. Yet Mayer’s interviewees were lower-middle-class men—the group most likely to harbor anti-Semitic resentments. They had long been supporting anti-Semitism in Marburg and the surrounding area, whereas in Berlin or Hamburg anti-Semitism was traditionally weak. The late nineteenth century had seen the emergence of rabid, if short-lived, explicitly anti-Semitic political parties, led by men such as Otto Böckel, that expressed the resentment felt by urban and rural “little men” toward the big-city capitalists who they believed had plunged them into economic crisis. One of Mayer’s friends described how his father and grandfather had been followers of Böckel (139), and doubtless his ideas had stamped their mark on some of the others too. The resentments remained even after Böckel’s movement collapsed. This was possibly the most persistently anti-Semitic region in the whole of Germany.45 The attitude that “Karl-Heinz Schwenke” held toward the Jews, blaming them for his economic woes (115–16), was essentially a product of this prewar milieu, which was not typical of most parts of Germany.
The Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jews did not become a central concern of historical investigation and public remembrance until later in the twentieth century. However, as noted above, Mayer’s German friends knew that they had to broach this subject with him and usually did so unasked, “somewhere between the beginning of the second conversation and the end of the fourth,” after which they referred to it repeatedly (123). They dealt with the feeling that they could be regarded as guilty parties in a variety of ways. “Karl-Heinz Schwenke” took refuge in denying that six million Jews had been killed by the Nazis (116). This was unusual. The others did not deny the reality of Nazi anti-Semitism. But, “Schwenke” and three others also affirmed a belief that the only Jews who had been arrested and taken to a concentration camp were those who had been in some way traitors to the German cause (125). The irony was that, as Mayer pointed out (141), while some of the interviewees justified their anti-Semitism in religious terms, the Jews themselves, in Marburg and in other parts of Germany, had been progressively abandoning their faith and assimilating into Christian society (121). The old Nazis whom he interviewed might have poured scorn on the party’s pseudo-academic racial theories (141–42), but, deep down, their ascription of negative characteristics to Jews was racist.
The men’s resentments, like those of many if not most Germans in this period, went beyond the issue of the defeat and destruction; they resented the “victors’ justice” of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and other prosecutions of Germans for offenses against people and property. “Karl-Heinz Schwenke,” who had been interned for three years after the war, blamed his misfortunes on the Jews—Jews in general, without reference to any specific individuals—but, as Mayer said, all ten of his friends were bursting with similar if less extreme resentments, “whining, whining, whining” (149). They regarded themselves as having been wronged and blamed the Jews for it.
***
These views, of course, were not necessarily shared by the millions of former Communists and Social Democrats who had survived the Third Reich and emerged at the end of it to reestablish their party organizations and resurrect their ideologies and programs. The merger of the two parties in East Germany that was enforced by the Red Army effectively reduced the Social Democrats to a tool of the emerging Stalinist regime, and, together with the Cold War, this shrank the Communist Party in West Germany down to a rump with no mass support even before it was formally banned in 1957. The Social Democrats, however, retained their Marxist program, with its demands for the wholesale transformation of the West German economy and society along socialist lines, until it was replaced by the more moderate and more realistic Godesberg Program in 1959. During the time that Mayer was living in Marburg, they were led by Kurt Schumacher, who held out for German unity and blamed the Allies for not doing anything to free the working class in East Germany from the shackles of Communism. On the other hand, Schumacher was also highly critical of the Allies’ role in what he saw as the restoration of a capitalist economy in West Germany.46
Overly impressed by the nationalist element in Schumacher’s stance, Mayer misread the Social Democrats both in his own time and in the past. The party had become the largest in the Reichstag by 1912, and far from lacking “an independent program of its own for altering the very basis of government,” as Mayer claims (153), it pushed such a program as hard as it could until it came to power at the end of World War I. The Weimar Republic, the modern democracy founded in 1919 by the Social Democrats and their left-liberal political partners, owed its existence through the 1920s largely to party members’ loyalty to their principles. Mayer had to admit that the Prussian Social Democrats “stood firm in resistance” to the betrayal of these principles (154), but it is important to remember that Prussia was most of Germany at that time and included most of its population.
Mayer had to argue away the significance of the Social Democrats and their courageous if ultimately futile opposition to Nazism because he wanted to sustain the idea of a German national character, an idea made popular by Allied propaganda during the war. Millions of organized workers had long opposed the hierarchical structures of German society and politics that Mayer claimed were accepted by all (162). There are many reasons to question his assertion that “free spirits” in Germany had to “give up or get out” (162–63): the vibrant satirical and oppositional culture of the Weimar Republic, along with the writings of scores of German authors who were critical of the conservatism of the old establishment, gave the lie to that claim. Only a tiny proportion of the emigrants who left Germany for the Americas in the nineteenth century did so for political reasons. The overwhelming majority simply sought a better life overseas, just like the millions of other Europeans who emigrated between 1815 and 1914.47
Mayer’s generalizations about the Germans became even more sweeping in his final chapters. He did not accept many wartime theories about the German character. But he did find Germans heavy and humorless, and he subscribed to the then-fashionable geopolitical theory that German attitudes were shaped by the country’s lack of clear natural boundaries, ignoring the fact that the same could be said of many other countries, such as Poland or Ukraine. Mayer’s rambling final chapters are weak, less interesting than the earlier ones, and dated. In truth, his ten subjects are not a good basis on which to generalize about supposed German arrogance, German racism, German prejudice, and German desire for order, as he does.
Mayer’s views caused a rift with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, which had guided his research but did not share the broader conclusions he drew from it. He caused something of a stir with a lecture in Offenbach in April 1952, in which he gave a preliminary report on his findings48; but there was even more of an uproar when he addressed an audience in Los Angeles on October 22, a month or so after he had returned to the United States. According to a report in the Frankfurter Neue Presse-Generalanzeiger, he had condemned as far-fetched the idea that the Germans could be educated into democracy. They were far less politically educated than the British, the French, or the Scandinavians, but on the other hand they were a good deal more gifted technically, more hardworking, and more numerous. His ten “little Nazis” showed no signs of being weaned away from their belief in authority or their admiration for Hitler. The newspaper commented that such generalizations, which threw all Germans into a single pot, were so obviously biased that even someone with only the most limited critical faculties would see through them.49
Adorno and Horkheimer tried to distance themselves from Mayer, who, they claimed later, had been connected to the institute only in a purely formal sense, insofar as the Allied High Command in Germany had asked for his funding to be channeled through it. He had never been based at the institute. He was a decent fellow, they said, but “seems in many respects to be a strange and naïve man.”50 In fact, however, the institute had played a far greater role in Mayer’s project than it was willing to admit after his sweepingly anti-German conclusions became public: Adorno and Horkheimer had advised him on several crucial points; in particular, it was largely due to them that the study encompassed ten subjects rather than a much smaller number. It is fair to say that the actual interviews and the detailed observations to which they led—if not Mayer’s conclusions—can justly be viewed as part of a project steered both intellectually and administratively by the Institute for Social Research.
From Mayer’s point of view, the publication of his work was, among other things, a contribution to the pacifist cause. With the Stalinization of Eastern Europe in the early 1950s and the outbreak of the Korean War, the Western powers, led by the United States, deemed it necessary to arm West Germany in order to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the face of what seemed to be a growing Soviet threat. In the light of the long history of German militarism and Germany’s aggression against other parts of Europe, West German “rearmament” proved extremely controversial. The final sentence in Mayer’s book, warning against the possibility that Germans might “re-embrace militarist anti-Communism as a way of national life,” expresses his strong opposition to rearmament. Like many others, he was suspicious that what he thought of as the German national character would reemerge with its essential militarism unaltered. But rearmament went ahead with the creation of a new German armed force, the Bundeswehr, in 1955. Hedged about with restrictions and conditions and bound tightly into NATO, the new force was further limited in its capacity for independent action by the continuing presence of large numbers of American, British, and French troops in West Germany. The fears of Mayer and other opponents of rearmament proved to be unfounded.
Mayer could not believe, in the end, that the German character could change with sufficient depth or rapidity to make it safe to rearm the country. Yet enormous changes did take place once the “economic miracle” of the 1960s had convinced the overwhelming majority of Germans that democracy was compatible with peace and prosperity. Neo-Nazism, along with nostalgia for the Third Reich, is a marginal force in present-day Germany and has been for some decades. Contemporary German identity is built not least on a widespread acknowledgment of the terrible crimes of Nazism, above all the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews. Marburg today is a very different town than it was in the early 1950s, when Mayer stayed there. After the unification of East and West Germany in 1989 and 1990, Germans began at last to reassess their past. Much work had been done on this by professional historians, but it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that Germans, seeking to define their national identity by something other than allegiance to capitalist or socialist democracy, took to their hearts, not without controversy and debate, the nation’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. The great majority now admitted that most ordinary Germans had in one way or another been involved. The gradual passing of the generation of Mayer’s ex-Nazi friends and the emergence of a new generation of Germans who were educated in the democratic spirit of postwar Europe made such a reassessment easier.
The fate of Marburg’s Jewish population has now been fully and publicly acknowledged. The town’s synagogue had already been rededicated in February 1946, although nothing now remains of the building apart from a memorial, with a small model of the original structure at its center. Today there are numerous memorials to those of Marburg’s Jews who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. On the town’s streets there are twenty-four Stolpersteine, brass plaques set into the sidewalk outside of houses where Jews who were killed had once lived. The Stolpersteine commemorate by name some fifty-five individual Jews and family members. At the town’s main railway station seventy-nine names of Jews who were deported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt on September 6, 1942, are inscribed on a metal rail on Platform 8.51
All this can make Milton S. Mayer’s book seem to belong to a distant past. His generalizations about national character seem out-of-date. Germany today is a bulwark of liberal values and democratic stability. And yet the voices of those whom Mayer interviewed speak to us across the decades in ways that still can provoke and shock. A snapshot of a small sample of Germans in the aftermath of Hitler’s Third Reich and World War II, Mayer’s book still stands as a timely reminder of how otherwise unremarkable and in many ways reasonable people can be seduced by demagogues and populists, and how they can go along with a regime that commits more and more criminal acts until it plunges itself into war and genocide.
1. Milton S. Mayer, “Keeping Posted,” Saturday Evening Post, March 28, 1942.
2. H. Larry Ingle, “Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog,” Quaker Theology 8 (Spring/Summer 2003), drawing on Milton S. Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). There is a good selection of Mayer’s writings in W. Eric Gustafson (ed.), What Can a Man Do? by Milton Mayer. A Selection of His Most Challenging Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
3. Morton Grodzins to Martin Niemöller, April 26, 1954, in University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Press (UCP), Box 321 Folder 9.
4. “Final Fieldwork Report, by Professor Milton Mayer, September 15, 1952” (“Final Fieldwork Report”), 1. Archive of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Sig. F8. The concept of the “little man” came perhaps from the immensely popular novel Little Man, What Now? by Hans Fallada, first published in 1933, the year of the Nazi seizure of power, portraying the dilemmas of an ordinary man caught up in the world of totalitarian politics.
5. Horkheimer to Adorno, June 4, 1954, in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel 1927–1969, Vol. 4, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 263–64.
6. “Final Fieldwork Report,” 1–2.
7. Mayer to Grodzins, December 29, 1953, in UCP, Box 321 Folder 9; Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
8. “Final Fieldwork Report,” 1–2.
9. Ibid., 2–3. The analogue of the Evangelical Church in the United States is the Lutheran Church.
10. “Personal, Confidential, Not to be circulated,” January 1952, 1–8, and “Addendum” to the same, in Archive of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Sig. F8.
11. “Final Fieldwork Report,” 2–3.
12. Ibid., 4: “Revision of the Project.”
13. Ibid., 5–6.
14. Ibid., 7–9.
15. Ibid., 9–11.
16. Ibid., 10–13, also for the following.
17. Ibid., 13.
18. Ibid., 14–17.
19. “Memorandum über eine Dinner-Konferenz mit Professor Milton Mayer am 1. Mai 1952 von 19 bis 21.30 Uhr im Restaurant ‘Viktoria’: Prof. Adorno,” 12, para. 3. Archive of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Sig. F8.
20. “Final Fieldwork Report,” 16–17.
21. “Morton Grodzins, political scientist” (obituary), New York Times, March 10, 1964.
22. Mayer to Grodzins, December 29, 1953, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
23. Ibid.
24. Mayer to Grodzins, January 3, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
25. Ibid.; Mayer to Grodzins, March 8, 1954. Dodd-Mead was (and is) a University of Chicago dormitory.
26. Ibid.
27. Grodzins to Mayer, March 11, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
28. Ibid.
29. Mayer to Grodzins, March 13, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
30. Alexander Morin to Harry Bachman, August 31, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 10.
31. Ibid.; Harry Bachman to Alexander Morin, September 2, 1954.
32. Grodzins to Niemöller, April 26, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
33. Hans Kohn, “Best Time of their Lives,” New York Times, May 8, 1955.
34. Information from the University of Chicago Press.
35. Grodzins to Niemöller, April 26, 1954, in UCP Box 321 Folder 9.
36. Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism. Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 34–35.
37. Koshar, Social Life, 80.
38. Dok. 5, “Aus dem Urteil des Landgerichts Marburg vom 16. September 1952,” in Wolf-Arno Kropat, Kristallnacht in Hessen. Der Jodenpogrom vom November 1938 (Wiesbaden: Kommission fur die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, 1988), 39–41.
39. “Damaged Torah scroll from a synagogue in Marburg desecrated during Kristallnacht,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last modified November 15, 2016, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn4375.
40. For a convenient summary, see Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2006), 580–98.
41. Barbara Händler-Lachmann and Thomas Werther, Vergessene Geschäfte, Verlorene Geschichte: Jüdisches Wirtschaftsleben in Marburg und seine Vernichtung im Nationalsozialismus (Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1992).
42. Benno Hafeneger and Wolfram Schäfer, eds., Marburg in den Nachkriegsjahren, Marburger Stadtschriften zur Geschichte und Kultur, vols. 65 and 68 (Marburg: Rathaus, 1998); more generally, see the website http://www.tracesofevil.com/search/label/Marburg.
43. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany. An Oral History (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
44. See the summation of the work of the 1950s and early 1960s in Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Praeger, 1965) and, for later revisions of this view, Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
45. See Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
46. For a good scholarly account—one that is roughly contemporary with Mayer’s research—of the history of Social Democracy and the development of its division into moderate socialist and Communist parties, see Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1955).
47. See Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (New York: Viking, 2016), 346–54.
48. “Memorandum über eine Dinner-Konferenz mit Professor Milton Mayer am 1. Mai 1952 von 19 bis 21.30 Uhr im Restaurant ‘Viktoria’: Prof. Adorno,” 12, para. 3, in Archive of the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Sig. F8.
49. Adorno to Horkheimer, November 12, 1952, in Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer: Briefwechsel 1927–1969, Vol. 4, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 2000), 68–70.
50. Ibid., 263–64: Horkheimer to Adorno, June 4, 1963.
51. “Category:Holocaust memorials in Marburg,” Wikipedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Holocaust_memorials_in_Marburg.