Creían que eran libres

In 1951, Milton Mayer, a well-known Jewish-American journalist, moved with his family to a small German town with the aim of studying what had made the rise of Nazism possible, understood as "a movement of the masses and not the tyranny of a few beings". diabolical attacks on millions of defenseless people". To do this, he made friends with ten ordinary Germans. They were not influential citizens, but had been members of the National Socialist party. Starting from the conversations he had with his Nazi "friends", to whom he dedicates this book, Mayer brilliantly exposed the spurious justifications, the veiled or declared anti-Semitism, the voluntary blindness and the moral abdication that allowed citizens, in many ways exemplary , applaud or maintain a complicit silence in the face of Hitler's policies.