"They Thought that They would Be Free! " (Nazi's /German Citizens...)

They Thought They Were Free By Milton Mayer

Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month Review



They Thought They Were Free" is an intensely personal book for me. Although I was born after Hitler was five years dead, the horrible dance between fascism and democracy has fascinated me since childhood. And, through a series of odd coincidences, my adult life has been heavily intertwined with those of both Nazis and the victims of Hitler's Nazis.

Throughout my life, I've had several close friends who lost family members in the Holocaust. I've spent a lot of time in Israel, sobbed at Yad Vashem, and my wife Louise and I played a role in two of our closest friends, Hal and Shelley Cohen, starting Orr Shalom, which is now one of the largest Jewish programs for abused children in Israel. Before I learned English as a baby I was speaking Yiddish, learned from our Holocaust-survivor neighbors in Detroit who cared for me when my parents worked, and so can today recite both Hebrew prayers and speak German with accents and inflections more characteristic of a first than a second language.

On the other side of the coin, this Sunday morning I'm having breakfast with an old and dear friend, Armin Lehmann. At the age of sixteen, Armin was the Hitler Youth courier who handed to Adolf Hitler the papers that caused Hitler to commit suicide two days later. Armin was there when the suicide happened. He was there when Josef and Magda Goebbels poisoned their six children and then committed suicide. He watched it all. If you see the movie "Downfall," you'll see a teenage actor depicting my friend Armin.

Armin and I first met in 1984 when we were paired up by a marketing/training company to lecture in Amsterdam (and, later, many other cities) to teach advertising, marketing, and communications for American Express and KLM. I had no idea he had been Hitler's last courier, or that he would later write a book about it titled In Hitler's Bunker: A Boy Soldier's Eyewitness Account of the Fuhrer's Last Days. We were friends for 15 years before he told me of his experiences. Armin is now a tireless campaigner for world peace.

Much more "food for thought in our brains at.......
http://www.buzzflash.com/hartmann/05/11/har05011.html

Worth all of the time I spent trying to locate a copy of this book.

quotes from it ...explaining how the Germans sort of got used to the Nazi's saying it "comes in increments."

It's a long read but very worthwhile. It's been re-released.

Actually- I think I heard about it from Hartmann also!
It gets more and more relevant, unfortunately...

<snip>
It's the story of how what happened in Germany could just as easily happen in Peoria, Illinois, particularly if the city were to become isolationistic and suffered some sort of natural or man-made disaster or attack that threw its people into the warm but deadly embrace of authoritarianism.

The individual surrenders his individuality without a murmur, without, indeed, a second thought - and not just his individual hobbies and tastes, but his individual occupation, his individual family concerns, his individual needs. The primordial community, the tribe, re-emerges, it's first function the preservation of all its members. Every normal personality of the day becomes an 'authoritarian personality.' A few recalcitrants have to be disciplined (vigorously, under the circumstances) for neglect or betrayal of their duty. A few groups have to be watched or, if necessary, taken in hand - the antisocial elements, the liberty-howlers, the agitators among the poor, and the criminal gangs. For the rest of the citizens - 95 percent or so of the population - duty is now the central fact of life. They obey, at first awkwardly, but, surprisingly soon, spontaneously.

:kick:

reading it as part of some Methodist church group I think it was. It caught my eye. Just checked it out at the library. It looks interesting and very relevant to this era.

I think from B&N.com. It's available now, at any rate. GREAT book. Scary. Many "good Germans" believed for years after the war that Hilter was right. The only thing they could find fault with was the war itself. Nationalism is a pathology.