A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it.

Nazi ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and culminated in the Second World War and the Holocaust. In this book, Gellately addresses often-debated questions about how Führer discovered the ideology and why millions adopted aspects of National Socialism without having laid eyes on the "leader" or reading his work.

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton 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, according to Mayer, 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 this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Every phase of the Third Reich s foreign policy was determined by its authoritarian leader, Adolf Hitler. Following his rise to power, his political acuity and utter lack of scruple enabled him to achieve numerous diplomatic successes against the well-intentioned but largely ineffectual Anglo-French democracies. First by duplicity, then by bluff and bluster, and finally by brinkmanship, Hitler succeeded in establishing a strengthened and united Greater Germany (Grossdeutschland) in preparation for a Second Great War. This book examines in depth the revanchist foreign policy of Hitler s Germany from 1933 to 1939: the withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations, German rearmament, the introduction of compulsory military service and the enlargement of the German Armed Forces, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the notorious Hossbach Conference, the Austrian Anschluss , the Munich Conference, the brazen seizures of Bohemia-Moravia and the Memel District, the Danzig crisis, the cynical brokering of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the German invasion of Western Poland.

For Germans in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the allure of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's promises for a better, brighter future promised so much. The reality was vastly different... Germany was a deeply divided nation when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933. As the shadow of the swastika lengthened, its citizens quickly came to realize that the Nazis' brutal programme was not optional. Everyone was expected to play their part in "national revival", especially those chosen as sacrificial victims. Much has been written about daily life during World War II from the perspective of the Allied nations, but little about life in Germany during the Third Reich. With the benefit of hindsight, questions have been raised as to why a civilized, cultured nation stood by and let the Nazi Party impose their rule in such inhumane fashion, and why so few individuals made any attempt to rebel. Life in the Third Reich draws on the recollections of those who actually experienced the rise and fall of this brutal and vicious regime: from the indoctrination of children to the disappearance of family, friends and neighbours and the effect of Kinder, Küche und Kirche [Children, Kitchen and Church] on the female population, to the defiance of the 'swing kids' and the resulting deprivation of the Nazi policy of 'Guns, not butter'. These are the stories of ordinary Germans caught up in an extraordinary time.

Examines all aspects of German life under Hitler, including the roles that economics and social class played in shaping German life during the Third Reich. Reprint.

This book reveals that daily German life under the Third Reich involved a complex mixture of bribery and terror; of fear and concessions; of barbarism and appeals to conventional moral values employed by the Nazis to maintain their grip on society. Eight leading historians present essays that shed fresh light on topics as familiar as the role of political violence in Nazi seizure of power and the German view of Hitler himself. It also focuses on lesser-known aspects of life in the Third Reich, such as village life, the treatment of "social outcasts," and the Germans' own retrospective view of this period of their history.