The family succeeded in boarding a ship to Oran in French Algeria on 18 October 1940 but were prevented from entering Morocco because they lacked a visa and were house arrested for several weeks in Oudja.

[5] He argued that what he referred to as "The Thirty Years’ Crisis" was caused by the problems of a dynamic new society produced by industrialization coexisting with a rigid political order.

[6] In Mayer's opinion, during 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was on the verge of civil war and massive industrial unrest, Italy had been experiencing the Red Week of June 1914, the French Left and Right were almost warring with each other, Germany suffered from ever-increasing political strife, Russia was close to suffering a huge strike, and Austria-Hungary was confronted with increasing ethnic and class tensions.

[7] Mayer insisted that liberalism and centrist ideologies in general were disintegrating due to the challenge from the extreme right in the UK, France and Italy while being a non-existent force in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia.

[8] Mayer ended his essay by arguing that World War I should be best understood as a pre-emptive "counterrevolutionary" strike by ruling elites in Europe to preserve their power by distracting public attention to foreign affairs.

[5] In Mayer's opinion, "It would take two world wars and the Holocaust […] finally to dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe's civil and political societies.

"[5] In his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, Mayer argued that Adolf Hitler ordered the Final Solution in December 1941 in response to the realisation that the Wehrmacht could not capture Moscow, hence ensuring Nazi Germany's defeat by the Soviet Union.

[16] The book considers the Holocaust as primarily an expression of anti-communism: Anti-Semitism did not play a decisive or even significant role in the growth of the Nazi movement and electorate.

People rallied to a syncretic creed of ultra-nationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-Marxism, anti-bolshevism, and anti-Semitism, as well as to a party program calling for the revision of Versailles, the repeal of reparations, the curb of industrial capitalism, and the establishment of a völkisch welfare state.

[20] At the same time, Mayer agreed with intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber in considering Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi crusade to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism" as major developments in the genesis of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

Such personal bona fides didn't prevent the Anti-Defamation League from including Mayer in its 1993 "Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust Revisionism", where his work is cited as an example of "legitimate historical scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews."

Mayer's crime is to "have argued, with no apparent anti-Semitic motivation"—- note how the absence of evidence itself becomes incriminating—- "that though millions of Jews were killed during WWII, there was actually no premeditated policy for this destruction.

[27] Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer alleged that when a Holocaust survivor such as Arno J. Mayer of Princeton University ... popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much more subtle form of Holocaust denial.

[28] Another controversy concerned what Robert Jan van Pelt termed Mayer's "well-meant but ill-considered reflection on the causes of death in Auschwitz".

In a largely favorable review, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft termed Plowshares into Swords an enlightening account of Israeli history that traces such people as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and, perhaps unexpectedly, Vladimir Jabotinsky and critiques the "chauvinistic and brutalising tendencies of Zionism".

[36] In a negative review of the book, British literary scholar Simon Goldhill,[37] an authority on Greek tragedy, said it was of little value as history and criticized Mayer for his political bias, arguing that Mayer ignored Arab acts and media rhetoric against Jewish settlers and Israelis, falsely portrayed the Six-Day War in 1967 as a "calculated imperialist plot", claimed that all Western criticism of the Islamic world for human rights issues is nothing more than self-interested, and described Arab feeling toward Jews buying property in Palestine in the 1920s as "righteous anger".