Milton Sanford Mayer (August 24, 1908 – April 20, 1986) was an American journalist and educator, best known for his long-running column in The Progressive magazine, founded by Robert M. La Follette Sr., in Madison, Wisconsin.
[1] He studied at the University of Chicago (1925–1928) but did not earn a degree; in 1942, he told the Saturday Evening Post that he was "placed on permanent probation in 1928 for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window.
(Mayer became a member of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers while he was researching this book in Germany in 1950; he did not reject his Jewish birth and heritage.
"[citation needed] Before a group at a War Resisters League dinner in 1944, he denied being a pacifist, even while admitting that he was a conscientious objector to the present conflict.
[citation needed] In an Afterword to the 2017 re-issue of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, Richard J. Evans presented important information on how the book was written and raised multiple issues concerning the work.
In addition, Mayer's treatment of the moderately sized Hessian university town of Marburg (depicted in the book as Kronenburg) as representative for all of Germany is questionable.
[7] Despite these observations, Evans describes Mayer’s book 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".