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In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of "Kronenberg" (in reality Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany. The town, located in Hesse with a population of 20,000 and a university, was controlled by the United States during the postwar period of occupation. The interviews occurred during Mayer's term at Frankfurt University's Institute for Social Research as a visiting professor. All ten were in the lower middle class. The author was not a German speaker, and the men did not speak English.

The interviewees had the following occupations: baker, cabinetmaker, bank clerk, bill collector, law enforcement officer, salesperson, student, tailor, and teacher. Walter L. Dorn of the Saturday Review wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the "anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class". The tailor had served a prison sentence for setting a synagogue on fire, but the others were never found to have actively attacked Jewish people. Mayer read the official case files of each interviewee.

The author determined that his interviewees had fond memories of the Nazi period and did not see Adolf Hitler as evil, and they perceived themselves as having a high degree of personal freedom during Nazi rule, except for the teacher. Additionally, barring said teacher, the subjects still disliked Jewish people. Mayer found that he sympathized with the personable qualities of his interviewees, though not their beliefs. Mayer did not disclose to the interviewees that he read their case files, nor that he was Jewish. Ernest S. Pisko of the Christian Science Monitor wrote "Had they known [that Mayer was Jewish] they would not have spoken frankly to him." Pisko concluded that, therefore, the relationship built by the author and the interviewees was on "false pretenses." At the time of the interviews, the interviewees were still not in favor of the democratic Bonn government. Pisko added that the interviewees could have objected to political developments that came had they known they would come, but that they failed to foresee how Nazi rule would develop.

The end of the book describes how the post-World War II United States took a pro-militarization stance, in the context of the Cold War, after initially rejecting the idea of militarizing Germany.

this is the book that answered most of my questions on that (But today we are seeing it happen in real time in America and yet no one is truly trying to stop it.) subject ☞https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free