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Quote by Milton Mayer

Work

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

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Author

Milton Mayer

Milton Mayer, born on August 24, 1908, and died on April 20, 1986, was an accomplished historian, journalist, and writer. Known for his profound analysis of Nazi Germany and his advocacy for democratic values, Mayer had a diverse career that spanned across various fields, including politics, education, and cultural commentary. His work, marked by its insightful historical research, writing, and public speaking, continues to be widely read and studied today. more

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“The condemnation of the National Socialist Party goes much further than it seems to. In reality, it reaches all the solid forms, all the geological forms of political life. Every nation, every party which urges us to remember our soil, our tradition, our trade, our race is suspect. Whoever claims right of the first occupant and calls to witness things as obvious as the ownership of the city offends against a universal morality which denies the right of the people to write their laws. This applies not just to the Germans; it is all of us who are dispossessed. No one has any more the right to sit down in his field and say: “This ground belongs to me.” No one has any more the right to stand up in the city and say: “We are the old ones; we built the houses of this city; anyone who does not want to obey our laws should get out.”

“Had Heidegger attached his great ego to the cause of international socialism, he would have enjoyed the whitewash granted to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hobsbawm and the other apologists for the Gulag.1 But the cause of national socialism could enjoy no such convenient excuse, and the sin was compounded, in Heidegger’s case, by the fact that it was precisely the national, rather than the socialist aspect of the creed that had attracted him.”