This Is How It Happens

A study of men in Hitler’s Germany shows how people allow tyranny to spread

German soldiers entering Saaz, 1938. Image: Wikimedia Commons/German Federal Archive

Shortly after the Second World War ended, American journalist Milton Mayer set out to investigate how Germany had become a totalitarian state. Mayer wanted to know why, as Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Party slowly amassed power and drove the country to war, Germans didn’t stand up for their…