How did German democracy collapse and give way to Nazism? Jack Mayer, a recently retired Middlebury pediatrician, has a personal interest in answering that question. His parents were lucky: They fled Nazi Germany in 1939 just as their neighbors were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where most of them died.

Mayer has written two books about Nazi Germany. His first book, Life in a Jar, is a non-fiction story about forgotten Holocaust rescuer Irena Sendler and three Kansas teenagers who tell her story to the world. His latest book, Before the Court of Heaven, is historical fiction that explores the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the democratic government that was in power from 1919, just after Germany’s defeat in World War I, and ended in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

Mayer argues that the collapse of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in Germany “is a cautionary tale” for the U.S. today. In the aftermath of WWI, many Germans embraced conspiracy theories and believed that Germany had not lost the war militarily, but because they had been "stabbed in the back" by Jews, socialists and liberals.

"Hitler talked about the usefulness of repeating the Big Lie over and over and over until people believed it," Mayer says.