Robert Smith Thompson - Nazi Germany: History Examined

What happens when an educated and cultured people, famed not only for their industrial prowess and military might but also their traditions in philosophy, science, and the arts, put aside their critical faculties to follow what the English essayist and novelist George Orwell called the tom-tom beat of modern tribalism? What happens when such a people abandon the ordinary politics of barter and compromise for the extraordinary politics of faith, hope, and hatred? What happens when, instead of facing problems rationally and working out reasonable and moral solutions, such a people become seduced by visions of a utopia with no problems at all and solutions based on the extermination of their enemies, actual or perceived? And what happens when, poisoned by the prejudices of the past and the propaganda of the present, such a people turn to warfare and mass murder? In 1923-1945, Nazi Germany happened.

This isnt to say that all Germans of the era became Nazis. From the very moment of Hitlers illegal seizure of power in 1933, somebut never the majorityraised their voices in protest. Most of those who did protest ended up in flight and exile, were imprisoned, or were killed. Those who took flight, such as the physicist Albert Einstein, the novelist Thomas Mann, and the symphonic conductor Erich Leinsdorf, often found refuge in the United States, which became a haven for many ordinary German refugees as well. Among those who remained in Germany, a significant minority resisted the Nazi regime by covert anti-Hitler activism. Others, doubtless, silently withheld their own hearts and minds from the regime.

The hard truth, however, is that the majority of Germans heartily approved of and supported the Nazis. Although many of his provocative and even inflammatory conclusions have been called into question by some historians, Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitlers Willing Executioners (1996) , presented chilling evidence that the vast majority of the German people did not merely tolerate, but applauded, the mass murder of Jews known as the Holocaust.

So we come to the question of this book: Why were the Germans, apparently as civilized as any people on earth, consumed by a movement of mayhem, murder, and military aggression?

Theres no single answer to this question. But Nazi Germany: History Explained provides the historical perspective that allows readers to find their own answers. For what history reveals is that, in key ways, Germany was unlike other European countries. Except for Russia, it had a bigger population than any other European country, and no other country on the continent could match its industrial base and capacity for wealth and power.

Yet, compared to England, France, and Spain, Germany was a Johnny-come-lately as a unified nation. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany did not even exist as a state. Once it came into that existence, its leaders, beginning with the brilliant Otto von Bismarck, began to demand a place in the sun. The tragedy that befell all who lived in Germany was that most of the German people eventually succumbed to the delusion that they could find that glorious place by following Adolf Hitler.