** 25th book of 2021: A Country Gone Mad **
“Others demanded that the victims lie down on the ground to be shot through the neck, I did not approve of these methods. Why? Both for the victims and those who carried out the executions, it was psychologically an immense burden to bear.”
This statement is from a Nazi official who had enough empathy to understand the effects of different execution styles, yet ordered thousands of executions nonetheless.
Even in a book of atrocities, this statement stood out as what felt like a microcosm of the third reich. A core set of people, just competent enough to retain power, militarize and industrialize a country, yet crazy enough to wager all-in wars and internal purges again and again until inevitable disaster.
After the invasion of France that was more successful than even the generals predicted, “Hitler is the gambler who has made a big scoop and would like to risk nothing more.” Yet like every gambler who insists on coming back to all-in bets, the final bet lost everything. This wasn’t war with Britain, who barely defended against operation Sea Lion, and certainly not the Americans who were years away from meaningful power projection. Hitler’s declaration of war against Russia, a country with enough troops and industry to match Germany, was the losing bet that defined the war and history. Every other theater was just a sideshow to the tidal waves of steel and terror that swept from Berlin to Moscow and back in 4 years.
We can take solace in learning the uniquely fragile position of the Weimar republic: an extremely febrile democracy with the omnipresent threat of military coup. Democratic norms had already shattered before Hitler came to power. Still, with just 44% of the vote, Hitler was able to short-circuit this moribund democratic process and create a dictatorship with ease. That is a scary precedent for any democracy, let alone any one-party state. Other parts of the third reich are uncomfortable for their modern echoes. Chinese Xi Jinping thought has permeated the social-sciences, Germany went one step further by introducing ethnicity into physics: “jewish physics is just a degeneration of fundamental german physics.”
As much as I appreciated the witty soundbites and end-to-end account, I kept hoping for more nuance. The author’s claim that Hitler became so upset he ‘ate the carpet’ is actually just a mistranslation and I didn’t leave this book with a richer understanding of Germany, it’s culture, generals, or even Hitler. Indeed Shirer goes so far to dismiss Germany altogether in his comparison with Italy: * a country with lacked the resources to become one and whose people, unlike the germans were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted to such false ambitions. * . Alas, 1614 pages of journalism does not a history make.