THE HISTORICAL MYTHS SURROUNDING GERMANY, 1918-1945
Historical myths are common at all times and in all places in the world. Examples among Americans include the "embattled farmer" myth of a revolution fought to its successful conclusion by Cincinattus-like militia, everyone a "Minute Man," with a hand on the plow and rifle in the other hand. Rifles were uncommon--the militias were largely equipped, initially, with the "Brown Bess" musket used throughout the British empire. Militia have only ever proven reliable in our history when acting as volunteers, or in the immediate defense of their homes--and even in the latter case, their record is poor. The Revolution was kept alive for more than eight years by the efforts of Washington and a handful of capable subordinates by keeping a long-service army in the field, and forcing the English to wage a war of posts--a type of conflict which was economically doomed for them. After that war, embittered former officers established the Society of the Cincinnati. This refers to Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, a figure in the legendary period of Roman history, who put his considerable properties in Rome up as surety for his scapegrace nephew, who then absconded, effectively impoverishing Cincinnatus. He retired to a small property, a farm, on the Janiculum, from whence he was several times called to assume the Dictatorship to protect Rome.
This leads us to another popular American myth, the "Roman republic myth." In the half century before the American Revolution, and especially after the publication of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the comparison of England's oligarchic republic to Rome's oligarchic republic was very popular. Small wonder, then, that American officers thought of Cincinnatus when cherishing their grudges against an incompetent Congress and an indifferent public. The myth is that we began as a republic like that at Rome 2500 years ago. The oligarchic component is forgotten, although it was certainly not unknown or despised among those who formed the Society of the Cincinnati. Further, the myth suggests that Rome "fell" because of social and moral corruption and decay, and that this will befall the United States lest we are ever vigilant. I will avoid the detailed analysis of this myth, but point out that as it is predicated upon an initial assumption of republican virtue both at Rome and in the United States, the proposition is beggared at the outset by even a casual reading of the political life of both republics in their early years. That such myths do exist and persist can be seen by visiting the website of
The Society of the Cincinnati, which claims: "George Washington was elected the first President General of the Society in December 1783 until his death in 1799." This is a fine piece of willfully disingenuous historical claptrap--Washington stated throughout his political life that he was opposed to what he called faction, and he refused to participate in the Society, and in fact publicly condemned it. The founding members had established a settlement on the Ohio River which they had named Fort Washington--piqued by his refusal to join them, they then renamed that town Cincinnati. For those who prefer to believe the website and not me on this point, i refer you to James Thomas Flexner,
George Washington, four volumes, Boston, Little Brown, 1965-1972; and Douglas Southall Freeman,
George Washington, seven volumes, New York, Scribner, 1948-1957. I highly recommend Flexner, which is available in a large but single volume paperbound edition, entitled:
Washington: The Indispensable Man, Little Brown, 1996. I have not the least doubt that The Society of the Cincinnati will continue to claim that Washington was the president of the organization, just as i am assured that the Roman republican myth will thrive and prosper in this country.
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So the reader may well ask what this has to do with Hitler. With regard to the details of American historical myths, it has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler. With regard to historical myths as a concept, it has everything to do with Hitler. There are three crucial German historical myths which we deal with here. I will attempt to briefly deal with them (i write "attempt" both because i know the hard-headed do not easily surrender their cherished myths, and because i find it difficult to be brief when reviewing historical topics).
The Army Myth
It can be seen time and again in history that when a people become disillusioned by the failures of their government, they raise the army to the pedestal of national admiration. A striking example of this is to be found more than once in the histories of the several French republics, most notably after the fall of the Second Empire to the nascent German Empire at Sedan in 1870. Although Napoleon III was deposed, and the Army of Chalons destroyed as an effective fighting force, the French soldiered on, necessitating a continuation of the war by the Germans, and a seige and long and heavy bombardment of Paris to bring the French to terms. Far from relegating the battle of Sedan to a shameful oblivion, the French elevated "Sedan Day" to a national holiday, and the army became the single public institution in which the French had an unquestioning faith. So much so, that when Emile Zola came to the defense of Alfred Dreyfuss, he was not only vilified in the press, he was attacked in the streets, and and put on trial for libel--in that he had libelled the Army! Dreyfuss had been graduated with honors, and then had his marks reduced by a General Bonnefond who commented in writing that: "Jews were not desired." When another French officer in intelligence services was selling military information to the Germans, and sensed the investigation was closing in on him, he accused Dreyfuss of doing exactly what he had been doing. When, in 1892, Dreyfuss and another Jewish officer had protested Bonnefond's antisemitism, this had been noted in their records, and this was actually used against Dreyfuss in his trial. Zola's career was ruined by all of this, precisely because he had accused the army of an anti-semitism for which their own written records is the evidence. Dreyfuss was eventually eventually exhonorated, but not before serving part of a life sentence on Devil's Island. Pardoned in 1899, he was not exhonorated until 1906, and eventually he reached the rank of Major, serving in the Great War.
I have gone on at length on the Dreyfuss affair to point out how great the passions of a people can be when they have placed their last social faith in the institution of the army, and it appears that the army is under attack. At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the German Socialist Party was the largest, best-funded and -organized such party in the world; nevertheless, they responded with unbridled patriotism to the war, voting funds for the government, and enlisting in large numbers. For people such as these, who had mistrusted and denounced the Imperial government, the army was the shining social institution which they held up for veneration. The Socialists were not alone in this attitude, it was prevelant among even those who approved of the Imperial administration. When the war began, the Germans put into effect the Schlieffen Plan on August 2, 1914. This called for a heavy concentration of force in the west to knock France out the war, and relied upon an invasion through Belgium. When Belgium was created in 1832, France, Germany and Britain had been the guarantors of its existence and neutrality, so the German invasion was a grossly hypocritical illegality, and it triggered the entry of England into the Great War. The Schlieffen Plan might have worked had it not been seriously modified--i say might have, because as Tuchmann notes in her
The Guns of August, what stopped the German drive more than anything was simple exhaustion. One of the core assumptions of the plan was that the Russians could not quickly mobilize. Before the war, in staff talks with the French, the Russians had promised to mobilize within three weeks--no one in Europe believed that, including the French. In fact, the Russians managed their mobilization in a little over two weeks. The Germans had left a single army in the east to defend against the Russians, subscribing to a common idiocy of military planning, which is that everything will work as predicted in the base operational plan--in this case, the Russians would require more than a month to mobilize, the French would be knocked out of the war in under a month, the English dare do nothing, and the Germans would then turn to the east to crush the Russians. As is always the case in such military idiocy, nothing went right. The armies sent west continually shortened their line as they wheeled to the right, to maintain contact with their respective flanks. The French predictably attacked Alsace and Lorraine, and got badly beaten up, but then showed unexpected resistence in the wooded ridges of the Ardennes, causing the contraction of the German line. The English did honor their commitment to the Belgian, and though badly roughed up at Mons, still managed to throw a wrench into the modified Schlieffen plan.
In the east, Maximilian von Prittwitz commanded the Eighth Army, and Max Hoffman was his chief of staff. Under the system developed from the Frederician army, each such command level had a commanding officer (von Prittwitz) responsible for command decisions, chain of command and administration; and a chief of staff (Hoffman), notably responsible for operational planning. The Russian "juggernaut" lumbered forward in a rather inept fashion. It consisted of an army commanded by Rennenkampf and an army commanded by Samsonov, the two of whom despised one another, would not cooperate, and had to be controlled by reference to their headquarters, by radio communications in the clear--which is to say, not encoded. Dealing with them should have been a piece of cake, despite the nasty shock delivered to the Germans by the rapid Russian mobilization. But when Rennenkampf, moving through much easier terrrain and in built-up areas, attacked Eighth Army, some of the regulars panicked and fled. Although von François, the First Corps commander, quickly put in reserve troops who stopped the Russian advance and stabilized the line, von Prittwitz lost his nerve, and began to plan a retreat to Koenigsburg which would have left a wide-open path into Germany and to Berlin. But von François did not lose his nerve, and he in fact was contemptuous of Rennenkampf (in the event, he was proven justified)--leaving a cavalary screen to blind the Russians to his movements, he began to move his corps to the south, to attack an unsuspecting Samsonov and shatter that army before returning to deal with Rennenkampf. Max Hoffman quickly and correctly assessed the situation, backed von François's play, and convinced von Prittwitz to look around and see if he might find where he had left his nerve.
The effect on the entire German effort, however, was important. Troops were transferred from the west to the east, although they did not arrive in time to have an effect. This weakened further the drive in the west, the chances for which had never been as great as Schlieffen had believed, and were now doomed. An old German general was brought out of retirement, von Hindenburg (he had been retired so long, he still wore a prussian blue uniform, never having been issued the new uniform) to replace the skittish von Prittwitz. Hindenburg was given a new chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been on the western front, and had driven a motorized battalion into Liège when the Germans advanced into Belgium. The Belgians had not planned to defend the city center, and had not known how to respond to his rapid advance. He was actually no threat to their position--as he was accepting the "surrender" of the city from the mayor, the Belgians in their forts were mowing the Germans down with machine guns. It was the arrival of the Krupp heavy guns which doomed the Belgian fortresses, and allowed the German armies to move on. But Ludendorff was brilliant when it came to propaganda, and he had immediately declared that he had "taken" Liège. The Imperial government, already nervous because things weren't going to plan, had leapt at the opportunity, and widely published this canard.
Therefore, in the new command structure, Ludendorff was responsible for operational plans under Hindenburg's command. When he arrived in the east, he found von François' first corps advancing on Samsonov's army, and Hoffman rushing troops to that front. He saw that this plan would succeed, and was in fact brilliant. He simply let Hoffman do what he did best, and prepared to take credit for the success on behalf of Hindenburg and himself. He arrived at a railway station at Tannenberg. In 1410, the Germans had been handed an humiliating defeat by the Poles and Lithuanians near Tannenberg, so Ludendorff immediately christened this new battle Tannenberg, even thought the fighting was not remotely near that village. This was another stroke of genius, and his star was now rising rapidly, and that of Hindenburg as well, since as commander, he received the lion's share of the credit. Hoffman was promoted, given command of an army, and throughout the war in the east, showed genius, and encouraged lower ranking officers to show initiative of the kind von François had displayed. One of the results of this was that a new tactical method was developed, which employed rapidly moving shock troops who would bypass strong points, driving deep in to the enemy rear areas, and quickly shattering the enemy line. This made static defense positions worthless.
With the collapse of Russia in 1917, the Germans were now in a position to transfer a million or more troops to the west. Hindenberg and Ludendorff were now the supreme commander and chief of staff respectively for the Imperial armies, and Ludendorff developed a plan to use the extra manpower and the methods developed in the east to break the stalemate in the west. This involved three separate offensives beginning on the first day of spring, 1918, and required success before the weight of the American army could make itself felt. But the offensives failed. As with the plans in 1914, no margin for error or provision for failure of any part of the plan was made. When Gough's Fifth Army was shattered between St. Quentin and Ham, the French detatched the Fifth Corps of
l'armée du Nord, relieved in the line by American divisions, and sent them into the flank of the German advance. Canadian cavalry stopped the furthest point of the German advance cold with an old fashioned cavalry charge in the Moreuil Wood, losing 300 troopers and 800 horses. Both Canadian and Australian troops, by now the best in the British empire, and elsewhere justifiably described as "the shock troops of Empire," helped to plug the gaps, and the French army, restored after the 1917 mutiny, was able to shorten its lines thanks to American reinforcements. By late summer of 1918, all of Ludendorff's offensives had been stopped, and the lines had been rolled back in many places. With a renewed optimism, the Allies regrouped, put the Canadians, Australians and Americans into the line, and then launched their own offensive, this time, a general assault all along the line. The Americans in the southeast were to have been the hinge upon which the French, the British Imperial and the Belgian armies turned. When American division ran through exhausted and understrength German divisions (the Germans had unrealistically assumed, just as had the Allies, that "green" American troops would make no progress, and had shifted men and resources to face the Franco-Anglo-Belgian assault), the entire German line began to collapse--the fairly good defense the Germans might have mounted against the British Imperial and Belgian armies rapidly disintegrated as the prospect of the Americans appearing in their rear loomed up at them.
Ludendorff convinced Hindenburg to quickly negotiate an armistice. No one in the army wanted to see Germany invaded--they knew only too well what might happen to their homeland, given the destruction both coincidentally and willfully visited on northern France and on Belgium. At almost the same instant, Ludendorff hatched the "German Army myth." This held that the army had never been defeated in the field, but had been sold out by politicians. In late 1918, there was murderous street fighting in Germany, and Socialists among the sailors of the fleet brought rifles and machine guns to the party--the German public had little time or attention for the details of the war on the western front, so Ludendorff's thesis was an easy sell to the Germans. The Allied governments, being as democratic as one can hope for in this world, felt obliged to demobilize their armies as quickly as possible. Americans took over the lion's share of occupation duties in Germany, as the English sent Englishmen, Canadians and Australians home as quickly as possible, and Clemenceau did the same with French troops. The French did keep far more men under arms than the other Allies, but they parcelled them out to hare-brained operational schemes in the Balkans and in Turkey. The Americans, with that "home by Christmas" attitude which so frequently characterizes newly raised armies, suffered heavy dissertions in Germany, and this contributed to the Army Myth through the suggestion that the Allies were badly demoralized. The Bolshevik revolution had created wild instability in eastern Europe, and Pilsudski had capitalized on this to help orchestrate the rebirth of Poland. The literally riotous instability in the eastern Baltic, in what was shortly to become Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, lead the Allies to make a truly monumental blunder. They organized German troops into the Freikorps, a quasi-military force intended to police the Baltic region. In the event, German commanders acted as little better than robber barons, and the German public, if it needed any further convincing, now bought the Army Myth hook, line and sinker. For all of its problems, the American Army had three million troops in Europe by 1919, and any attempt at a resurgent German Army could quickly have been crushed. But of course, such realities mean little in the face of historical myth.
The German Army Myth was a crucial component of Hitler's propaganda, and pre-eminent gutter politician that he was, he exploited it to the fullest. He even attempted at one point to recruit Ludendorff in his political program. Acquitted after his trial for participation in the Kapp Putsch and Hitler's "Beer Hall" Putsch, Ludendorff became a Nazi member of the Reichstag in 1924, and ran unsuccessfully for President in 1925. He became a proponent of an "Aryan religion," and some have not unreasonably suggested that his virulent attacks on the Pope, Jesuits, Jews and Freemasons inspired Hitler's later agenda. I consider this reasonable, as everything i've read leads me to believe that Hitler had few original thoughts in his life, his most notable "original" thought being the conquest of the Ukraine as a colony for his "master race." It is not hard to see what that piece of unreconstructed military fantasy did for Germany.
The Versailles diktat Myth and the National Socialist Myth
I've reviewed at length the details of how the experience of the Germans in the great war, and in particular Ludendorff's flair for propaganda lead to the creation of the Army Myth because it has not been examined in detail in this and the other Hilter threads. I've already cited what i consider reliable sources for much of this--much of the detail i've relied upon comes literally from dozens of sources, there being thousands of works--far too many of them spurious "histories" dedicated to one or more of the myths--available for this period. I will then quickly review the particulars of the Versailles Myth. This held that Germany was held responsible for the war, and soley held responsible. As i have already pointed out, this arises from the article in the Versailles treaty which required Germans to accept responsibility for the destruction wrought in Belgium and France, and for the deaths and maimings of Allied soldiers in the war, and this clause was inserted into the treaty as a legal basis for demanding reparations. As i have also pointed out, the identical clause appears in the treaties signed by Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria. Turkey signed no such treaty, but that occurred because of the idiotic French attempt to overrun Turkey with a Greek Army. It was a spectacular failure, it brought Mustafa Kemal to power, and Attaturk refused to negotiate anything with those who had invaded Turkey, and the French were by then powerless to impose their will. The split of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, and the attendant break-up of Austrian territory left them almost completely incapable of paying anything--they pleaded with the Allies not to take their art treasures, and the Allies agreed, and their reparations were forgiven. The Hungarians tried to pay, but the turmoil which continued in central and eastern Europe, including invasions of Hungary by Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Roumania, lead to the rise of Admiral Hrothy, and a pugnacious government unwilling and not simply unable to pay. The Hungarians stopped paying, and the now powerless European Allies backed down. The Bulgarians faithfully attempted to pay their reparations for many years, despite a crushing economic poverty, and their reparation were finally forgiven by the League of Nations. The pigheaded partisan attitude of Woodrow Wilson assured that even the slim chance of American paricipation in the League was killed in the Senate, and absent American participation, the rather dicey League authority was made meaningless. Germany paid some of its reparations in kind, replacing things which they had destroyed, such as the library at Louvain (a willful attrocity committed in 1914, long before the bitterness of continued warfare could have provided even a fig leaf of justification), such as turning their fleet over to the British (and which fleet was soon scuttled by its own sailors) and turning the Saar over to the French, whose industrial base in the north of France had been devasted by the war, and in many cases, willfully blown-up by the retreating Germans. In the event, the Germans paid less than ten percent of the reparations assessed against them, which were only 40% of the damages the Paris Peace Conference special committe had catalogued. On that basis, which is to say a percentage, impoverished little Bulgaria paid far, far more than Germany.
Exploiting the resentment arising from the Army Myth and the Versailles
diktat myth, Hitler used his gutter politics skill to forge an alliance with Ernst Röhm and the Brown Shirts. The Sturmabteilung, or Brown Shirts, which Ernest Röhm had thought to command (although he had far less authority with them than either he or Hitler believed), were the originators of the soup lines and public works projects which brought some marginal employment back to Germans after the war. These small measures are usually cited by those who wish to claim that Hitler was good for Germany. Röhm supported Hitler's putsch in Munich, and was forced to flee Germany, wandering to South America and Africa. He was able to return in 1931 after the National Socialists began to gain real political power in Germany, but he did not live very long to enjoy his restored authority. The Sturmabteilung had remained suspicious of Hitler, and the Reichswehr had been justifiably suspicious of a paramilitary organization which seemed bent on usurping the proper functions of a national army. Hitler tried to mollify both sides, but he was failing. The racism of Röhm and the Brown Shirts had appealed to a great many Germans, and their militaristic style appealed to many others willing to ignore the racism. The Nazi SS is a "copy-cat" organization which took a page from the Brown Shirts' militarism, and as with all things Hitlerian, raised the ante considerably. With serious trouble looming between the Sturmabteilung and the Reichswehr in 1934, Hitler sent the SS out to put paid to the Brown Shirts. This is now known to history as "the Night of the Long Knives," which refers to the dagger which was a part of the SS's comic opera military regalia. By 1935, Hitler had eliminated any right-wing and reactionary political competition, after having adopted and adapted the most popular features--such as Ludendorff's quasi-religious anti-semitism and Röhm's
opera buffa love of uniforms and paramilitary display. The Sturmabteilung were, in many cases, street thugs dressed up in silly uniforms, beating up political opponents and Jews in the street, without interference from the police. Fritz Lang's movie,
M, satirizes the devil's bargain struck between the SA, the Nazis and the courts and police, and for that he was forced to flee for his very life to America.
Hitler showed a positive talent--once again, that of the successful gutter politician--for choosing popular figures to attach to his movement. Ludendorff has already been mentioned. Herman Göring is another example--he had been a young pilot in Manfred von Richtoffen's "Flying Circus," and took command after Richtoffen was killed. After the war, he remained a visible hero--the Imperial Air Force had been the one military organization which had continued to dominate in the war, and this of course fed right into the Army myth. Goebbels and Himmler were essential to the rise of the National Socialists, because of their flair for propaganda and political organization. People like Martin Bormann and Rudolph Hess were also drawn into the Hitlerian circle because of their popular appeal, but they became the objects of the deadly jealousy of Goebbels and Himmler, and that meant their days were numbered. I've personally never considered the flight of Hess to a crash landing in Scotland to be that great a mystery. I rather think he simply saw the handwriting on the wall. A very recent work has confirmed many of the opinions i long ago developed of Hitler's cronies,
The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle, Anthony Read, W. W. Norton, New York, 2004. I believe this was previously published in England with a slightly different title, but i don't have the publishing details.
Having consolidated his power, and begun the process of eliminating potential rivals within his organization, Hitler turned his nasty political instincts on the former western Allies. He marched into the Rhineland, after the French had conveniently withdrawn, and portrayed this as driving out an occupying power--he correctly predicted that the French and English would do nothing. He defied the Versailles Treaty by introducing conscription, creating a new air force and constructing submarines--he correctly predicted that the French and English would do nothing. The story of how he then moved into Austria and Czechoslovakia does not need to be rehearsed here. The "re-militarization" of Germany created a good deal of employment, which is also viewed (simply the employment itself, not the militarization) by apologists as evidence of Hitler doing something good for Germany. However, such an economy cannot long endure without warfare--there was no substantial good done Germany by the National Socialists, because the "full-employment" programs resulted from conscription and military industry, and no economy can long sustain such efforts without going to war. That Hitler would go to war was inevitable; that
Germany would have inevitably gone to war absent Hitler, as suggested by some members writing above, is farcical.
None of the "good" which Hitler is alleged to have done Germany was of a lasting character. The soup lines and public works projects which the Nazis coopted from the SA were cosmetic. The conscription and military industry, as already noted, could not be sustained without war. Walter would be far better qualified than i to detail how much effort was made by and success acheived by the Weimar government in restoring Germany's economy.
Hitler's biggest mistake, which worked out to be a crime against Germany and the rest of the world, was believing his own claptrap propaganda. Judging correctly the spineless character of the crypto-facist government of France in the 1930's simply points up Hitler's talent as a gutter politician. His assessment of the English government only seems to have been correct, however--it was in fact as wrong as wrong could be. In 1853, the Emperor Nicholas and his advisors looked at the strong pacifist movement in England at the time, and at Lord Aberdeen's palid government (fine for staying a prosperous course, disasterously unable to deal with a war), and decided the English would not fight. That misjudgement cost the Russians, as well as the Turks, the French and the English a great deal in the Crimean War. After the "Khaki Election" of 1900, the public enthusiasm for Joe Chamberlain's Imperialism and rapprochement toward Imperial Germany quickly cooled. Chamberlain twice managed to destroy political parties in his country, first abandoning the Liberals and temporarily destroying their power over the free trade issue, and then destroying the Union party formed thereafter with the Tories by his single-minded campaign for Imperialism and an alliance with Germany. Many Germans other than Schlieffen looked at the political disarray of England and the traditional English pacifism and opposition to a large standing army (both were centuries old traditions) and incorrectly assumed the English would not fight to save France (mostly true) or Belgium (completely false, to the eventual utter misery of the Germans). In 1938, Hitler looked at Neville Chamberlain, Joe's son, and came to the same false conclusion as to the eventual resolve of the English to oppose him. The mistake made with regard to Aberdeen, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, as well as the English nation in general, made by unscrupulous leaders and politicians (Nicholas I and Prince Menshikov; Wilhelm II, von Schlieffen, von Moltke and Bettman-Hollweg; and finally by Hilter) was in assuming that English politicians were as unscrupulous as they were themselves, and that the English were "a nation of shopkeepers," in the aphorism of another who badly misjudged them, Napoleon Bonapart. Ludendorff in 1917 and Hitler in 1941 also badly misjudged the Americans and their leaders. Although i don't claim much credit for the moral courage of American politicians in general, both Wilson and Roosevelt were badly misjudged by men who brought disaster on their nation as a result.
The question of whether or not Hitler was good for Germany is at the heart of the National Socialist myth, which in its most scabrous form, holds that Hitler was not only good for Germany, but that all the good was undone by a war forced upon an innocent Germany. This is akin to the ludicrous contention that an innocent Germany was cozened into the Great War, and then soley blamed for the war, and economically ruined by being made to pay unjust reparations. Even had the reparations been unjust (for which claim there is no historical basis--rather the opposite can be shown from the proceedings of the Paris Peace Conference), it would have mattered little, as Germany did not pay the tenth part of those reparations.
I have little doubt that we will continue to see such ludicrous threads and contentions about Hitler and Germany at this site. I have read widely and deeply into the historical myths of Germany because in junior high school and high school, my love of history was deeply afronted by a crackpot history teacher who ranted endlessly about the "Great German Nation" and Hitler. As is to be expected when history is perverted for propaganstic and mythic purposes, she was full of contradictions. She would rant on and on about how badly the Germans had been sinned against in two wars, and then publicly name the names of those whom she claimed shirked their military duty in those wars in the small American town whose students she terrorized. She was virulently racist as well, but that is not to be wondered at under the circumstances. Of my own choice, i would never have wasted as much of my reading time on Hitler and the Nazis had i not felt compelled when still a boy to seek out the truth to armor myself against her hysterical contentions. Perhaps it is as well, as her particular form of hysteria seems to be all too common.
