It cannot be stressed too strongly, that in the early 1930s Germany looked back on almost twenty years in which economic decline and insecurity massively outweighed the experience of prosperity and economic advancement. Over the previous decade, international economic integration had brought crisis. Investment had led to bankruptcy. Hundreds of thousands of young people who had embarked optimistically on apprenticeships and university degrees found themselves stranded in unemployment. In light of this experience, one did not have to be a radical right-wing ideologue or paranoid anti-Semite to
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