Coping with dissonance is hard. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in “The Crack-Up.” It requires teasing apart our feelings about the Nazi regime from our factual judgments about the Wehrmacht’s organizational resilience—and to see the Wehrmacht as both a horrific organization that deserved to be destroyed and an effective organization with lessons to teach us. There is no logical contradiction, just a psycho-logical tension. If you want to become a
...more
