Neither Nazism nor the war itself could be rejected, because Germans envisaged their own defeat in existential terms. The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became. Far from leading to collapse, successive crises acted as catalysts of radical transformation, as Germans tried to master the situation and rethink what they could expect. Major disasters like Stalingrad and Hamburg did indeed lead to a catastrophic fall in the regime’s popularity, but they did not in themselves call patriotic commitment into question.
