The sentiment – ‘if only we had not treated the Jews so badly’ – expressed an impossible wish. By searching for a way back through a cycle of escalation which could not be reversed, Germans were acknowledging precisely the bind that Goebbels had wanted to place them in. ‘Above all in the Jewish question, we have gone so far that for us there’s no escape. And that is just as well,’ Goebbels had consoled himself back in March. ‘Experience tells that a movement and a people, which has broken the bridges behind itself, fights much more unreservedly than those which still possess the possibility of
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