They had been to the very perimeter of life, inhabited the borderland between all and nothing, and the intensity that had saturated them there, the carnage they had witnessed, could never be meaningless or empty, could never be nothing; this they knew above all. From a political perspective the possible consequences were basically twofold: never again could there be such an appalling and meaningless waste of human life, or else a new war would render meaningful the sacrifice of those two million German soldiers. To Hitler, only the second of these possibilities was real.
