The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

an independent but narrow and confused mind,

“I know Esser is a scoundrel,” Hitler retorted in public, “but I shall hold on to him as long as he can be of use to me.”23 This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present.

Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes.

Such were the men whom Hitler gathered around him in the early years for his drive to become dictator of a nation which had given the world a Luther, a Kant, a Goethe and a Schiller, a Bach, a Beethoven and a Brahms.

The failure of the duly elected government to build a new Army that would be faithful to its own democratic spirit and subordinate to the cabinet and the Reichstag was a fatal mistake for the Republic,

The failure to clean out the judiciary was another.