All the historic forces which had impelled Germany to this point, its necessary warrior past and all the philosophers and romantics who had forged from it the Aryan myth, the race-hygiene scientists, the Herr Professoren who had interpreted history in terms of Germany’s all-conquering mission and Kultur, the soldiers and statesmen who had drunk from the Prussian legend and created the myth of the ‘stab in the back’ and the ‘unbeaten German Army’ of the First World War – all the forces which had created Himmler’s world impelled him on, and without them he was literally nothing. At the same time
...more
