Status Updates From Treći Reich: nova povijest

Started reading this book. This is a massive tome of a book.

Extravagant amounts of political unrest in the weimar republic

The people of the weimar republic are angry becuase of the treaty of versilles and a political figure and hitler step up and march through munich.

Talk of the unfair treaty of versilles.

Soviet Union of the bolshevics provid weapons and vehicles against the treaty ater WW|.

The war in 1918 raveges Germany and troops dissert

I read until I start having nightmares, then I take a break.

‘Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being bored is greatly preferable to being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy.’

‘In this sense, the lower register, the more pragmatic ambitions, the talk of taxes, markets, education, health and welfare, evident in the political cultures of Europe and North America, constitute progress, even though we as yet lack historians with the gift of conveying its many remarkable Jamesian virtues.’

‘This is one of the many ways in which epistemological advances in the study of history have led to greater insights regarding this very subject than his been achieved by an approach based on the mere accumulation of archival “facts”, especially when those “facts” have been accumulated for narrowly forensic purposes, which explain little about the metaphysical motives behind the Nazi project.’

The dénouement is a discussion of Nazi Germany from the perspective of today; what it means for Germans, what it means for us.

‘as the quiet migration of Nazi secret policemen, engineers and “Sovietologists” into Western and Eastern intelligence agencies and other government services independently established.’

‘By some irony, the most compromised individuals were to be dealt with last, which meant that their hearings coincided with a skills shortage in the economy, and the onset of the Cold War, in which even the dirtiest of hands were needed, […]

‘In other words, in the Soviet-occupied zone, denazification was in line with the complacent, prejudiced and simplistic assumptions underlying orthodox Marxist analysis of the roots of “fascism”.’

‘Denazification was most radically pursued in the Soviet zone, where it was simultaneously used as an instrument of socio-economic restructuring, to consolidate a Marxist–Leninist–Stalinist dictatorship. Nazis were those who had enjoyed power, wealth and influence in the preceding twelve years, a blanket category joined by anyone politically opposed to a Marxist–Leninist society.’

‘It proved difficult to sustain either the quest for justice or outrage in societies concerned with post-war reconstruction, the threat of Communism, and, in Britain’s case, the Palestine emergency, where Zionist terrorism subverted British sympathies for Jews.’

‘Weariness also set in regarding the constant diet of depravity and horror, against which human psychological defence mechanisms rebelled. This mood spread to some of the Allied nations, where public opinion began to turn against trying German generals, who had captured innocent imaginations on the Allied side during the conflict.’

‘Taken together, it is doubtful whether these trials had a wider didactic effect. Trials conducted by the Allies were open to the charge of “victors’ justice”. however unwarranted this was in practice. The German Churches played a conspicuous role in pleading on behalf of the accused, at a time when they said little or nothing about the Nazis’ enormous numbers of victims.’

Goebbels talking about the referendum in Germany on quitting the League of Nations.

On sensationalist Nazi documentaries that continue to this day: ‘The Nazis cynically manipulated posterity as they had manipulated their contemporaries; by way of continuity, they are cynically manipulated in their turn by a “Hitler industry” for which there seems to be an insatiable market.’

‘Attempts were made to enthuse the civilian fighting man through propaganda which highlighted the murder, rape and plunder which characterized the Red Army's presence in Eastern Germany. Ironically, what was undoubtedly happening was frequently dismissed as a Nazi propaganda trick, especially by those ideologically disposed to think well of the Soviets.’

‘With characteristic cynicism, Goebbels regretted that Germany had not seceded from the Geneva Convention.’

The bombing of Dresden.

Regarding Eichmann’s determination in the deportation of 1700 Jews from Hungary for extermination: ‘It was this devious implacability which makes some baulk at the triteness of the term “banality of evil” to describe such people, for it does not quite convey the willingness of those concerned to circumvent or surmount each and every obstacle.’

Goebbels nearly let on the extermination of Jewry in the East in a speech to an audience in Berlin’s Sportspalast.

‘Solidarity between cities fragmented; for example, the inhabitants of Würzburg refused to countenance the relocation of industries from Schweinfurt lest the factories act as magnets for the bombers.’

Allied analyses of the impact of air-raids focussed on political effects, and thus did not consider the demoralising effects of air-raids, subsequent homelessness and destruction on, e.g., productivity.

The deadly British air-raid on the city of Hamburg.

‘as a co-architect of the post-war “world order”.’

The Soviets arrested the generals of the Home Army of Poland’s resistance on accusations of collaboration with the Nazis. ‘This despicable treatment of people who, from a British perspective, had been fighting Nazi Germany since September 1939 led to a chill in relations between Stalin and Churchill, whose consequences were tempered by Roosevelt’s continued faith in the former […]