General Discussion

Although I'm not entirely certain, since it was a long time ago, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich may have been among the first "adult" history book I read, probably in Junior High School. My parents didn't have many books in our house, but for some reason had that one, in hardcover.

For the record, my father was half German and half Scots - his Grandmother was a German immigrant, his Grandfather a German speaking Austrian - and his father, the Scots drunk, was badly wounded in World War I fighting the Germans in the trenches. My father, looked, in his old age, rather like the Austrian war criminal Adolf Eichmann when he was on trial in Jerusalem, almost a dead ringer in fact; I always wondered about that, if Eichmann was a distant (or not so distant) relative. My father had an antisemitic edge, although many of my friends growing up were Jews; all of my first four jobs had Jewish bosses, one a holocaust survivor, tattoo and all. My father got along very well with my best friend growing up, who was a Jew. He certainly was no Nazi, and spoke rather proudly of having machine gunned Nazi war planes in the Eastern Atlantic.

Still, my parents, as poorly educated as they were, didn't really buy many books; it was enough to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads.

Why they had that book, and few other books, other than Bible commentary is something I never thought about. I remember Shirer's commentary as sardonic, as finding it all unbelievable but real, but I didn't have the sense that he wanted Germany pastoralized, but then again, the book was history, not political theory. Of course, I last read the book nearly half a century ago.

The punitive pastoralization of Germany was of course, the proposal of Robert Morgenthau, resisted by Henry Stimson, and finally by Roosevelt, and then Truman. It was a serious consideration; happily it didn't prevail. Truman did a lot to establish West Germany, and to protect West Berlin.

I should read that biography of Morgenthau; there's so much to read, so little time, I may never get to it.

I don't believe that the US will go fascist; Trump is just a high point in the will do so, but of course, there were Germans who didn't believe Germany would go fascist. The difference of course, is cultural, hopefully. The US has a long culture of democratic government; in 1933, Weimar Germany was an imposed Government, just 14 years in existence, imposed by foreign punitive powers, and it followed a long history of autocratic Monarchism. (Basically, World War I started as a familial dispute among cousins.)

I hope, and believe, I'm right; that we are at a nobler crossroads than 1933 Germany.

An excellent post by the way, very thoughtful.