TJ,
You and Maurice both present a view of the Nazis which I believe is historically flawed, even though it is the establishment viewpoint. There has been a great deal of new thinking and a considerable effort to come to a realistic view of the Nazi period in light of recent revelations from the Soviet archives and elsewhere and to try to come to a realistic understanding of the Nazis untainted by war era propaganda or any other distortions.
Earlier this week, the primary scholar and writer on the Nazi period, David Irving, was released from an Austrian prison after serving 13 months for the offense of "holocaust denial", an offense which can land you in jail in a great many places but not yet in the USA, thankfully. Irving just happens to be the leading historian in the school of "new realism" with regards to the Nazis. His numerous works, including his 1000+ page "Hitler's War" are really the gold standard in Nazi era history.
In a nutshell, the "new realism" view of the Nazis is as follows: The Nazis, who were to a man soldiers of Imperial Germany, were part of an army that was undefeated on the battlefield. They had defeated the Russians and were in the process of doing the same to the Italians. Their navy was undefeated. They were in no danger of defeat on the Western Front, even with the arrival of the Americans.
But on the German homefront there was Red Revolution, beginning in factories and then spreading to the fleet. The Kasier's generals felt there was no choice but to seek an armistice and to bring home the "reliable" divisions from the front, those untainted by Marxist and Bolshevik agitation to suppress the revolution, or else Germany would go down the same path that the Bolsheviks had taken Russia. The army did prevent a Bolshevik style revolution, though this was not completely decided till 1923.
In the aftermath of all of this there arose among the defeated German veterans the idea that they were "stabbed in the back" by the German communists and that the Jews, especially the newly arrived Jews from the East, were in the vanguard of this treason. Out of this great misfortune arose the Nazis and the rest of the extreme right and here likewise arose the extreme bias against the Jews.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Stalin was just beginning to consolidate his power and it was the belief of the leading Nazis that all of Europe would soon be at war with the Red Army and that it was "their duty" to save the world from Bolshevism, regardless of the cost.
And Hitler may have been right. What really stopped Stalin after the Nazi defeat was the threat of nuclear weapons. By the time the USSR had produced a nuclear weapon the US nuclear force was vastly superior.
Anyway, the idea is to understand the Nazis and the other fascists and to try to understand what made them act as they did. To dismiss them as merely "evil" or "insane" or any of the more emotional resolutions of the fascist era is useless. Hitler surely wasn't insane and to those who knew him he was anything but evil. It is a very interesting subject.
Slagle
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