Interrogations [Hardcover]

It is acknowledged that Hitler placed into prominent positions persons with little or no background or experience in their positions of authority or domains (Ribbentrop was a champagne dealer, Heydrich a disgraced WWI Naval officer who became head of the SS non-Reich territories and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, or Czechloslovakia), placing his utmost confidence in them. And how could their have been people with "experience" in his ultimate aims, the domination of Europe and extermination of European Jewry? He had many men scurrying to act as they knew what they were doing, learning on the job, so to speak, and that, if anything, rings clear. Do you, the reader, remember a first job where you feared it would be found out you were a pretender, a fraud, a newbie? Imagine being given an entry-level job in command of thousands of slave laborers, displaced persons to be worked to the last pfennig of their worth and then destroyed, fed only enough to eek out that last pfennig of work...on the gate of many of the concentration camps (Konzentrationslagen) one sees the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI. I have seen the gate at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, and used by the Soviets and East Germans as a prison for many years after the war. Usually this is translated as "work will make you free." I have understood a different meaning, a distinctly Germanic one. Arbeit--Work; Macht--Power; Frei--Unconfined....from my 1939 German dictionary. For, as we know, freedom is an American concept. Those three words were, at best, double entrendre or propaganda. As understood by Germans in the SS, a wholly different meaning was conveyed.

In a country where the Abitur (high school diploma) was looked upon as we in America might look upon a Master's Degree today, men of only elementary education took up the leadership in many aspects of the classless German society which Hitler sought to create. Of course, few such men went through the indoctrination of the Labor Service, mandatory for all young men issued spades to drill with instead of guns, the Hitler youth, or the concept of the Lebensborn (children born out of wedlock for the Führer).

All of these schemes, when shone under the light of day for the world to see, were doomed to failure. Yet the Elite seemed never to grasp this fact. They pursued their aims with whatever efficiency was possible, a German tradition. The trains ran in a timely manner nearly till the absolute end of the war, even after the massive bombings of major cities and bridges. Hugo Boss continued to design revisions in the war uniforms to account for shortages in quality material.

This is an essential book for a library on the 20th Century--not a "read" but a true reference work. What Germany and the European Union aspire to, and will become, has passed through the mind of Adolph Hitler and his collaborators, into the minds of the descendants of the "Täter" und "Opfern" (German for the perpetrators and the victims--to which the Germans now include the victims of Allied strategic bombing of civilian population centers).

As sure as the Persian Gulf Wars I and II were initiated in our national interest, understanding of the perpetrators of the various atrocities, and, as we know, in some cases exceptions, of the all-important period from the Treaty of Versailles to the end of hostilities in May, 1945 in Europe are part of the prologue to the 21st century. Some find history dull and heavy, but like the Law, history has a long grasp.

Read this book. More than once! My highest recommendation.