Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jewish. Her husband is an important German surgeon, and in Hitler's Germany, things have become "too difficult." She has decided to leave him "for a couple of weeks." Animatedly, she enacts a hypothetical farewell of heartbreaking reasonableness. All at once her mood tears soundlessly, and she sobs: "I love you." At the horrifying unfairness of it all she screams: "You are monsters. or bootlickers to monsters." Her husband (George Voskovec) appears. He is a bootlicker, an intellectual full of soothing self deceit. With shameful secret relief, he hustles his wife off to the waiting train and the dark...
Anxious to rescue history from simple moral judgments, historians have been restoring the reputations of many a traditional villain. Richard III, Metternich, Aaron Burr have all been readmitted to civilized society and admired for their "realism." But no one (outside Germany) seemed to have thought of scrubbing up Hitler-until now. In The Origins of the Second World War, Oxford Historian A.J.P. Taylor finds excuses for Hitler and reasons to blame nearly everybody else...
Provoked by Little Powers. Most historians have pictured Hitler as a juggernaut. In Taylor's account, he is peculiarly passive.* "He did not seize power," writes Taylor. "He waited for it to be thrust upon him." Like other statesmen of his time, he was defending the national interest in a cleanly Machiavellian way. He simply wanted to overturn the Treaty of Versailles and restore Germany as a great power. Minimizing the fact that Hitler committed his plans for conquest to paper as early as 1925 in Mein Kampf, Taylor claims that the dictator did not really want...
...Taylor's view, it was always somebody else who put poor, passive Hitler in a mood to fight. "Provoked" by the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg. Hitler improvised the invasion of Austria almost overnight, as proved by the fact that 70% of the German transport broke down on the way. When Hitler ordered his generals to "smash" Czechoslovakia, it was merely a "momentary display of temper." The real culprits, Taylor implies, were the men foolhardy enough to stand up to Hitler. Poland's Foreign Minister Jozef Beck had such "great power arrogance" about his little nation that...
Russell's delight at the defeat of Hitler was short-lived. Immediately after Hiroshima he wrote, "The atomic bomb makes one...reconsider all sorts of things. I have never, not even in 1940, felt the outlook as gloomy as now. Everything is working up for a war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., with us a satellite of the U.S.A.; both sides will use atomic bombs, and very little will be left...