Word: nazis
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After the war, Hitler joined a new and violently anti-Semitic group, the $ forerunner of the National Socialist German Workers' Party -- Nazi for short. There, for the first time since adolescence, he found a home and friends. Within a year, he became the chief Nazi propagandist. Judaism, he told his audiences, had produced the profiteers and Bolsheviks responsible for the defeat of the fatherland and the strangulation of the economy. Jews were bacilli infecting the arts, the press, the government. Pogroms would be insufficient. "The final aim must unquestionably be the irrevocable Entfernung ((removal)) of the Jews...
During his months behind bars, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf, the Nazi bible. The terrible arithmetic of the war and the Holocaust was prefigured on every page. Propaganda: "The German . . . people must be misled, if the support of the masses is required." Morality: "Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." Tactics: "The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." Genetics: "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff...
Paroled on Dec. 19, 1924, Hitler spent the next five years reinvigorating the Nazi Party, exploiting Weimar democracy to bring down the Republic. The party's members were tireless, cajoling, exhorting, running for local offices, gathering about them a brutal elite guard called the Schutzstaffel, or SS. During this period an American journalist, Louis Lochner, watched the Nazi leader addressing students at Berlin University. "I came away from that meeting," he reported, "wondering how a man . . . who ranted and fumed and stamped could so impress young intellectuals. Of all people, I thought, they should have detected the palpable flaws...
...flaws were in Hitler's overconfident detractors. The Nazi Party received strong support not only from the lower middle class but also from university students and professors. The existentialist Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Psychologist Carl Jung grew intoxicated with "the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment." A young architect named Albert Speer found that Hitler's oratory "swept away any skepticism, any reservations...
Asked to find and interview people who lived through the Nazi invasion of Poland 50 years ago, Jerusalem reporter Marlin Levin contacted dozens of sources before he was finally steered to Rafael Loc, 79, a Tel Aviv lawyer who emigrated to Israel from Poland in 1956. Loc had not only been a lieutenant on the front lines but had also survived five years in a German POW camp. "As his wife served homemade Polish cake, Loc spent two hours telling me about his adventures," says Levin. "The fact that he lived through the war when nearly every Polish...