In the event, the German people he was prepared to see damned alongside him proved capable of surviving even a Hitler. Beyond the repairing of broken lives and broken homes in broken towns and cities, the searing moral imprint of Hitler’s era would remain. Gradually, nevertheless, a new society, resting in time, mercifully, on new values, would emerge from the ruins of the old. For in its maelstrom of destruction Hitler’s rule had also conclusively demonstrated the utter bankruptcy of the hyper-nationalistic and racist world-power ambitions (and the social and political structures that upheld them) that had prevailed in Germany over the previous half a century and twice taken Europe and the wider world into calamitous war.
The old Germany was gone with Hitler. The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share his nemesis.
<p><emphasis>ILLUSTRATIONS</emphasis></p>1. Hitler, September 1936, portrayed wearing a suit and not the usual Party uniform.2. Hitler discussing plans in 1936 for new administrative buildings in Weimar with his up-and-coming favourite architect, Albert Speer. Fritz Sauckel, Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Thuringia, is on Hitler’s right.3. The Berlin Olympics, 1936: the crowd salutes Hitler.4. British Royalty at the Berghof. Hitler meets the Duke and Duchess of Windsor on 22 October 1937, during the visit to Germany of the ex-King Edward VIII and his wife, the former Mrs Wallis Simpson.5. Field-Marshal Werner von Blomberg in 1937. He was to be dismissed from office as War Minister the following January on account of a scandal concerning his wife.6. Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Until his dismissal, in the wake of the Blomberg scandal, at the beginning of February 1938 on trumped-up charges of homosexuality.7. Hitler addresses the exultant masses in Vienna’s Heldenplatz on 15 March 1938, following the Anschluß.8. The Axis: flanked by Mussolini and King Victor-Emmanuel III, Hitler views a parade of troops in Rome during his visit to Italy in May 1938.9. Hitler is cheered by crowds of admirers in Florence.10. Part of the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which opened in Munich on 8 November 1937 and ran until 31 January 1938, purporting to show the ‘typical external features’ of Jews and to demonstrate their supposedly Asiatic characteristics. The exhibition drew 412,300 visitors in all — over 5,000 per day. It helped to promote the sharp growth of anti-Semitic violence in Munich and elsewhere in Germany during 1938.11. ‘Jews in Berlin’, from the exhibition ‘The Eternal Jew’, which opened in the Reich capital on 12 November 1938. This was two days after Goebbels had unleashed a nation-wide orgy of violence in which Jewish property was destroyed throughout Germany, leading to mass arrests of Jews and their exclusion from business and commerce.
