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What is clear is that contemporary public opinion had it right: Operation Paperclip was a bad idea. By shining light on the human, ethical and monetary costs of the program, Jacobsen’s book reveals just how bad. Nazi scientists were generously remunerated for developing biological and chemical weapons whose cleanup and disposal took decades and cost approximately $30 billion. American experimentation on humans continued during the Cold War in violation of the Nuremberg Code. A lethal chemical might have been developed for warfare, with terrible consequences.

certain truths are obscured in Jacobsen’s disturbing account. She writes that the Germans didn’t use any chemical or biological weapons in World War II. Although they may not have deployed such weapons on the battlefield, the Germans did use carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B, a pesticide) in mobile gas vans and gas chambers

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small

when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.

We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.

the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.

It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.

If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.

mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag

During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.

By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

Hitler was on a steady stream of barbiturate tranquilizers, morphine, nasal and eye drops containing cocaine and other drugs — along with bulls’ semen to boost his testosterone — thanks to his Berlin-based personal physician, Theodor Morell, according to the report

He was characterized as “a quack and a fraud and a snake oil salesman”

Hitler was shown to have signs of Parkinson's disease by the end of World War II in 1945, and the dizzying array of drugs likely contributed to his serious health issues.

Eventually, he was brutally tortured and executed — not by the Nazis, but after the war, in 1947, by the Communists. They then suppressed the story of Pilecki’s heroism for decades (a book about his work, “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” was published in 2012).

According to the indictment, Mr Zafke served in the SS in a different part of the Auschwitz complex from October 1943 to January 1944, during World War Two.

Last year a German court sentenced Oskar Groening, 94, to four years in jail as an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 people at Auschwitz.

As World War II recedes into history and survivors of the Nazi era become fewer, provenance research and restitution is generally becoming harder to execute.

The task force finished its work on Dec. 31, and its report was released in January. The full report is available online in German with a summary in English. Responsibility for the Gurlitt collection has now passed to the Center for Lost Art in Magdeburg, where a staff of 20 will be augmented according to need. Ms. Grutters’s total budget for provenance research is now 6 million euros, or about $6.5 million, three times what it was three years ago.

Most museums have committed to the 1998 Washington conference principles on identifying and giving back art looted by the Nazis, but individual owners are not bound by the agreement. And the only crime not falling under a 30-year statute of limitations in Germany is murder, she said, so there is nothing binding private owners to restitution.

"This is a large and important lawsuit that arrives 71 years after the war. A relatively large amount of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendents live in Israel," Zell said, who himself is a distant relative of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.

"There were attempts in the past to get reparations from Nazi criminals in Hungary, but this case is unique because this is the first time the Hungarian government is being sued. Usually the Nazi crimes occurred in areas where there was no independent regime, such as Poland

"I grew up in a nationalist-Hungarian, a secular Jew. I saw Hungary as the homeland and what happened was disappointing," he said, and explained that "justice should be done. Whomever is to blame has to pay the price."

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944 some 424,000 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where nearly all of them died.

The Jewish population of Hungary is estimated today at 35,000-120,000, the World Jewish Congress says. The higher estimate is the figure given by the Hungarian Jewish organisation Mazsihisz.

Establishing a precise figure is difficult because definitions of Jewish identity differ and many Hungarian Jews are married to non-Jews.

The report in Bild, since confirmed by the family’s spokesman, shows that ancestors of Reimann family were enthusiastic antisemites and keen supporters of Adolf Hitler. They used Russian civilians and French prisoners of war as forced labourers in their factories.

The source of the revelations appears to be a report commissioned by the family themselves, in a bid to learn more about their ancestry. After discovering the extent of the Nazi ties, the family have said they will donate $11.3m (£8.5m) to charity, though they’re yet to say which one.

Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?

We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.

“I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II

While the impulse today to interpret May 8 as a day of liberation — if only through a retrospective lens — is understandable, few seem to have taken into account the danger that many Germans will take the term at face value, as historical reality. But as generations pass, and as the last victims and perpetrators perish, keeping the facts straight becomes even more important.

In a poll commissioned by the German weekly Die Zeit before the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, 53 percent of respondents agreed with the false statement that “it was just a few criminals who instigated the war and killed the Jews.” In another poll commissioned by a German public broadcaster, 23 percent didn’t even have a grasp of what the Holocaust was.

To be clear, German leaders today employ the notion of liberation to embrace their historical responsibility, not to deny it. This was clear when President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day. It had taken three generations “for us to wholeheartedly admit” that May 8 is “a day of liberation,” he said.

Though the liberation was “imposed from outside,” he said, Germans subsequently played a part in “our internal liberation.” This was a “long and painful process which involved facing up to the past,” he said, and “fighting to stop silence and denial from prevailing.” The process of internal liberation, in other words, meant rejection of a Schlussstrich.

The point is not to saddle current and future generations with guilt, but to ensure that the unvarnished truth remains clear. No good lesson can be drawn from history without a full understanding that the guilty were all around, and that they fought to the end.

They also discovered that the Vatican hid these and other sensitive documents presumably to protect Pius’s image, a finding that will embarrass the Roman Catholic Church, which is still struggling with its coverup of clerical sexual abuse.

“If Pius XII comes out of this study of the sources looking better, that’s wonderful. If he comes out looking worse, we have to accept that, too.”

Pius XII, who headed the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958 and is now a candidate for canonization, was the most controversial pontiff of the 20th century. His failure to denounce the Holocaust publicly earned him the title of “Hitler’s pope,” and critics have for decades asked for his wartime archives to be opened for scrutiny.

The pope’s defenders have long argued he could not speak out more clearly for fear of a Nazi backlash, and they cite his decision to hide Jews at the Vatican and in churches and monasteries as proof of his good deeds.

The chain of events goes back to Sept. 27, 1942, when a U.S. diplomat gave the Vatican a secret report on the mass murder of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. It said about 100,000 had been massacred in and around Warsaw and added that an additional 50,000 were killed in Lviv in German-occupied Ukraine.

The archive included a note confirming that Pius read the American report. It also had two letters to the Vatican independently corroborating the reports of massacres in Warsaw and Lviv, according to the researchers.

The research team also found three small photographs showing emaciated concentration camp inmates and corpses thrown into a mass grave. A Jewish informer had given them to the Vatican ambassador, or nuncio, in neutral Switzerland to send to the Vatican, and the Holy See confirmed reception of them in a letter two weeks later.

It has long been known that the Catholic Church — possibly with covert U.S. assistance — helped ex-Nazis, like the Holocaust bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele or Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, flee to South America. These men were anti-communists, and Rome and Washington considered communism their enemy.

Other questions Wolf wants to research are Pius’s relations with U.S. political and intelligence networks during and after the war, his role in promoting European unity, and his thoughts about allying with Muslims in a campaign against communism.

Answers to these and other questions could also influence a drive by conservative Catholics to have Pius declared a saint.

Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.

This sends a clear message to the world that certain crimes will not go unpunished.

After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.

Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.

Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,

German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.

He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.

But his past caught up with him in Germany, where he was tried for crimes against humanity.

When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.

Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.

The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.

He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.

When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.

The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.

Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.

“Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”

New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.

A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.

German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.

The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.

Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.

“For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”

The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.

Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.

But several other cases have already been tried or are pending.

Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.

Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.

“If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”

Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.

This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”

But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.

The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.

But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.

Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.

The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.

For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.

More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.

“Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”

The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’

“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”

the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:

Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?”

While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.

“They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”

Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.

this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.

The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.

The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.

While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.

they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”

She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)

The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union

Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”

“The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.

“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”

In the end, all of these poor military leaders were appointed or promoted by Hitler, many solely because they were Nazis, and that's no way to fight—or win—a war.

The Germans saw the Japanese as adjuncts to the greater effort they were putting in. The Japanese never trusted the Germans; they didn't even tell Berlin they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Neither country put in the diplomatic work required to really coordinate their efforts. Essentially, the Second World War was two separate conflicts fought simultaneously.

Who were the most effective combat generals of the war? The Russian Georgy Zhukov, because he was given every impossible task and succeeded at all of them. For Germany, Erich von Manstein, who came up with the "sickle cut" maneuver that in May 1940 defeated France and was the most effective German general on the Eastern Front.

The major problem with the historiography of World War II is the Cold War—it was not in the West's postwar interest to acknowledge that it was the Russians who destroyed the Wehrmacht, at an unbelievable cost to themselves. We are just now beginning to acknowledge the Soviet Union's contribution.

Statistically, the Eastern Front was where the war was won—out of every five Germans killed in battlefield combat, four died on the Eastern Front