Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Indifference

His efforts to muddy the waters [of his background] were favored by the fact that he came from across the border. Like many of the revolutionaries and conquerors of history, from Alexander to Napoleon to Stalin, he was a foreigner among his countrymen. There is surely a psychological link between this sense of being an outsider and the readiness to employ a whole nation as material for wild and expansive projects, even to the point of destroying the nation. At the turning point of the war, during one of the bloody battles of attrition, when his attention was called to the tremendous losses among newly commissioned officers, [Hitler] replied with surprised incomprehension: "But that's what the young men are there for."

- From Hitler by Joachim C. Fest

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