Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Maria56]

Currently reading Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford. This passage struck me:

LIke may other conservatives and nationalists committed to rebuilding a powerful Germany by reversing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, [Ulrich von Hassell] had deluded himself that Hitler could be controlled. So, when his own party, the right-wing DNVP, was dissolved in 1933, he had joined the Nazis. Unlike some other senior German diplomats, he had also stayed at his post.

Yet, long before his dismissal, he had become disgusted with the barbarities of the regime and seriously alarmed by the march to war. On leaving Rome, he linked up with conservative opposition groups, and later in his secret diary railed at the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, the euthanasia program against the handicapped and insane, the savagery of the war in the East, and the general barbarity hat now ruled his country. This did not prevent the émigré novelist Thomas Mann from judging him harshly: von Hassell, declared Mann, was “one of the people who should never have served the Nazis and yet who did so out of ambition, cynicism, or ignorance. Too late did they regain their sight.”

I hope America fares better.