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The Imitation Knight
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17490 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
3,579 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
THE KNIGHT, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL
Ella Leffland
New York, William Morrow and Company, 1990
719 pp., $22.95
In his final days Adolf Hitler, incredibly, believed that he had not been sufficiently ruthless in carrying out his vision of a renewed and purified Europe. One of his last recorded remarks, made three days before his suicide in his Berlin bunker, was "Afterward, you rue the fact that you've been so kind."
Most of us need to believe that Hitler was insane and that the Nazi horror was the work of one evil madman, a leader so powerful that the others, mere followers, fell under his sway. But how, then do we explain people like Hermann Göring? Nicknamed "Hitler's fist," he was one of the principal architects of the Nazi police state, head of the storm troopers, founder of the Gestapo, creator of the concentration camps, commander of the Luftwaffe, and the primary spokesman and ambassador for the Nazi party. He also was a devoted husband, a charming and urbane statesman, a beloved World War I aviation hero, and a deep patriot. He was intelligent, forceful, and self-directed - no mere follower hypnotized by the power of the fuhrer.
Nor was he a madman. For Göring, as well as other highly ranked Nazi leaders who were clearly sane and yet went along with Hitler's demented policies, we must discover some other category, some larger set of circumstances that enabled these men to take part, zealously, in a program so horrible that only forty-five years later - still within the life spans of many of
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