The book deals with the progressive, and almost total, moral collapse of an advanced industrial society at the heart of Europe, many of whose citizens abandoned the burden of thinking for themselves, in favour of what George Orwell described as the tom-tom beat of a latterday tribalism. They put their faith in evil men promising a great leap into a heroic future, with violent solutions to Germany’s local, and modern society’s general, problems. The consequences, for Germany, Europe and the wider world, were catastrophic, but no more so than for European Jews, who were subjected to a deliberate campaign to excise and expunge each and every one of them, which we rightly recognise as a uniquely terrible event in modern history.

In a local sense, Germany suffered its second massive and total defeat in the twentieth century. This was the price of mass stupidity and overweening ambition, paid with the lives of its citizens, whether directly compromised by dreadful crimes, or characterised by moral indifference or innocence. In a wider sense, other peoples were subjected to the compromises, indignities and terrors of occupation, forced and slave labour, or mass murder in the case of Europe’s Jews, while for over four years the human, cultural and productive resources of the Allied nations were skewed into repulsing and destroying a regime antipathetical to the civilised, free, humane and tolerant values that we cherish. A dystopian “quick fix” to Germany’s manifold problems ultimately resulted in the deaths of some fifty million people in a conflict whose legacy Europe has fully recovered from only after half a century, for the process of healing and reconciliation has been a long one. That the Second World War also briefly lent fresh, but spurious, moral and political legitimacy to a no less ruthless and sanguinary Soviet tyranny is one of the multiple ironies of this story. For what we in the West (and many Russians) regard as a straightforward contest of good and evil seems less categorical from the perspective of, say, the Balts, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Croats, Poles, or Ukrainians, for whom 1944-5 did not bring deliverance from tyranny, but rather several decades of imperialist oppression from which at least one of these nations is still struggling to liberate itself after the turn of the millennium. In this sense, this book is about the wider international context of Nazi Germany (and its ideological confederates), something otherwise European-minded German scholars, and many of those who traipse in their footsteps, have neglected in their understandable preoccupation with their own local legacy. There is no respectable reason why the intellectual agendas of histories of this period should be exclusively fabricated in Germany, however much scholars there have contributed to knowledge and understanding of this dismal period of their contemporary history, which, in a profound sense, is not their “own” story. . . .