Historians writing about the years immediately before Adolf Hitler’s war have to contend with two problems: hindsight and the common and dangerous conflation of Germans and Nazis. It was the German state, not the Nazi party, that went to war in 1939 (though of course the state was under Nazi control) and the vast majority who were not Nazis kept their heads down to avoid ending up in a concentration camp or worse. Almost all of those who ended up at the end of a rope at Nuremberg, took the suicide pill or escaped to South America, were committed party members – with all that entailed.
