World War II has fascinated me since I was nine years old. After the BBC series A World at War, I found it difficult, even at a young age, to distance myself from the tragedy and drama that unfolded in the 1930s through to 1945.
Many have, in recent years, explored this ‘obsession’ with Hitler and that little moustache, his wild behaviour and sexual deprivations. We have learnt also, that the war dead may actually amount to over 50 million individuals - by war, starvation or execution. That figure would be a closer and tighter reasoning - but the margin of error would be likely in the avenue of minus 3 million to plus 4 million even ten, given what the study of the executed Jews in Europe has achieved in the last ten years of scholarly research.
One online bookstore has over 2000 titles on “Hitler” alone. Many deal with his personality and military, political leadership. There are very little titles dealing with the Grand Strategy aspects of Hitler’s dream of a “Thousand Year Reich”, and the lengths he went to getting that dream achieved. Operation Barbarossa put a long stop on the realization of a pure race of Germans living in Germania, the renamed Germany, whereby many would benefit from lebensraum (living space) in which the slaved would serve the Aryan population.
It is now 2010, seventy-seven years since Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. He combined the old Presidency with the Chancellor office and the term Fuhrer, (from German Führer ‘leader,’ part of the title Führer und Reichskanzler ‘Leader and Chancellor of the Empire’) was used instead.
I am fifty years old. In the last ten years I have wondered again why I hold to this part of history and Hitler in particular, as an unfinished lesson in history. Have we completed what we all need to learn about this man and the Nazi history? Perhaps it is a personal thing with me - that I have not completed the study – but I am not convinced there is a real sense of closure to the question of Hitler and Nazi history either way. Why? What else do we need to learn?
This is my dialectical journey to discover the depth of what could be a final closure – for me or perhaps for everyone. Dialectical in that I am going to investigate the truth of opinions of WWII and Hitler’s grand strategy of a “Thousand Year Reich”. A Marxist Theory suggests the use of Dialectical Materialism as a means of measurement – which political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces and are interpreted as a series of contradictions and their solutions, the conflict is believed to be caused by material needs. A start indeed when World War One created mass unemployment and hunger in Germany.
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