Ben H. Shepherd

“Furthermore, discriminating against Jews and against social and political ‘undesirables’ made ‘mainstream’ Germans feel more integrated; those Germans who met the right social, political and, above all, racial criteria could feel part of a ‘national community’ and enjoy far greater self-confidence than they had a few years previously. In the words of Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, ‘it is no accident that Germans of that generation tend to describe the Third Reich, up until Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad, as a “great time”. Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were.”
― Ben H. Shepherd, Hitler's Soldiers: The German Army in the Third Reich