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Faced with far more overwhelming odds, Hitler’s regime would use every means of coercion and propaganda to rally the Reich for an apocalyptic last stand. There were those in Germany in 1918 who wished to do the same. If they had gained the upper hand, 1919 might have witnessed the kind of inferno that laid waste to much of Germany and central Europe in 1944–5.

In the Kaiser’s mind, it seems that Wilson’s conciliatory remarks toward the Bolsheviks in his 14 Points address had conjured up the fantasy of a world Jewish conspiracy with its tentacles in both Washington and Petrograd. After this outburst, the discussion was adjourned to allow the Kaiser to take a restorative stroll

"In this context the democratic demands of civil society tend to develop against the regime of political parties and are often expressed as skepticism about all forms of political representation. Fascism, then, develops out of this general crisis of politics."

"What American strategy was emphatically directed towards suppressing was imperialism, understood not as productive colonial expansion nor the racial rule of white over coloured people, but as the ‘selfish’ and violent rivalry of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan that threatened to divide one world into segmented spheres of interest."

The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand.

Goering had spoken casually of feeding the Eastern workers on cats and horse-meat. Backe had consulted the statistics and reported glumly that there were not enough cats to provide a ration for the Eastern workers and horse-meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population

...the SS and the Wehrmacht were deliberately murdering millions of people, who could just as well have served as workers for the German war economy...it is hard to avoid the impression that the Third Reich faced an unresolvable contradiction between its genocidal racial ideology and the practical imperatives of production.

In the three years between June 1941 and May 1944, the average rate of loss for the Wehrmacht was almost 60,000 men killed every month on the Eastern Front.