I searched the web and found many examples of the phrase “extermination by work” but none that verified that this phrase was an official “slogan” of Mathausen.

So I’m driving through Austria back in the day, stop fer coffee, and there’s this old old guy having a spot a grappa. You know he fought in the war. My general store guy, Bruno, back in Italy, says “yeah…we fought against the Americans, but then we fought alongside them.”

The point being, is nice to have opinions, but why not ask somebody who was there?

Speak the language, learn the slang, go to parties, make friends and interact with the populace. There are a few striking aspects of German culture; the so-called “cult of the Father” (ie, susceptibility to authority figures which, in Germany, are most often mere bureaucrats) is only the most well-known of them.

There’s a phrase: “Deine eigene schuld” (your own fault) and I’ve seen, time and time again, how anyone who gets in any kind of trouble here, minor or major, preventable or not, gets hit (and isolated) with that. The attitude being that you’re either a fool, a bad-luck bird or out of favor with the Gods to be in such a bad way, so a crowd watching an Ausländer being harrassed by soccer fans on the S-Bahn feels no need to cross the line into the territory of the victim’s bad luck by helping. What this involves is a total absence of empathy that puts me in mind of a mild autism.

Many Germans, even today, while wanting nothing to do with the tacky taint of skinhead politics, feel that the Jews “had it coming”, in a way. That they precipitated the conditions of their own destruction.

Germany is an amazingly liberal society, these days, as a reaction to the horrors of before, obviously. But, every day, in a thousand little ways, that Cultural Autism asserts itself. America is a melting pot/salad bowl and, therefore, crazy in a thousand different, very protean, ways. Germany is rather more homogenous and crazy in just a few ways that are *much* easier to discover a pattern for.

Once you’ve lived here long enough, the events of the recent past start losing their incomprehensibility. I once had an old woman’s mid-sized dog start barking, *ferociously*, at me, from across the street, causing quite a commotion. The result being that everyone else on the sidewalk, after the dog had been quieted, stared at *me*, not the dog. That’s very German.

Was Hitler a monster? No question, and even if Baker hadn’t included any negative details about him, readers would still know that. Was Churchill a bad guy? Now that’s not been much discussed, and it takes a bit more evidence to indicate that he might have been, hence the emphasis on the darker moments of the Allied side.

In the end, there’s nothing in the book that says Churchill and FDR were wrong and that the war was the result of their saber rattling. It just suggests that the often-prescient pacifists probably deserved a better hearing then, and that they should have one now, too.