William Shirer, witness to what was the Third Reich and
author of the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” once made an interesting and
insightful comment about Germans as they stood by watching Hitler and his rise
to power. “How did it happen that an ancient and cultured people steeped in
Christianity, cultivating the arts and sciences, preeminent in technology who
gave us Luther and Kant, Bach and Beethoven, Gorta and Einstein, collapsed into
savage barbarism in the mid-20
th century?”
