>fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership op

>fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueless about what they're really doing. For Goebbels, as a cripple who never fought in any war, maybe so, but not for Hitler, at least as far as combat violence was concerned. The man was a repeatedly wounded veteran of the first world war who had served right in the worst of front line duty, and knew exactly how brutal the carnage could be for every one of the millions of soldiers he later ordered out to battle through his generals. Cluelessness might apply to his ordering of the holocaust, because a thing like that pretty much had no precedent in human history, but not quite so much for his war-making. Curiously, while, as far as anyone knows, Hitler himself never witnessed one of the mass killings his death camps were performing daily, Himmler did want to see what it was truly like, and nearly fainted at his first sight of all those regular people being gassed at once. Didn't stop him from continuing to approve the whole monstrous thing though...