Abstract
A fundamental problem in writing about Germans or Germany during the period 1933-45 is chronological. We are close to the period concerned; many of the actors, at least the secondary ones, are still living and part of the drama is still being played as evinced by the present-day division of Germany, the continuing West German interest in prosecutions of figures of that era, the recent Eichmann trial in Israel, and the fact that Germany is on the agenda of any conferential relationships between the two parts of our split world. And, most difficult of all, the overall period has already been judged in countless books, in the Nuremberg trials, and in the activities of the postwar Germans themselves.