Could I have learned from him earlier? I don’t know. The Nazis worked hard at binding us children to Germany and to Hitler, and they might have won me away from even the most determined parental opposition. Certainly the regime never wavered from its primary domestic goal of reshaping the young, and thus the future. “I don’t need you all that badly,” Hitler once shouted to a rally of farm workers. “I already own your children.”

For once, he wasn’t exaggerating,

 • • • 

But Hitler did not draw his support solely from us children of the Reich, and it still baffles me that out elders and our educators gave him equal assent. The explanation lies partly, of course, in his undeniable success in restoring full employment and economic order to a devastated nation, where six million were unemployed in a population of 66 million. “You’ve got to hand it to Hitler,” said my grandmother, who equated idleness with villainy. “He puts everybody to work, even the damned Gypsies.”

That was in 1938, and by then the number of unemployed had sunk to a miniscule 200,000 out of a workforce of 25 million. It was an impressive achievement, even if it depended on conscription and a vastly expanded army, on massive rearmament and public-works programs (such as the construction of the autobahns), and finally on the introduction of compulsory labor service for all young Germans. The only other national leader who could be compared to Hitler in so thoroughly remaking a whole society in the ’30s was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Like Roosevelt, Hitler captured the souls of many of his countrymen by giving them economic security at a time of economic chaos. In Germany, though, the worldwide depression of the ‘30s was the second such calamity in a decade. In December of 1923, you could have exchanged 4.2 billion marks for a single dollar. A man needed a wheelbarrow full of currency to pay his rent, provided the landlord would accept the stuff at all. My grandfather had to pay the mortgage on his land with wine and meat ― and he was one of the lucky ones: he could still feed his family, and he didn’t lose his farm. Millions of Germans bartered away everything they had. Inflation and unemployment not only devastated their traditional victims in the working class, but wiped out much of Germany’s middle-class as well.

This economic disruption can be traced in part to the Treaty of Versailles. Among its other provisions, the treaty stripped Germany of almost 15 percent of her prewar territory. In the west, the French occupied the Rhineland and took possession for 15 years of the Saar province and its rich coal mines. In the east, Germany lost West Prussia, most of Posen, and the port of Memel. Danzig became a “free city” under the protection of the League of Nations. In addition, Germany lost her African colonies and suffered a reduction in her merchant fleet. And in 1920, the Allied Reparations Commission assessed the staggering sum of 132 billion gold marks as damaged owed, virtually guaranteeing that the German economy would be crippled for years.

The treaty had less-tangible consequences as well. When German troops marched home after the armistice of 1918, they were told by Fredrich Ebert (no right-wing nationalist, but a Social Democrat who became the first president of the Weimar Republic), “You have not been beaten on the field of battle.” This was, of course, a lie, as the generals who had sought the armistice knew full well. But the lie became legend, and the legend became the Germans’ substitute for a true understanding of their defeat. The harsh reality of the 1919 treaty, then, came as a shock. The nation went into mourning and then on a monumental binge of self-pity. Suddenly the Germans had to adjust not only to the reality of defeat and their culpability, but also to the verdict of the Versailles treaty that Germany was solely responsible for the War.

For many Germans, there was no adjustment, only rejection. And so over a decade of political unrest the legend became the myth of the “stab in the back,” the shameful betrayal by the “November criminals.” These men, who had little choice but to accept the terms the Allies had dictated, were now the men of the Weimar Republic.