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of the theft of food, property, and wealth from the occupied territories. The euthanasia program directed resources at “healthy” elements of the population, while few Germans could fail to notice the prevalence of foreign, forced workers in industry and agriculture, a fact that kept the German economy and food production going during war. Germans not only benefited from the suffering of others but also witnessed it in their daily lives without much moral distress. Indeed, the Nazis’ genius seemed to be their ability to combine rational self-interest with a sense that this was just retribution for past inequities in a system that balanced belief in a new society with racism and exploitation to create that New Order. 12
    It is, in fact, disconcerting to realize that so many Germans supported the Nazi regime either from mistaken notions of idealism or from crass materialistic motives, but it is also disturbing that the average Landser fought so long and so well on behalf of such a murderous system. Thisraises yet another, final, question: Could Germany have won? As with the others, this is a complex issue that involves a number of factors that must be considered. In contrast to the generally accepted view, when Germany began World War II, its armaments economy was relatively unprepared, both organizationally and in terms of raw materials. The quick victories in 1939–1940, moreover, promised more than they delivered. Both at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain, the Germans lacked the resources to compel the British to negotiate an end to the war, while, in North Africa and the Mediterranean, they were dependent on weak and unreliable allies. All this revealed German weakness, not strength. Great Britain remained in the war, so blitzkrieg had failed, while Western Europe, for all its value industrially, proved a drain on Germany precisely at its weakest and most vulnerable point: foodstuffs and basic raw materials. Once the British secured American aid, the time pressure on Hitler rose significantly. His pact with Stalin had made Germany blockade-proof, at least temporarily, but that very dependency opened the Reich to blackmail and pressure from the hated Bolshevik enemy. In any case, war had to come with the Soviet Union sooner or later, for the simple fact that Hitler’s entire ideology, with the central role of Lebensraum in all its racial and economic manifestations, demanded it. Hitler did not, contrary to what many Western historians argue, blunder into war with the Soviet Union, for that constituted the entire purpose of Nazism and was what differentiated Hitler from the run-of-the-mill German nationalists who simply wanted a revision of the Versailles system. The Führer envisioned instead a complete reordering of Europe, for which the destruction of the Soviet Union was the necessary first step. Having decided to break the Gordian knot through an invasion of the Soviet Union rather than driving Great Britain from the war, itself an implicit admission of German weakness, he found that the tyranny of time again asserted itself. He needed a quick victory in the east before American power could assert itself in the west.
    As early as late July 1941, with the unexpectedly fierce Soviet resistance at Smolensk, some in the German leadership worried that the gamble had already failed, but events in early December resulted in the decisive change in the nature of the war. The setback in front of Moscow, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the German declaration of war on the United States all combined to transform what had remained an essentially European struggle into a global war of resources, manpower, and industrial prowess that put Germany at a distinct disadvantage. An additional dimension to the conflict was created by Hitler’s deliberate intention to wage a war of extermination in the Soviet Union.In a terrible irony, the failure to knock Great Britain out of the war, combined with