The Silver Thread

There is, perhaps, no single period in history about which so much has been written as the decades from World War I through WW II. The silver thread in that may be the exceptionally large number of published books about the period, but only if the books get read. For personal reasons, I have read, for a lifetime. Mine are books about Nazi Germany and World War II and how it came to be that a supposedly civilized land came to see extermination of certain groups as desirable or just OK. How people who had, between two world wars, lived in democracy, and then followed a lunatic, to not just taunt the “others,” bad enough, but to slaughter them with machineguns, and starve them in cattle cars and pens, and gas them in chambers. How on earth did that happen in supposedly civilized Europe? …