Over Christmas, self-isolating with Covid, I rewatched Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees’s classic BBC documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History. It is a gripping production that looks at the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, their plunging of Germany into war and genocide, and their subsequent fall.
One episode in the series examines the Nazi obsession with order, represented by mass rallies and carefully synchronised set pieces for the cameras at events such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Yet, as documented by Kershaw and Rees, much of this was a façade. The Nazis only created an illusion of perfect order. Scratch the surface and administrative chaos prevailed.
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