Eliot Barculo Wheaton

970 Prelude to Calamity: The Nazi Revolution 1933-35 With a Background Survey of the Weimar Era, by Eliot Barculo Wheaton (read 15 Oct 1968) This is not an excessively well-written book. But it is horror-inspiring. One would think one knew all about Hitler, and yet reading this book shows new facets of the greatest evil known in history. The book is more powerful because it spends little time on the latter enormities of evil--and shows how Hitler was evil incarnate always, not just "later." This paragraph made my blood run cold: "In conclusion it seems fitting to make a rough estimate of how many people died in the Nazi camps--aside, that is, from the vast toll in Action Commando massacres, ghetto liquidations, Gestapo torture centres, and the like. Including only places which plainly fall under the heading of camps--concentration, extermination, slave-labour, prisoner of war--the total even so must have come to at least 6,000,000. 6,000,000 individual human beings done to death--one cannot readily grasp what this represents. Yet its meaning can to an extent be conveyed obliquely. On May 26, 1940, near a town in northeastern France bearing the lovely name of Le Paradis, an SS unit forced a hundred English prisoners-of-war to defile in front of a barn and, as they did so, machine-gunned them. While the wanton savagery of this deed is almost incomprehensible, its scale can be grasped. Let it simply be noted, then, that at the rate of a mere hundred killings a day, the Nazis would not have attained their six million total until after the passage of 164 years."… (més)