Hitler sat upon his Bavarian peak and cunningly meditated in his diseased vanity how to sit upon all Europe itself and gain the chauvinistic glory he thirsted for. He finally translated his dream into visibility, but only to find in the end that he had sat upon a volcano in which all the peoples of Europe burst forth in the mightiest revenge-seeking upheaval history has ever known.
Many people became so depressed by Hitler's early and easy recurring victories as to believe that he would win the war, and they became so deceived by his High Command's facade of ruthless efficiency as to believe that he was utterly invincible. Apart from other factors of internal weakness, they often overlooked one which was of immense importance: the mental one. They did not notice the invisible deterioration of the nerve of the German people, the hidden breaking of morale, and the spread of social neurosis. Underneath even the egoistic bombast of the Nazi Party members themselves, there gradually grew up a psychosis of fear, a malady of jittery nerves, and a palsy of flagging will. The German mind generally became more and more filled with confusions and anxieties, with inability to defeat growing doubts. The passage from these concealed cracks to a sudden and open national nervous breakdown, as the realization of useless suffering and needless loss became clearer, was therefore only a matter of time.
-- Notebooks Category 11: The Negatives > Chapter 3 : Their Presence in The World > # 206
