If you win, you need not have to explain...If you lose, you should not be there to explain! - Adolf Hitler

I ought to have seized the initiative in 1938 instead of allowing myself to be forced into war in 1939; for war was, in any case, unavoidable. However, you can hardly blame me if the British and the French accepted at Munich every demand I made of them!

The National Socialist racial idea and the science underlying it do not lead to the underrating or disparagement of other nations but rather to the recognition of the duty to preserve and maintain the life of our own people. Hence it leads inevitably to a natural respect for the life and character of other peoples. It thus frees foreign political activities from those attempts to subjugate other peoples in order to rule them or to incorporate them as a mere numerical mass in one's own nation by imposing a foreign language upon them. This new idea entails equally great and fanatical devotion to the life and hence to the honour and freedom of one's own people as it does respect for the honour and freedom of others. This idea can therefore provide an essentially better basis to the effort for a true pacification of the world than the sorting of the nations into groups of victors and vanquished, of those with rights and of those subjugated without rights, from mere considerations of strength.

By looking after his relatives' interests as he did, Napoleon furthermore displayed incredible weakness on the purely human level. When a man occupies such a position, he should eliminate all his family feeling. Napoleon, on the contrary, placed his brothers and sisters in posts of command, and retained them in these posts even after they'd given proofs of their incapability. All that was necessary was to throw out all these patently incompetent relatives. Instead of that, he wore himself out with sending his brothers and sisters, regularly every month, letters containing reprimands and warnings, urging them to do this and not to do that, thinking he could remedy their incompetence by promising them money, or by threatening not to give them any more. Such illogical behaviour can be explained only by the feeling Corsicans have for their families, a feeling in which they resemble the Scots. By thus giving expression to his family feeling, Napoleon introduced a disruptive principle into his life. Nepotism, in fact, is the most formidable protection imaginable : the protection of the ego. But wherever it has appeared in the life of a State — the monarchies are the best proof — it has resulted in weakening and decay. Reason : it puts an end to the principle of effort.
In this respect, Frederick the Great showed himself superior to Napoleon — Frederick who, at the most difficult moments of his life, and when he had to take the hardest decisions, never forgot that things are called upon to endure. In similar cases, Napoleon capitulated. It's therefore obvious that, to bring his life's work to a successful conclusion, Frederick the Great could always rely on sturdier collaborators than Napoleon could. When Napoleon set the interests of his family clique above all, Frederick the Great looked around him for men, and, at need, trained them himself.
Despite all Napoleon's genius, Frederick the Great was the most outstanding man of the eighteenth century. When seeking to find a