At the end of August 1943 Dr. Alexander Loudon, Netherlands Ambassador to Washington, made a most interesting forecast about the outcome and aftermat… - Curt Riess

By early 1943 Hitler had become perhaps the most isolated man inside the Third Reich, Every report was rewritten before it was given to him. He no longer saw the newspapers, though, to be sure, they contained little enough genuine information. He saw only clippings. The reason for all these precautionary measures was that nobody around Hitler fancied the hysterical outbreaks to which he was so addicted, and nobody wanted him to have any more brainstorms or intuitions of the kind which had already cost the army so dearly in Russia

Generals usually know when a war is lost. The German generals had never been absolutely convinced that they could win World War II. They had only hoped to win it mainly because Hitler had promised them that the enemy armies would suffer amoral collapse and that they themselves would not have to fight a two-front war.

Next to Goebbels, Himmler was the foremost connoisseur of Russian methods in the Nazi Party. But while the great propagandist was concerned mainly with the theory, Himmler studied the practice of the Bolshevists.