The argument Stargardt offers and that Hastings finds persuasive is this: If Germans lost the war, they…

The argument Stargardt offers and that Hastings finds persuasive is this: If Germans lost the war, they knew that “retribution must follow” and that this retribution “seemed likely to be annihilatory.” Consequently, Stargardt says, faced with the prospect of defeat, “Neither Nazism nor the war itself could be rejected, because Germans envisaged their own defeat in existential terms. The worse their war went, the more obviously ‘defensive’ it became. Far from leading to collapse, successive crises acted as catalysts of radical transformation … Major disasters like Stalingrad and Hamburg did indeed lead to a catastrophic fall in the regime’s popularity, but they did not in themselves call patriotic commitment into question.”