"The advent of Bolshevik, Fascist and National Socialist regimes in Russia and Europe successively between 1917 and 1933 led some contemporary intellectuals to wonder whether their own terminology adequately conveyed the scope of these regimes’ pretentions or the horrors they were responsible for. Of course, many intellectuals did not view them as horrors at all, but rather collateral costs of supposedly bright future."

“By 1930, Nazi students had a majority in the unions of nine universities; by 1931 they had seized control of the national Deutsche Studentenschaft”

“Power was briefly seized by the Communists, who proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic. Their leader, Eugen Levine, received the blessing of Lenin, who characteristically wished to know how many bourgeois hostages had been taken. A ‘classist’ tone was soon apparent. Milk shortages were rationalized with the argument: ‘What does it matter? . . . Most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie anyway. We are not interested in keeping them alive. No harm if they die – they’d only grow into enemies of the proletariat.’”

“The major faultline running through the left wing of the working class, for by no means all workers came under the rubric, was hostility between the Communists and Social Democrats. Between 1928 and 1934 the Communist Party adhered to an inflationary use of the term ‘fascism’ to describe not only the Nazis, but also the previous chancellors and the ‘social fascists’ of the”

“The Labor Front’s leisure arm, ‘Strength through Joy’ was heavily influenced by the ideas of the apostate Belgian socialist Hendrik de Man, who sought to fuse Marx and Freud, and the practice of such firms as Siemens in Berlin.”

“The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality… Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was a ‘soul-malady.’ Many Nazis were also viscerally anti-clerical, up to and including resisting the emergence of a quasi-clerical caste in their own ranks. One would have to visit the Reformation or the extremes of liberal anti-clericalism in the modern era to find anything analogous to their vicious and vulgar attacks on priests.”

“The National Socialists not only joined the Communists in denouncing Social Democratic bosses, but also practiced egalitarianism, unlike bourgeois parties. One should not underestimate the extent to which working-class people bitterly resented being treated as infantile inferiors by the middle and upper classes.”