--as every first-class newspaperman must be--a student of ideas
and social systems, and a human being sensitive to moral values.
That is why he has written not only a gallery of portraits of the
Nuremberg criminals, but an analysis of the outer predations and
inner impulsions of the Nazi system. He lays bare the meaning
of what the German nation did--a nation led by scoundrels and
sadists (but also ready for such leadership, terrorized by them)
but with hysterical undertones in its history that seemed to exult
in terrorism, indoctrinated by them but ripe for such indoctrination.

We have recently had a spate of now-it-can-be-told stories about
the Second World War. But the biggest story of all has up to now
been neglected -- the story of how seventy million minds were
poisoned and seventy million hearts were hardened beyond human
recognition, and the deeds that the poisoned minds and the dehu-
manized hearts found it possible to do. Now is the time to tell
the Fascist story--the story of the men and the forces which turned
Europe into a cemetery and the human heart into a petrified forest.

Victor Bernstein is the right man to tell it. He was PM's cor-
respondent at Nuremberg all through the weary months of the
trials. He came to his assignment wonderfully prepared for it.
He had covered Berlin during the years when Hitler was building
his power. He knew Germany--its language, its history, its pol-
itics, its people. He had followed closely the whole tragic course
of the diplomacy which failed to stop Hitler's aggressions and
prevent the war. As a war correspondent in Germany, he witnessed
the final collapse of Hitler's power, and saw the concentration
camps and the human furnaces which were its ghastly memorial.

And so, when the hidden Nazi documents began to turn up--
in Nazi headquarters overrun by American troops, or in the vaults
and salt mines in which they had been hidden--Bernstein knew
how to read them, what they meant, how they furnished the final
cement to the damning structure of evidence that had been built
up for over a decade. He has pieced it all together in this book:
how Germany rearmed for war even during the Weimar days, and
how Hitler and Goering and the Nazi generals speeded it up as
soon as they came to power; how Austria was betrayed from within
and conquered from without while Goering directed the psycho-
logical terror by telephone; the inner story of how the blow was
prepared for Poland and fell on it; the Nazi documents relating

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