The Liberal Wing of the Nazi Party

I finished Mazower's book, and I was interested in at least two things: the existence (not just a Pynchonian joke) of a liberal wing of the Nazi party and the seamless movement by any number of mid-level technocrats from the SS bureaucracy into the postwar West German state. The liberal wing espoused the idea that it would be better to work captive populations to death as opposed to immediately exterminating them. The mid-level technocrats offered knowledge of town planning and European identity to the anti-communist fervor of the late 1940s and beyond. The Nazis' main mistake? To treat some Europeans the same way that Europeans had been treating colonial subjects for 450 years. Otherwise, they weren't that much different than, say, other Europeans.

So the hopeless and pointless choice: Hitler or Stalin? And the third way--Anglo-American "liberal" plutocracy--doesn't seem so great either. A system that encourages financial geniuses to dream up ever more sophisticated financial instruments for fleecing fools and then suffer inevitable "crashes" doesn't strike me as a sane way to function. Yet the cycle has begun again. When will the next economic crash occur?