An earlier version of this article was published in 2018. Enjoy the war, because then peace will come. The phrase traveled the four corners of Germany during the closing bars of World War II. German citizenship had passed on tiptoe above conflict. Adolf Hitler did not want a repeat of the events of 1918, when isolation, hunger and internal instability mythologically dynamited any bargaining power of Imperial Germany. War must be a bed of roses. And to a large extent it was. Seven million slave laborers were dragged into German production centers, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans had...