Erich Marcks, soldier son of an eminent neo-Rankean, saw more clearly than he knew. In July 1940, a few weeks after he had written these lines, the German army staff gave him the intriguing task of drafting Germany's preliminary plan for an attack on Soviet Russia. That attempt at global Blitzkrieg, in both aims and consequences, was National Socialism's most revolutionary deed. Limitless military violence and pitiless racial-ideological genocide, conquest both external and internal, fused in the “East” into the consummation of the German Revolution.

Like the Paris revolutions of 1789–94 and unlike the German “military strike” of 1918, the German Revolution of 1933–45 transformed politics and society at home while generating unprecedented external destruction. Yet except in the air, German technological or numerical superiority was either absent or contributed relatively little to the ruin of France and the humiliation of Britain in April–June 1940. In the attack on Soviet Russia, as Omer Bartov has shown, most German units found themselves by winter 1941–42 reduced almost to the technological levels of the First World War against an increasingly mechanized and motorized enemy.