There is one question that is seldom asked of Nazi Germany yet is fundamental to understanding how it could behave as it did towards the populations under it's power: why did Nazi Germany think it were right? National Socialism never regarded the vicious persecution unleasehed against it's enemies as criminal or immoral. It is unlikely that Hitler spent sleepless nights tortured by the thought of the millions victimized at his behest. Nazi Germany never displayed any outward doubts about the justice of it's cause. The lack of conscience was not merley a consequence of exceptional power unscruplously exercised, the expression of might as right. In National Socialism, as well as Stalinism, there existed a unique moral universe that was constructed in order to justify and explain what appear otherwise to be the most sordid and arbitrary of acts.
Historians have been wary of trying to reconstruct the moral outlook of National Socialism because it's ethical claims are seldom taken to be more than rehtorical or demagogic devices to sweeten the sour taste of state repression. Yet the faliure to take the ethical discourse, in my opinion, seriously distorts historical reality and undermines any attempt to understand the operation of the dictatorship on it's own terms. National Socialism was driven by powerful moral inperatives that challenged and transcended the norms derives from the heritage of Roman antiquity and Christianity. It did not simply rely on the existance of a tough coerive power to enforce its values, but directly contested other moral claims that compromised its own claim to legitimacy and moral worth. The most evident examples of this moral contest can be found in the attitudes National Socialism took to organized religion and the law. National Socialist institution was rooted in moral traditions that pre-dated dictatorship.
The moral plane of dictatorship was not an irrelevance, but a battleground between differing interpretations of justice and moral certainty.
