“It’s not that Germans are particularly evil. It’s just that they are particularly efficient, no matter whether they’re doing evil or just building cars.”
This may be it.
Completely random, but I became very good friends with a German/NATO pilot for the better part of a decade. He had been to Israel repeatedly and was amazed at the progress and the people.
One day he got very drunk, the avoided topic of the Shoa/WWII came up and he basically said the only mistake the Germans made was targeting the Jewish people — we were very smart and there is a unique combination of German and Jewish that is amazingly brilliant and efficient — and we could have taken over the entire world.
I chalked it up to alcohol, but kept my distance, thereafter.
Well, they did lose a lot of great scientists and engineers when Jews started fleeing Germany even before the war. If not for that, they might have built the bomb before we did. So I can see what he meant from a strategic perspective, but that’s certainly not the “only mistake” they made.
Hitler said that if the Germans adopted Mohammedism, instead of “weak” Christianity, the German Race would have conquered the world.