vaunted unity there existed nothing but "discontent, secret opposition and repressed decency". Germans had entered the war divided. Less than one in five were true devotees, the "real Nazis". No consideration, not even the "Bolshevik menace", could reconcile this "morally inaccessible" section of the New Germany to a stable Europe. The anti-Semitism that is their "badge" had outrun its original motive: the venting of Hitler's private resentments, the scapegoating of a minority as a safety valve for anti-capitalist sentiment. It functions rather as "a means of selection and trial", identifying those who are prepared, without pretext, to persecute, hunt and murder and thus be bound to the Leader by "the iron chains of a common crime". Hitler, in turn, (a "potential suicide par excellence") recognises only devotion to his own person. A greater number of Germans—perhaps four in ten—wish only to see the back of Hitler and the Nazis. But "unorganised, dispirited and often in despair", very few identified with the submerged political opposition, itself divided and confused. Side-by-side they live with a roughly equal number of Germans who, dreading a further Versailles, bear "the surrender of personality, religion and private life" under Hitler as a "patriotic sacrifice". Through their generals, these Reich loyalists might eventually seek terms with the Allies, but Haffner urged caution. Anything less than a decisive break with the status quo ante would merely return to "a latent and passive state" the Reich's animating spirit of aggrandisement and "vulgar worship of force". For there to be security in Europe, Haffner insisted (in original italics) that "[The] German Reich must disappear, and the last seventy-five years of Germany history must be erased. The Germans must retrace their steps to the point where they took the wrong path--to the year 1866" (the year when, on the battlefield of Königgrätz, Prussia removed Austrian protection from the smaller German states). Articulating a thesis he was to defend at length in his last (dictated) work, Von Bismarck zu Hitler (1987), Haffner maintained that "No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany". Germany should be returned to an historical pattern of regional states bound by confederal arrangements that are European and not exclusively national. At the same time, Haffner admitted that part of the attraction for Germans would be that, repurposed as Bavarians, Rhinelanders and