Lately stuck on WW2 history.

[Deesse23]

You'll never have to commit suicide over guilt of what your superiors do if you always realize you are not a master race. This is a picture of a Nazi sympathizer  Mayor realized they were going to lose. 

Popular history tends to focus on overweening german air of racial supremacy between 1870-1945, with its pretentious of being the ubermenschen and exterminators outlook towards people of the east.   But they often overlook there is a flip side to this Darwinian outlook.   Germany always felt, even as it grew stronger, that all the other races of the world is out to keep germans down and as a germany was always  5 minutes from catastrophe and losing it all.   Many Germans genuinely felt Germany was in a life or death reckoning with the world, and Germany must keep winning, and if Germany loses, the world will completely destroy Germany, and subjugate the German people so they can never rise again.  So there is nothing to live for if Germany loses.

Racial supremacy thinking was purely a thing of the nazi era 1933-45. During the second empire 1870-1918 Germany was like any other major european nation in the age of imperialism and colonialism: extreme nationalist and jingoist, but not predominantly racist, at least not against the other europeans (but all europeans vs everybody else, africans particularly).
From 1870 until Bismarck got sacked (1890?), Germany was politically well entrenched in Europe. It was Bismarcks policy to not be militaristc and risk wars but to entrench germany in european political alliances while isolating France (the main adversary) to avoid wars, particularly with France. Bismarck loved to be protrayed in a military outfit, being vain and all, but actually he was a politician through and through. It was politically a purely defensive strategy, of course not without saber rattling, like everybody else.

The big change came with Wilhelm, who envied his relatives (Gramma Victoria, Uncle Edward and Cousin Niki) and their empires. He most probably suffered from a  (inferiority) complex related to his crippled left arm. Bismarck particularly wanted to be/remain closely allied with Russia, Wilhelm preferred Austria-Hungary! Bismarck didnt want to participate in colonialism, Wilhelm did, and pissed off France and Britain mostly, bringing them closer together.

During the 20s, Germany tried to appease the allies for a long time and comply with the versailles treaty and its burden (while at the same time trying to look for loopholes). There was no "live or die" or "germany vs the rest of the world". Of course there was a deep sense of humiliation and a sense of beign denied a rightful place within the ranks of leading european nations. The nazis used this underlying feeling(s) to encourage and feed this into the rage that finally became the Nazi struggle for world domination, but again, that started in the 30s, not in 1870.

There was no "Germany vs the rest of the world" attitude until probably 1910, when the dice was already cast for a future major confrontation, and later again only after 1932-33.