The German Style of War

Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania is a gripping piece of historical non-fiction.  Larson, as usual, delivers a readable and informative book.

This book highlights how the Germans, and their brand of nationalism, really began the steady decline of dehumanization in war that would culminate in the Shoah, and the large scale atrocities of World War II.  Their U-boat campaigns in the First World War bear the stamp of later atrocious acts of "war."

That a nation would show pride at the sinking of a passenger liner, killing hundreds of woman, children, and babies, illustrates the rot at the core of twentieth century German social and national thought and feeling.