How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
This was the heaven-sent opportunity. Now the young vagabond could satisfy not only his passion to serve his beloved country in what he says he believed was a fight for its existence […] but he could escape from all the failures and frustrations of his personal life.
"To me," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "those hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me during the days of my youth. […] For me, as for every German, there now began the most memorable period of my life." (1.1.153-154)
So, if Hitler had only had a good job and a girlfriend, he'd never have evolved into the Fuehrer? That's a massive over-simplification, natch, but Shirer sees Hitler's joining the army as basically a solution to his aimless, unfulfilled life at the time. Many American WWII-era vets look back on their service as a formative event, but they sure didn't sign up as a solution to their failed lives.
Quote #2
For Hitler the preservation of culture "is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard—that is how it is!" (1.4.32)
For Hitler (as he wrote in Mein Kampf), the desire to wage war was not only natural, but admirable. It was a sign of one's instinct to live. He was merciless with the generals who wanted to retreat when they were surrounded by enemy troops and sure to be destroyed.
Quote #3
War is the great purifier. In Hegel's view, it makes for "the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm." (1.4.88)
In Shirer's view, the philosopher Hegel's thoughts were among the "weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century," and which had such a huge influence on Hitler's own thinking later. War as a purifier? How can a long peace corrupt the ethical health of a people? What do you think he's saying? (1.4.83)