Allies winning WW2 was in vain

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So, the head of the Nazi SS, Hermann Göring, had a problem: he needed his soldiers to commit atrocities during WW2.
Now, that doesn't sound much of a problem at first, but the key word here is *during*.
He was well aware that you can't create a decent society out of monsters.
He sought help from Eastern philosophy, and is known to have carried with him a leatherboung edition of the Bhagavad Gita, in which the Prince Arjuna is about to go into battle but suddenly has doubts about the rightousness of this - aren't his opponents humans, just like his troops. Many would die on either side.
However, his horsecart driver turns around and reveals himself to be the god Krishna and tells him that everything is temporary, that you can never know the outcomes of your actions, and that you have to do your duty, because there's bigger things than you can know.
Arjuna goes into battle.

That, apparently, was the philosophical answer to Göring's problem: make sure that the soldiers know that this is tempirary, that they have to do monstrous things to win the war, but not *become* monsters.

And that was very much how Germans saw themselves: as people who did their duty, even though it meant doing horrifying things, to win the war, eradicate the Jewish people, who, they believed, were truly evil, and live happily ever after.

The Nazis didn't think of themselves as evil.
Hollywood has done a great disservice to mankind, showing the villains as joyfully evil Darth Vader types.
But most people are not psychopaths. They want the best for themselves and their families and their societies, and often, they are willing to do barbaric things to achieve that -
The question now is of course, what kind of circumstances lead people to believe only temporary barabarism can save themselves, their families and their societies?


(That said: true psychpaths do exist, and war times amplify their psychopathy. Concentration camp guards are a different matter - but not all Nazis/Germans were concentration camp guards. Read up on the rape of Nanjing and unit 731, if you are looking for psychopathy. But not all Japanese people were prison guards of unit 731.
Most thought barbaric things needed to be done to save their society from evil. If the Nazis, or the Japanese Empire, had all been evil personified, monsters indeed, how come the same people could be complacent democrats, less than a decade later?)

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Anyway, as to the causes of WW2, this set of 2 pages sounds reasonable to me,

GI Roundtable Series

Primary source documents from 1944–46

There is bad and good in every country. Each country has a checkered past.