Looking at your comments, Jonah, I was glad to see your observation that Trotsky was “certainly right about the barbarism and mysticism underlying much of the Nazi movement.” Indeed he was. One sometimes hears the claim that Nazism was an aggressively secular/atheist movement, an argument that fails to reflect either the difficult questions posed by its status as a “political religion” (the British historian Michael Burleigh is well worth reading on this topic) or, for that matter, the mystical/pagan strain that ran through aspects of the Third Reich’s governing ideology.