How quickly we forget the zeitgeist of an earlier era, and thus the conclusions which naturally follow there from. Plus, at that time, much of my knowledge of modern Germany were based on the very first edition of Geoffrey Barraclough's "Orgins of Modern Germany", which really started with a single short summary of the developments prior to the emergence of Prussia and then proceeded to describe the subsequent process of accretion for a brief to the Imperial War College in
Britain during WW II. I had found a copy of this in the Oklahoma State University library, while History was only my second minor subject and was fascinated. (I would very much like to find a copy as it is vastly different from the later editions.) The rest of my then knowledge of German history was from the course work I had in Russian, French and English 'national history course sequences. Add to that the fact that I was working 60+ hours a week and had a pre-school child at home, often missed the evening news on TV and primarily relied on the LA Times, which, at the time, had a fairly good foreign news section. Even so, little of what was in the Spiegel article was covered in any detail, mostly just the fact of the conferences.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."