Walter Martindale

The Latin quote provided by Demetrio was translated by Henry using Google Translate or something similar (I pasted the text into google translate and got the same - um - verbatim...

I suspect that the google translate tool misses some of the semantics of the original Latin, which if I think back nearly 50 years to ninth grade, leaves a lot to be understood or read between the lines.

I think the sense of it is - if you want to live a peaceful existence, make it so nobody's going to be foolish enough to attack you. In the Aikido/MA perspective of this, I used to read of people who would/could walk into a room and defuse a "situation" by being there and being confident, somehow letting people know that it wouldn't be a good idea to "attack"...

Kinda like why Japan chose not to invade the US during WWII, because there's an American with a rifle behind every blade of grass (I may not have the quote exactly right, and I don't care enough about it to waste energy and time on it looking it up).

I'm afraid I haven't owned a copy of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich since some time in the 1970s so I can't remember much of the detail. Hitler was a psychopath who charmed enough Germans of the day, in troubled times, to follow his warped path.