A puzzle still unsolved

Sara Moore would explain a rise to power as astonishing as any in history. A down-and-out house-painter and plebeian agitator becomes master at 43 of a country whose most influential classes expected its rulers to be of some social standing, and not to look absurd. The Marx, Lenin and Stalin, all in one, of his revolution; writing the manifesto, building the party; overthrowing the state after a lost war; then murdering his party rivals; becoming the subject of a ‘leadership cult,’ and then war leader; there differing only from Stalin in that he lost.

Take away any one part of the whole —defeat in 1918, inflation, the army and bourgeoisie owing no allegiance to the new republic, slump — and it probably would not have been possible. Put them all together, and it is the only way it could have been. Still, the world will never be able to explain something so unique. But much of the world — or at least the Western political and educated classes — thinks it can.

Thus Hitler came to power because of the vengeful Versailles Treaty whose reparations bled Germany dry and caused the economics that gave him his chance. For any of the world’s ills, it is always more satisfying, to a certain mentality, to blame the bourgeois West.

This excusing of Germany began immediately after the first world war. Arriving at the Paris peace conference, President Wilson privately warned an aide against ‘too much success or security on the part of the allies’ — presumably the first time in history that victors thought it possible to have too much of either.  

In Paris too, Lloyd George applied our traditional policy of opposing whichever was the dominant European power, and decided that it was France.