[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Problem with that assumption set is that so much of that is true elsewhere in Europe. Colonial genocide? The Belgians in the Congo. That didn't lead to European genocide. Germany was very progressive with Jews before Hitler, as opposed to France, with the Dreyfus Affair (which happened in part because Dreyfus, as an Alsatian Jew, was deemed to be someone who would thus have been a likely German spy); France wasn't the country that wiped out 5.6 million Jews. And in 1914, France was pining for war, as well as Russia, both with utterly fantastic plans for the post-war situation. None of this is unique at all to Germany. Not even the rise of fascism after the war: all nations in Europe had such movements, and quasi-fascist (at least both conservative and nationalistic) movements ruled the Baltic States (including Poland in this) at times in the 1930s.

Hence change the victor in the Great War, and there is, for once, a clear point when this could have happened. Fascism still happens, just next door. The German aristocracy (not just Prussian; none of the other sets of conservative German aristocrats were actually any better, just less powerful) takes the place of the Bolsheviks in the Cold War.

And any of those things could have taken place without what happened happening. Hitler was an unexplainable phenomenon.