You’re absolutely right about the over-simplicity.
I’m currently reading Patrick J. Buchanan’s book HITLER, CHURCHILL, AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR. It’s a very good read and fully documented.
For a whole year after WW1 Churchill and England kept the food embargo against Germany starving the populace. The Allied Powers via the Versailles Treaty instilled enormous enmity (justifiably) among the Germans. Of all the villians in WW1 most historians hold Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II the least culpable.
It was the folly of President Wilson’s “Self-Determination” policy that made such a mess of the Balkanized world we have today.
Another excellent book that thoroughly explains the rise and fall of both the Second and Third Reichs is William Manchester’s “The Arms of Krupp”. It’s an amazing tale, and it is very clear that German Industry was what enabled the rise of 2 Kaisers and Adolph Hitler, but also helped forge modern Germany out of a vast forest that even the Romans were too wary to conquer.
It’s very easy to heap all of the blame on Adolph Hitler for the atrocities of World War II, and that is exactly what Historians and Post-War Germans have done. But the complicity for the atrocities committed during the many German/Prussian wars over the centuries lies more in the makeup of the German people, than at the feet of just one man.
"I’m currently reading Patrick J. Buchanan’s book HITLER, CHURCHILL, AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR. It’s a very good read and fully documented...
Of all the villians in WW1 most historians hold Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II the least culpable." I've read the book completely, and agree that Buchanan makes some good points. But his fundamental assumptions are flawed, leading to ridicuous conclusions.
Here's an example:
The appropriate analogy for Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914 is the leader of a gang of thugs who walks into a bank (Serbia), intending to rob it. He does not intend to kill anyone, he just wants the money.
But once there, some of his goons (i.e., Moltke, Bethmann) begin shooting. Too late, the Kaiser says, "no, no, don't shoot," but once things get going, the Kaiser then orders his goons to kill everyone, including the neighbors and the local constabulary.
Buchanan refuses to understand this, even though he claims to have read widely on the subject.
So I have recommended here before, and will again -- here is the real story of what was going on during that summer of 1914:
Fromkin, "Europe's Last Summer"
