I just want to advert to a discussion on this subject of which virtually all Americans are either totally ignorant, or else choose to ignore.
How did the Weimar Republic fall so fast, and Hitler rise so high so fast in Germany?
If you follow the FDR line, Hitler was just another manifestation of aristocratic and imperial German self assertion, the same last seen before, during, and after WWI. I have pointed out elsewhere here the falsity of this view.
In the intervening years, during and after WWII, it has been convenient for American historical opinion to simply adopt FDR's view; the alternative, seeing Hitler as a brother lower class right populist, but nationalist, revolutionary movement, analogous to the sans culottes, and the American Rebellion, and other European patriot rebellions in the late 18th Century, has been unacceptable to American Liberal opinion.
For American Democrats, and many Republicans, all the way from WWI in 1917, with the Russian Revolution (which we welcomed), to the very end of WWII, to the very brink of the Cold War, Russia was our friend and Germany was our enemy.
See a very different take, see Kennan's discussion in Russian and The West Under Lenin And Stalin, "The Rise of Hitler".
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