Recently
I read a book called “Benes, Statesman of Central Europe” by Pierre
Crabites. It was a book that came out in
1935 on the eve of World War II, and it was a book that was focused on the
qualities of Edvard Benes, the Czechoslovak president at the time. But the book came with a foreword from the
author. He stated that he saw war
brewing in Europe. He thought another
great war would come, and he predicted it would come out of Germany. I could summarize but his words have a bone
chilling potency. He said “His[Hitler’s]
energy, his eloquence, his excoratiations have unleashed passions that he may
be unable to master. I fear that when a
generation of Germans who knew nothing of the horrors of first-line trenches
has assumed control at Berlin, Hitler may be brushed aside as completely as was
Kerensky. When that hour sounds,
terrible will be the toll which it will exact.
It is Hitlerism and the consequences of Hitlerism that I fear, not
Hitler… I am obsessed by fear of another war.”
He was right, war did eventually come, but he was also wrong.
Or
was he? He makes a bold distinction
between Hitler and Hitlerism. Hitlerism
was the monster that Hitler created from his speeches and laws. Hitlerism was the monster that people clung
to, ridding themselves of poverty and oppression created by the Allies after
World War I. Crabites saw a very
different world than we do now. He saw a
tragic victim in World War I in Hitler, someone who knew the uselessness of
war, and he tried to separate him from the monster of revenge that was
encapsulating Germany.
Crabites
saw war as inevitable. He thought
Germany was already ready for war, and only Hitler held it back. Most would dismiss this theory without a
second thought, but perhaps we would do so because we are biased. From birth we’ve been taught to hate Hitler
and Nazism identifying them as one single thing. But as Hitler can be blamed for much of
Nazism, he was not it. And it begs the
question-what if Hitler had fallen from power?
Would there have been a Second World War? Crabites would say yes. Why?
Because as he saw it, Europe was sick with a disease, one incurred from
the past century of existence, and the only way to cure it, was to remove it.
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