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Dr. Egon Ranshoven-Wertheimer makes this statement:As far as I am aware, not a single foreign observer who was resident inGermany between Hitler's rise to power and the outbreak of the secondWorld War has ever suggested that the German nation had any active desirefor war. Hitler, who was aware of this mood, assured the nation that hewanted peace and that he was resolved to maintain it. The support of Hitler'sforeign policy (up to the seizure of Prague), even outside the ranks ofadherents, rested upon a reluctant admiration for a man who seemed to beable to get so much for Germany without involving her in war. He knewhow to create the great myth of being the great redeemer who would stopshort ^ war. 11Rauschning tells of an able and patriotic Jew genuinely devotedto his fatherland and brokenhearted by his expulsion from Germany.He said to Rauschning with a tinge of bitterness: "Really,but for the persecution of the Jews and the war on Christianity,this Nazi movement might have gained the world."There is no end of testimony for this same attitude toward bothHitler and Mussolini. The crime of which they are held guilty byso many is not the establishment of national socialism or fascism ortheir doctrines, but the launching of the European war and thepersecution of the Jews in the case of Hitler and the desertion of theWestern powers in the case of Mussolini. National socialism orfascism itself, divested of these crimes, did not excite that universalexecration either in Britain or America or France which it deserved.Hitler in his unsuccessful race for the presidency had polledfourteen million votes before he became Premier and got possessionof the instruments of state coercion. It was not the Junkers andindustrialists who were responsible for Hitler. These gentlemen—the Von Schleichers, Von Papens, Thyssens, and Hugenbergs—came in at the eleventh hour when they saw this seemingly irresistibleforce and foolishly supposed they could seize and use it. In acountry that had been humiliated and ruined by war, devastatedby inflation, crushed by an impossible external debt, and finallybetrayed by a republican regime which could not save it fromanother depression, it was the little man, the unemployed, the^Victory Is Not Enough, by Egon Ranshoven-Wertheimer, W. W. Norton, New York,1942.IS*