Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.

The idea that white Germans were the ‘superior’ race developed in Germany tied in with European and American racist thinking. The Nazi reading of race came out of the work of Hans F. K. Gunther, who developed the Volk or Volkergruppe, people of a common hereditary with precise physical and spiritual habits. The concept of Aryan or Nordic races arose out of Gunther’s work.

The key question that contemporary people around the world want to answer is, “What kind of people could perpetuate the unspeakable crimes that occurred in the 1940s war in Europe?". This is of course the correct question to be asking. But alongside it are parallel questions that are rarely investigated. 'Unspeakable' crimes were committed across the colonial world, in both South and North America's, and smaller but dreadful ways by all the colonial powers from time to time, as my blogs have highlighted. The Nazi Holocaust was the final colonialist racial crime. It is this theme that is pursued below.

In the next several blogs I will cover the rise of Nazi Germany, Hitler, the Jewish holocaust, and racism. European and American readers will be used to these subjects. They are frequently covered in film, radio, TV and even referenced general conversation. This begs the question, is there anything new to say? Outside Europe and the USA, these subjects will be less covered. However, because one outcome of this period was the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Arab world, and to a less extent the Islamic peoples around the world, has been deeply affected by events in which they had no hand. The rise of Hitler and the Jewish Holocaust has therefore been of significance almost worldwide.

Private property for the first time became the dominant method to handle land and industry. Banking had grown in importance. The entire edifice was premised on a stable system of exchange; this was the pound sterling which acted as the world's currency. Gold had become the ultimate standard of value for all the major non colonised countries.

The British government at an early stage, in 1916, limited their adherence to the system and by 1931 removed the system altogether. The essence of the global capitalist system, that is the mechanism that held it all together, ceased to work.

What had changed by the end of the 1914-18 war? The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had disappeared. The Chinese Empire remained in place, just about. The Russian Empire had erupted into a socialist revolution. This revolution would focus the minds of the European and American ruling classes for the next 70 years, the new socialist leaders would nationalise the companies privately owned by wealthy Europeans. They tampered with private ownership; previously, private property had been untouchable.

The global relations of power were altered fundamentally after the turbulent period between 1914 and 1945. In 1914, Britain was the world’s leading industrial state. She controlled the global infrastructure for trade and finance on which the world’s stability depended. Thirty years later in 1944 and 1945, Britain had lost nearly everything she had fought for over the previous 400 years. The USA took over global leadership. Worse, as far as Britain was concerned: she was about to lose control of her huge global empire and become again a small island nation in the North Atlantic.

The 30 years from 1914 to 1944 represent years of such death and turmoil at every level that it is hard to exaggerate the suffering across the globe. Many of the events of this period have become so seared into people’s memory, contemporary events are frequently compared and contrasted with them. More people than ever were involved in, or affected by war, and at the times when there was no war, there was chaos across the global economy, which affected everyone’s lives.

There is a small body of historians who have argued the case that the British ruling classes or a powerful part of that class, did wish to go to war with Germany in 1914. And further that they prepared all the conditions for such a war. This small group of historians has in the main been ignored by the establishment historians who have been given prominence by the major publishers in both the USA and UK.

The origins of the war in 1914 cannot be understood without a deeper understanding of racism. The idea that the Europeans stood as a standard-bearer of the world’s peoples, that they were a ‘superior’ race above all others of the world’s peoples, was a widespread belief across all ruling classes at the time.

Following on from last week’s blog, a second possibility was that Germany was responsible for the war in 1914. All the winning powers agreed with this proposition in 1919. The new Germany was the "contending" nation for world power. In the 25 years before 1914, the German economy was growing significantly faster than Britain's. Germany had only been unified as a single state in 1870, and therefore had missed out in the race for colonies: the ‘common sense’ of European foreign policy of the era. And Germany was competing for oil, the new super energy in the ground in the Middle East.

The period between 1914 and 1945 saw war break out across the world. These 30 years saw death and destruction on a scale that had never before been envisaged. And, while this period is behind us by over 100 years, it is still replayed in books and television almost as if it was yesterday. These wars are seared into the public mind as almost nothing else in history. As is so often repeated, history is written by the victors, and so it has been.