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 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.

Global power is itself something extraordinary. It imbues those people who have experienced it with arrogance and self-confidence that is hard to exaggerate. First Britain, and then the USA, have behaved on the global stage as if their role as a world leader has been ordained by God. For Britain to give up her empire so easily in 1944, some devastating events had to have occurred.

One of the keys to understanding the period between 1914 and 1945 is the continuation of colonialism. Stated or unstated, the expansion and control of foreign states was a major war aim of Britain, France, and Germany. The winners, Britain and France took everything. The one major part of the world uncolonised until this period was the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had been a strong precapitalist Empire some hundreds of years old. During the 19th century, as the Europeans expanded, the Ottomans declined in wealth, power, and territory. By 1900, they only existed because the European powers supported the Ottomans geographically to stop the Russian Empire from expanding southwards into the Mediterranean.

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.

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.