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.

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.