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.

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.