Hitler was the symptom....not the disease. The disease was Prussianism and centuries of German anti-Semitism. Germans had a collective self-image that they were natural warriors, and essentially undefeatable in war. So you wound up with a German leadership that concealed the fact that Germany was losing the war in the last months of World War I. So the eventual armistice (which was a German surrender in reality) came as a shock to the German people....and even many common soldiers at the front. Add this to the German cultural mythology around their infallibility in war..... ...and you had a German nation that refused to accept that they had lost the war, and left them looking for a face-saving explanation as to why the "humiliation" of the Versailles Treaty was forced upon them. So just like the American South came up with the "Lost Cause" as a face-saving explanation for why they went to war....and so they didn't have to face the fact that they waged (and lost) a devastating war to defend slavery..... .....Post World War I Germany concocted the "Stab in the Back" mythology . It basically stated that all the internal "undesirables' that ethnic Germans didn't like (Jews, socialists, Gypsies, etc....) all conspired to "stab the German military in the back" and deny them the victory that they were earning on the battlefield. All Hitler and the [url=http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law]-godwinslaw!-[/url] did was just give a FOCUS to that malicious bit of delusion and self-deception....and let the German people see themselves as victims of shadowy forces, and that they weren't suffering the consequences of militarism and Will to Empire run riot. But this was why the Allies never wavered from "Unconditional Surrender" as their strategy in the European Theater during World War II, and were not going to let Germany negotiate a peace a second time. They were going beat Germany bloody until it could no longer wage war....and until it had no choice but to accept the fact that it had been truly beaten.