Volume 36, Number 15 · October 12, 1989
Making Way for Hitler
By Gordon A. Craig
How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939
by Donald Cameron Watt
Pantheon, 736 pp., $29.95
Chamberlain and Roosevelt: British Foreign Policy and the United States, 1937–1940
by William R. Rock
Ohio State University Press, 330 pp., $30.00
Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Stalins Kalkül
by Viktor Suworow
Klett-Cotta Verlag, 461 pp., DM38
During the first decades after the end of the most terrible war of our century, historians who searched for an explanation of its coming often came close to adopting the one that the fifteenth-century soldier-diplomat Philippe de Commynes found to describe the reasons for the unprecedented violence that followed the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in 1494. Commynes attributed it to 'the bestiality of some princes and the inadequacy of others, who have intelligence and experience enough but use them badly.'[1] In the same way, his modern successors divided the blame for the coming of the Second World War between Hitler's inhumanity and the weaknesses and mistakes of his antagonists, and every book on the crimes of the German Führer that came from the presses was matched by one about British appeasement or French defeatism or American isolationism.
Review, 6100 words
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