Soviet–Nazi Pact of 1939 which freed Hitler of his fear of a second front. It has little to recommend it. French distrust of Germany would never have been allayed by the sight of victorious German armies anywhere. But the decisive disproof of the allegations is the fact that both England and France declared war against Germany as soon as she marched due east to Russian borders. They did not do it, of course, to save Poland and Russia but to save themselves. Why did they wake up so late to the realization that Hitler threatened them and that they had to save themselves? Their false estimation of the nature of Fascism, their reluctance to forestall the rise of Hitler and the rearming of Germany, can be accounted for by the fear, not less influential because ungrounded, that the red flood of Bolshevism was the only possible alternative to the brown flood of Fascism. They were lamed in eye and mind and limb by the fear of Bolshevism, both before and after that unhappy day in January, 1933, when Hindenburg betrayed the Weimar Republic. It was only when Hitler held the knife to the throat of Poland, and to Russia beyond her, that they realized that knife was intended for them, too.
Once Hitler made of Germany a Fascist state, the Second World War was only a matter of time. The world as we know it to-day, which a generation ago would have appeared as a Wellsian fantasy, became a historical reality.
In summary, then, of the first step of the argument: three chains of events radiating from the Russian Revolution converged to contribute strongly to the victory of Hitler:
(a) The withdrawal of Russia from the world economy left a dead spot unable to absorb the flow of goods and services from other countries. This accentuated the economic crisis, which would have occurred anyhow, but in not so violent a form. It enabled Hitler to recruit his mass following from those who felt the impact of the crisis most sharply.
(b) The destruction of the labour movement which, if it had been as unified as it was at the time of the monarchist Kapp Putsch in Germany, could have stopped Fascism in its tracks or, at least, put up so strong a resistance that Germany would have been as exhausted as Spain.
(c) The fear of Bolshevism and of the imposition of the Bolshevik pattern on the West. This led reactionary groups in Germany to call Hitler to power and explains the shortsighted indifference of reactionary groups in other capitalist countries
