Article 231 of the versailles treaty made Germany and her allies responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. It caused a lot of offense, which is hardly surprising. Meinecke thought that Germany had been treated in an exceptional and unjustified manner, a manner that violated historic precedents. Furthermore, the war guilt clause seemed— and certainly not only to Germans—to be a gross simplification of the complicated state of affairs, of the manifold and highly unstable forces, that led to hostilities in August 1914. But in being a subject of controversy and a cause of outrage, it was also useful to German nationalists bent on undermining the immediate postwar “Weimar” Republic. The Nazis, in particular, regarded the men who signed the treaty at Versailles as national traitors, fit only for assassination. Moreover their act of alleged treason also underpinned the popular “stab in the back” (Dolchstoß) theory, which claimed that German armies had not, in fact, been defeated on the battlefield but had been betrayed by Jewish capitalists at home. Although Hindenburg knew this was nonsense, his closest military ally, Erich Ludendorff, who had planned and lost the final offensive on the Western front and who postwar got into print very quickly in order to blame everyone else, was all for the opportunistic rationalization and duly joined Hitler's gang and participated in the unsuccessful 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

Hitler, of course, was the player who made the most of the propaganda opportunities implicit in the Versailles Treaty. It is, for instance, a sore at which he repeatedly picks in Mein Kampf, notably in volume 2, chapter 6. And yet one stumbles here on an odd fact. Hitler's thinking was not as simple or as crude as we are prone to assume, or rather as we want to assume. For instance, in relaxed, private circumstances, he showed himself inclined to think more broadly within the parameters of German history.