دانلود کتاب The avoidable war: Pierre Laval & the politics of reality : 1935-1936

The summer of 1935 was the summer of the dictators who occupied center stage in Europe when Europe was the center stage of the world. Incontestably, the most dynamic force was Adolf Hitler, who had become German Chancellor in January, 1933.
In newsreels, on magazine covers, the lank, dark lock that traversed his forehead, the hypnotic stare, the mini-mustache, half comical, half sinister, were familiar to audiences across the world. They knew, too, in pictures, moving or still, the searchlights and torchlights, the massed bands and banners, the phalanxes of brown-shirted storm troopers and steel helmeted soldiers that were the background for his strident proclamations. They did not have to know German to catch on their radios the hatred, the savagery of his tone, the cadences rising in swelling tides from passion to hysteria. They could hear and they could feel the thunderous responses: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! They well knew the cruel persecutions that Hitler’s hatreds had unleashed. A few apolo¬ gists aside, the sinister nature of the Nazi regime was known and un¬ derstood across the world.
Hitler had never accepted Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the peace settlement at Versailles that followed it. His immediate goals were to eliminate all of the servitudes of the Treaty of Versailles which had almost totally disarmed Germany and most importantly had demilitarized the critically strategic Rhineland, the banks of the Rhine, and the lands between the Rhine and the French border. To achieve these goals meant building a mighty new army and air force, and this is what Hitler proceeded to do in defiance of treaties and the condemnation of the other nations of Europe and the League of Nations. Hitler noted that such condemnations in no way altered the accomplished fact.