The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

“We created Hitler, more than anybody. We Americans. Mainly by not joining the League, and then by passing the insane Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, during a deep depression, knocking over Europe’s economy like a row of dominoes. After Smoot-Hawley the German banks closed right and left. The Germans were starving and rioting. Hitler promised them jobs, law and order, and revenge for the last war. And he promised to crush the Communists. The Germans swallowed his revolution to fend off a Communist one. He’s kept his promises, and he’s held the Germans in line with terror, and that’s the long and short of it. Why, there isn’t a German in a thousand who’s read those books, Briny. It’s all a thick cloud of university gas. Hitler’s a product of American isolation and British and French cowardice, not of the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche.”