For some time governments that were opposed to Hitler congratulated themselves on resolving international territorial disputes without all the messy fighting and dying. Hitler's troops were clearly superior to those of the countries he was invading (in terms of number and equipment) so the outcome was obvious and the actual business of conflict seen as archaic, other than maybe a few token shots to satisfy military honor. Even when Germany and Britain finally declared war on Hitler, there was no actual fighting at first - this period is referred to by historians as 'the Phoney War', and at the time it was humorously called 'Sitzkrieg' (a pun on the Blitzkrieg, or 'lightning war' style of Hitler's conquests up to that point). It was imagined that when Britain and France had their forces in place, they could be sized up against the German forces, and a simple economic calculation would quickly bring Hitler to the negotiating table.
To the astonishment of most of the allies (though not Winston churchill, who had dourly foreseen exactly this outcome) Hitler responded to the deployment of forces with an all-out attack, ignoring treaties and invading the Low Countries (Belgium, NL, Luxembourg) almost incidentally in order to encircle the British and the French, dealing a crushing blow. France in particular wildly overestimated the robustness of its own defences, which were essentially a giant fortified wall (the Maginot Line). Since the Germans had been manning their version (the Siegfried Line) without doing anything very much, the French convinced themselves that they had forced a stalemate and that sooner or later a diplomatic solution would emerge.
Obviously, I'm simplifying a great deal here.
Now of course, people might have responded to Hitler much earlier if they had taken all his Jew-baiting and so on at face value, and realized that when he talked about exterminating large groups of people he meant exactly that, as opposed to just conquering and looting in the traditional fashion. But I can easily imagine contemporary parallels.
Now of course, people might have responded to Hitler much earlier if they had taken all his Jew-baiting and so on at face value, and realized that when he talked about exterminating large groups of people he meant exactly that, as opposed to just conquering and looting in the traditional fashion.
If people had called Hitler's bluff, things would have gone differently. Do you think the next one will be able to bluff?
Of course, another major factor in enabling Hitler to become Hitler was the circumstances of world power. WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the dramatic culmination of the centuries-long rise of Europe. You mentioned that WWI was destructive. But not destructive enough: thirty years later the same adversaries were ready for another attempt to settle scores and dominate Europe. WWII had to be the end of that cycle: after WWII, Europe was shattered, and world power had shifted to the east and west. The Europe that the combatants had sought to dominate no longer existed.
I'm not much of a scholar of Napoleon, but the way it was framed to me was that the Napoleonic war(s) was the first total war: the size of the French forces were unprecedented, and contemporaries could have been forgiven for not predicting the outcome. Each subsequent war of this type raised the stakes further. That cycle has run its course forever, because the stakes are now so high that victory would mean acquiring territory that was radioactive and uninhabitable.
PS. One of the things that's striking about Mein Kampf is how provincial and small-minded it is. I read a little bit, and one of Hitler's biggest bugbears was the Habsburgs and their treatment of Austria. Hitler was very much a product of his time and place. That time and place is gone forever.
My final point: no one wants to be the next Hitler. What do you suppose was going through Hitler's mind when he committed suicide in a bunker beneath Berlin, surrounded by foreign armies closing in from all sides? He may have anticipated being hanged as a war criminal, or feared retribution from his own people now that defeat could no longer be credibly denied. People make a lot of how Hitler was a maniac and insane, but he knew he lost. In photographs of Hitler from near the end of the war, he looks clearly downcast and exhausted. Hitler started the war maniacally certain of victory, and he ended his reign thoroughly aware of his failure. Hitler was not an imbecile, and if he had known what was coming, I don't think he would have chosen it.
I do agree that nobody could be as obvious about their ill intentions as Hitler was; mass communication through radio, film newsreels and so on was a fairly new phenomenon when he rose to power and people were not fully aware of how it could support totalitarianism as they are today. But you can get away with a lot in politics by simply making the right noises, sadly.
Has a totalitarian state always to come with a crazy person? How about a group of people, how about a system, where you don't see "one big dictator"?
The people in the 30s also did not foresee another big dictator rising. Other parties in Germany for example thought, they could "tame" Hitler.
I don't think that mustache will come back into style. Ever.
He only "ruined it" for all future Hitlers in the next ~100 years. A lot of peace and prosperity we have enjoyed in the last 60 years can be attributed to people remembering and recovering from death and destruction of the II World War. There are only few people alive today who lived during WWII, soon there will be no one with first-hand memories of what has happened then. You can already see a new wave of nationalistic trends. For many young people today, Hitler is no different than Napoleon, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan - some dude who killed a lot of people some time ago. They can't relate to them in any way.
A lot is made of the fact that people are ignorant of history, but Hitler wasn't: he loved history, perhaps a little too much. He inserted himself into historical events and imagined that he could right historical wrongs and slights suffered by Germans. That is the underlying theme of Mein Kampf. You can say that he distorted history, and I won't dispute that point -- however, his ideas were based on real events, with added sentimentality and sensationalism, the way Hollywood movies are.
Nazism was crushed as thoroughly and decisively as probably any movement ever has been. Hitler is despised by people that don't even know history. Historical events may become dormant, but they are remembered when they become pertinent again, and there has rarely been a historical event as clear and one-sided as WWII: whether Hitler was wrong is a matter of opinion and can be debated (not a good idea in public), but that Germany suffered total military defeat under Hitler's leadership is indisputable fact.
The USSR was initially part of an anti-fascist pact but made amends with Germany after the western allies' betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
If Germany hadn't broken their agreement with the USSR the Soviets probably would have stayed out of the war - remember that they had just been humiliated by the Finns.