Following the Great War, now known as World War I, the victorious allies forced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who would be the last German emperor, and thus ending a 300-year dynasty that had ruled Prussia. The Weimar Republic was born as a new experiment in democracy. The result was utterly catastrophic for the country and the world. The trigger was war reparations and the means by which they were paid.

"The depreciation of the mark of 1914–23," wrote the brilliant economist Lionel Robbins in 1937 (therefore two years before World War II) "is one of the outstanding episodes in the history of the twentieth century. Not only by reason of its magnitude but also by reason of its effects, it looms large on our horizon. It was the most colossal thing of its kind in history: and, next probably to the Great War itself, it must bear responsibility for many of the political and economic difficulties of our generation."

"It destroyed the wealth of the more solid elements in German society," he wrote, "and it left behind a moral and economic disequilibrium, apt breeding ground for the disasters which have followed. Hitler is the foster-child of the inflation. The financial convulsions of the Great Depression were, in part at least, the product of the distortions of the system of international borrowing and lending to which its ravages had given rise. If we are to understand correctly the present position of Europe, we must not neglect the study of the great German inflation. If we are to plan for greater stability in the future, we must learn to avoid the mistakes from which it sprang."

Consider the prescience here. It was not possible for Robbins or anyone to anticipate the ghastly scale of destruction of Europe that would follow in the coming years. The costs of the Nazi political movement were very apparent. The full implications were inconceivable.