There is controversy on whether the rise of Nazism in Germany was a reaction to the Communist threat coming from the Soviet Union or due to internal causes, namely the Treaty of Versailles, social unrest, and the great depression.
The treaty did not help, but Hitler really became popular only after the great depression hit.
As an aside, we all know Hitler was obsessed with Jews and communists and one of his chief aims in WW2 was to crush the USSR, but I recently realized these two obsessions were linked.
It turns out many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev were jewish. Lenin had a jewish grandfather and a large proportion of the Communist party were jewish. Much of the early White anti-Bolshevik propaganda during the Russian Civil War was very anti-semitic and played up the fact that the Bolsheviks were "foreign" because of the religion of the leadership.
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