[in_vino_vomitus]

It's interesting to read what "ought" to have been done, written in the light of what actually was done. On the subject of the seeds of WWII, I suspect that if the allies had shown a little more compassion after WWI then the environment that led to the rise of the Nazis might never have come to be. And regarding the excesses of that regime, don't forget that most of them spent their formative years dealing with carnage on an industrial scale. I'm not making apologies here either, I'm just saying that we did our part to give Hitler a fertile recruiting ground and a direction to his rhetoric.

I often wonder how things would have turned out if, after the Somme debacle, King George had written a letter to his cousin, the Kaiser, and said "Look Wilhelm - nobody's winning here, let's just stop." Of course that was never going to happen and it's impossible to second guess minds that thought that machine guns were effeminate and the bayonet was the way to win battles. As an aside, I can't help thinking that the closing line of "Apologia" by Wilfred Owen, was directed specifically at king George, rather than the population at large, when he said "These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment."

Anyway, my point is that if you want to talk about the origins of WWII, you could go back a long way if you wanted to.