Gerhard Ritter: A Patriotic Historian’s Justification

Abstract

Once during the last war Winston Churchill accused the Germans of having involved the world in wars of conquest and aggression five times in the past 125 years because of their hatred of the liberty enjoyed by their neighbours. He was not the only one to think this. In all the great post-war conferences over Germany, all the statesmen from both the East and the West agreed on one thing at least: the wars of 1870–1, 1914–18 and 1939–45 were caused by the Germans alone. Especially in the first years after the German Reich’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, in the period of re-education, German as well as foreign historians and writers tried to find historical grounds for the crime of National Socialism. They maintained that there was continuity of political thought and military depravity, stretching from Martin Luther in the Reformation to Frederick the Great of Prussia and to Bismarck, the founder of the Empire, and from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adolf Hitler, the war criminal.