The idea that there is a straight line between Versailles and Hitler, its a tidy narrative. But do we believe that Hitler wouldn& #39;t have tried to gain power anyway? He was a white supremacist, genocidal anti-Semitic demagogue and megalomaniac. His agenda wasnt avenging Versailles.

Hitler& #39;s beef was that Germany lost and he believed that they lost because of the old stab in the back. Then, and i think this is where the meat is, he had all these complex racial theories about aryan supremacy and a lot of hateful nonsense about Jews, Slavs and Marxists.

Versailles did not create Hitler, Germany losing is was set him off. That and a bunch of racist stuff you can read about if you care to, buyer beware.

All this to say, perpetuating the Versailles=WWII narrative is helpful to a guy like Putin because it makes an American and Western world order look like a disaster waiting to happen. But you certainly have to overlook a lot of major factors. Putin& #39;s analysis is a bit shallow.

What, more than anything, created WWII? In my view, racism and ethnic nationalism, and that narrative is somewhat less helpful to Putin.