General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: For those who don't know what the "Greece" problem in Europe is about - here's the explanation [View all]coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)non-fiction, but cannot for the life of me bring anything specific to mind.
Re your argument about religious and racial intolerance and their origins in economic problems, German electoral returns would seem to support you. Specifically, in the latter half of the 20s when the Weimar Republic had largely stabilized and the German economy was performing well, the Nazi Party was a 'fringe' party in German electoral politics and did not start making serious electoral gains in the Reichstag until the German economy, shadowing that of Britain, France and the U.S., started to go south ca. 1929.
My view is that it lets Germans off the hook to ascribe Hitler's rise to power to anonymous economic forces. As Daniel Goldhagen has pretty definitively demonstrated in "Hitler's Willing Executioners," pre-1945 Germans were a particularly nasty bunch. Goldhagen's book profoundly altered my view of ordinary Germans and their role in the Holocaust (after I had written a senior thesis whose assumption is directly at odds with the argument Goldhagen directly advanced). And I'm not going to let them off the hook ever again.
If you've ever seen the graffiti in Germany saying 'Turks 'raus', you'll understand that old habits die hard for some of the Germans But that's grist for another thread, methinks.