period ofde ́tentebetween the Soviet Union and the USA which started with
the successful negotiations of theSALTI treaties in 1972. Its particular
political importance was that it involved every European state (Albania
eventually joined in 1991, and several of the newly-independent countries
of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were also admitted), and also
included the USA and Canada as countries inextricably involved in European
security. After 15 years of little practical achievement the initiatives of the
Helsinki process suddenly assumed much greater importance at the beginning
of the 1990s after the collapse of communism effectively left the whole of
Europe with a single rulingideology—some version of liberal capitalism.
For example, the OSCE became involved in cease-fire and human rights
monitoring in the Yugoslav conflicts, and there has been speculation that,
because of its pan-European membership, the organization was better placed
to intervene in European emergencies than eitherNATOor theEuropean
Union.
Hitler
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the political and military leader of Germany
from 1933 to his death at the end of the Second World War. He had been a
junior corporal in the First World War, a failed artist, and was a rootless but
emotionally and intellectually powerful man who took control of a set of
movements of the German right in the early and middle 1920s. In the chaotic
conditions of theWeimar Republichis party, offering a violent and aggres-
sive assertion of nationalism, populism and racism (seefascism), and bearing
the nowadays self-contradictory title of ‘National-Socialist German Working
Man’s Party’, was one apparent answer. Hitler ruthlessly used any phobia he
could find in the German population, especiallyanti-Semitism, to build up
an emotional support for his party against the apparent threat of the commu-
nists, with whom his paramilitary party fought in street demonstrations in
German cities. Ultimately he came to power as a result of ordinary electoral
politics, helped tacitly by the right-wing president, Paul von Hindenburg
(1847–1934), and managed to get himself appointed leader, ‘Fu ̈hrer’, of
Germany for life. Once in legal power he and his party took over all aspects
of German life, controlling totally the military and police powers, and much of
industry, as well as the whole of civil government. There were no elections
allowed in Germany during his rule. His aim was the creation of the ‘Thousand
Year Reich’, a new German state that he hoped would cover most of Europe,
and which did, during much of the Second World War, very nearly achieve
this.
Hitler was responsible for initiating a movement of fanatical and violent
aggression through Europe which took the combined force of the British
Hitler