Around the world the Nazis are understood as the personification of evil, and rightly so. The Holocaust was the most evil act ever and the people who did it are beyond understanding, because entering in to understand them, let alone provide an excuse for them, is to give evil a rationale it cannot have and to grieve the Jewish people who mainly carried their arrogant hate. But this descent into hell had a backstory as they now say. It included the extreme forced labour of the War, the persecution of Jews from 1933 onwards, after earlier hostility and abuse. It included the failure of the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the impact of the Great Depression on Germany, the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic. It included the funding from Fritz Thyssen and other arms merchants and rich industrialists, and the funding of Thyssen by the Harriman Bank and Prescott Bush, the provision of weapons from the States, the early backing of Henry Ford, another anti-Semite, and of Ludendorff, who pretended that the Wehrmacht had been stabbed in the back. It also included a hardening against God and obedience to the Sixth Commandment. This history has been worked over by many historians and all these contributions show aspects of how evil develops. But there is one area, perhaps a crucial one, which has perhaps not been fully recognised.

Shell-shock, or PTSD, as it now tends to be called comes from traumas like being engaged in war, bombing, fighting, sexual violence, devastation and destruction. Estimates of the number of combatants effected run from 5-30%. Given the nature of the Great War, especially in the trenches, the numbers then are not likely to be below 20%. Given 50 million fighting, there were an estimated ten million shell-shocked soldiers. Some were just gibbering wrecks because shell explosions were in their brains. Others, the more gentle ones, retreated into silence and often suicide. We need to know how real this is. A BBC documentary last week said eleven US veterans a day commit suicide. In the UK it is about one a week. Fine loving men end their lives, because war has done it to them. Some stay with hate and aggression, for that is what war, and the Great War is about. Germany, attacking and attacked on all fronts, had some 13 million under arms, and 20% of these is at least two million suffering PTSD. Let us say that 10% of these take the aggressive form of this illness. This is some two hundred thousand who are available to the early Nazis.

Hitler, of course, was gassed and injured in the thigh in WW1. He was probably suffering PTSD, and hardened into hate and fixated self-belief in his Fight. He then gathered up the aggressive shell-shocked, those still locked in fighting. They wanted to march, to have weapons, to find the enemy, to attack, because that was the only sense available to them. Hitler gathered money from the rich, including Henry Ford until 1923 and others who wanted an army to fight revolutionary socialism, and gave these men a pittance every day so that they could survive. He gave them the Jews and Socialist to blame, and the same answer as was available during the War – to hate and kill. All of this occurred in a poverty ravaged country, with rampant inflation caused by the borrowing of war to finance the arms companies like Krupp and Thyssen, with limbs missing, sex suddenly predatory, young workers dead, a vast army disbanded and a nation in chaos through war defeat, famine and lethal flu.

We cannot see what it was like, except through the work of George Grosz, a great artist who shows us the horror of that time. We are remembering the Armistice of the Great War, the War to end all Wars. The emphasis is on the sacrifice. We are sentimental about the end of the war. But wars do not end war. Those who take the sword continue to die by it. One hundred years ago, inside the heads of tens and hundreds of thousands in Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Turkey, Italy and elsewhere the War went on, as PTSD or War Trauma, expressed in Fascism, funded by the Rich. This was the entrenched seat of the cancer of hate which could not be shifted. The tragedy, as I note in War or Peace, is this generation, the World War One PTSD people, would have been through the political system in a few years’ time, old men damaged by the Great War but now not shaping world events. Sadly, that did not happen because the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 was sabotaged by the arms companies. The frozen rage of WW1 PTSD erupted into the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The warning is that our bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen is repeating the same process.