A hundred years ago, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote, Germany dodged a bullet: ‘During 1923, the swastikas disappeared, the storm troops and the name of Adolf Hitler all but fell into oblivion. Nobody thought of him any more as a possible political factor.’
Writing this in his memoir in 1941, Zweig knew that he and his contemporaries had been wrong. He was so despairing that, a year later, in exile in Brazil, he and his wife took a lethal overdose of barbiturates.
