The historians of our era, obsessed by the determinist idea and by the sociological conception of history, often tend to misjudge what was accidental… - François Furet

What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘ Machiavellianism of the masses'.

In the case of Hitler and his accomplices, however, the Jews not only incarnate Bolshevism in their eyes but also stateless capitalism. This allows the Nazis to magically unite in the same hatred a single people who presumably incarnated two contradictory ideas and social regimes.

The German extreme Right, and even the entire Right, did not need communism to hate democracy. The national Bolsheviks admired Stalin. I concede that Hitler privileged the hatred of Bolshevism, but as a final product of the democratic bourgeois world. In fact, certain of his close accomplices, such as Goebbels, made no mystery of hating Paris and London more than Moscow.