>>32054
The book does go into the rising tensions between Germany and the Western powers, the worsening climate with each one of Hitler's moves and in particular how Roosevelt, after the end of his isolationist phase, was hostile to Germany. Like before the last war they were locked in an arms race and there was, if not a thirst for war, at least a willingness to put war on the table as part of brinksmanship. When war did break out it wasn't truly about Serbia or Poland but over this great power confrontation. Though Germany fired the first shot all the great powers were playing the dangerous game.
The dynamic of the arms race is very important here: both sides knew Germany was weaker and would lose it in the long run, so the Allies played slow through appeasement and the like while Germany moved aggressively in its territorial acquisitions, and, ultimately, in being the immediate initiator of war. This logic continued to play through the war with a race against time and the Western power's economic superiority being the central concern of his French and Russian strategies.
>Meanwhile the German Reich would probably head in eastern direction, it would be the wish of the democratic states that there would be a war between the German Reich and Russia in the East.
That's what I learned in school, that the Western powers wanted Germany and Russia to exhaust each other in war. Nothing unconventional here. Nor is it non-mainstream to complain of Versailles, I was also taught in school that it was brutal.

Churchill being a drunkard is no secret and doesn't matter much to this discussion.

Also, mind your manners. I post my fair share of Jewish jokes in the humor thread but here we don't just call each other "Schlomo" in a discussion as if it were an argument. That may be the case in Kohl but not here.

>LOL after outright famine?
Yes. After 1925 hyperinflation was solved, foreign credit allowed a more comfortable level of imports, radical parties had little electoral success and through Stresemann a geopolitical strategy to maneuver around the French and British was at work. Then with the Great Depression everything went downhill.
>Germany was one of the leading industrial nations, it was the leading nation in science and research. Foreigner came to worship German universities.
It is a fact that Germany had a large industrial base and had a good position in several areas of science and technology. It is also true that it lagged behind America in techniques of mass production, had an incompletely modernized agricultural sector and lower living standards. Development is uneven, both within and between nations.

>German ruled Europe had first class living situation
The book has an entire chapter loaded with quantitative and qualitative, statistical and anedoctal, academic and lay data on interwar living standards. I wrote a synthesis here. I suggest you read it.