Hitlerism is not the creation of a single individual, the personal creation of Hitler: it is a mass phenomenon. Nor is it the necessary result of a determined economic system, since we see individuals in the most dissimilar countries, who are “converted”: rich and poor, industrialists and farmers, intellectuals and army men. The enumeration of the more or less immediate historical causes of Hitler's success, such as Eternal Germanism, the Versailles Treaty, inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, the Dictator's personality, the defects of the democracies, the complicity of big business, does not suffice to explain why they have all converged to the same result. Viewing the breadth and depth of the phenomenon, these heterogeneous “causes” seem to play the part of mere pretexts, of catalyzing agents determined, orientated and carried along by the phenomenon itself—which, therefore, still remains to be explained.