could be disproved the legal requirement to pay reparations would disappear. To that end, the German government funded the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War. This subject, the question of Germany's guilt (Kriegsschuldfrage or war guilt question) became a major theme of Adolf Hitler's political career. United States Senator Henrik Shipstead argued that the failure to revise the article became a factor in Hitler's rise to power., a view held by some historians, such as Tony Rea and John Wright, who wrote that "the harshness of the War Guilt Clause and the reparations demands made it easier for Hitler to gain power in Germany." Despite these views, the historical consensus is that the article and the treaty, did not cause the rise of Nazism but that an unconnected rise in extremism and the Great Depression led to the NSDAP gaining greater electoral popularity and then being maneuvered into office. The Marxist historian Fritz Klein wrote that while there was a path from Versailles to Hitler, the former did not make "Hitler's takeover of power inevitable" and that "the Germans had a choice when they decided to take this path. In other words, they did not have to. Hitler's victory was not an unavoidable result of Versailles." Historical assessment In 1926, Robert C. Binkley and A. C. Mahr of Stanford University, wrote that German accusations of the article assigning war guilt were "ill-founded" and "mistaken". The article was more "an assumption of liability to pay damages than an admission of war guilt" and compared it with "a man who undertakes to pay all the cost of a motor accident than to the plea of guilty entered by an accused criminal". They wrote that "it is absurd" to charge the reparation articles of the treaty with any "political meaning" and the legal interpretation "is the only one that can stand". They concluded that German opposition "is based upon a text which has no legal validity whatsoever, and which Germany never signed at all." Sidney Fay was the "most outspoken and influential critic" of the article. In 1928, he concluded that all of Europe shared the blame for the war and that Germany had no intention of launching a general European war in 1914. In 1937, E. H. Carr commented that "in the passion of the moment" the Allied Powers had "failed to realize that this extorted admission of