War II Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and its invasion of Poland in September 1939 (the latter invasion immediately drawing France and Britain into World War II) provoked the drive to explain the phenomenon of Nazi Germany. In 1940, Sebastian Haffner, a German émigré living in Britain, published Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, in which he argued it was Adolf Hitler alone, by the force of his peculiar personality, who had brought about Nazi Germany. In 1941, the British diplomat Robert Vansittart published The Black Record: Germans Past And Present, according to which Nazism was only the latest manifestation of what Vansittart argued were the exclusively German traits of aggressiveness and brutality. Other books with a thesis similar to Vansittart's were Rohan Butler's The Roots of National Socialism (1941) and William Montgomery McGovern's From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi-Fascist Philosophy (1946). Early postwar period After Germany's defeat in World War II in 1945, the term lost its positive connotations from the 19th century and acquired its present negative meaning. There was much debate about the origins of this "German catastrophe" (as the German historian Meinecke titled his 1946 book) of Nazi Germany's rise and fall. Since then, scholars have examined developments in intellectual, political, social, economic and cultural history to investigate why German democracy failed during the Weimar Republic and which factors led to the rise of Nazism. In the 1960s, many historians concluded that the failure of Germany to develop firm democratic institutions in the 19th century had been decisive for the failure of the Weimar Republic in the 20th century. Until the mid-1960s, the debate was polarized with most non-German participants at one pole and German participants at the other. Historians like Léon Poliakov, A. J. P. Taylor, and Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, echoed by journalists like the American William L. Shirer, portrayed Nazism as the inevitable result of German history, reflecting unique flaws in "German national character" that went back to the days of Martin Luther, if not before. Consider Martin Luther's anti-Jewish polemics and antisemitism for example. During the Raleigh Lecture on History in 1944, Namier stated that the German liberals in the Revolution of 1848 were "in reality forerunners of Hitler", whose views about the Poles and Czechs presaged the great international crises of 1938–39, and called the 1848 revolution "a touchstone of German mentality and a decisive element in East-European