conflict of interests". Ritter maintained that militarism first appeared during the French Revolution, when the revolutionary French state, later to be followed by Napoleon I's regime, began the total mobilization of society to seek "the total destruction of the enemy". Likewise, Ritter contended that Otto von Bismarck was a Kabinettspolitker (Cabinet politician), not a militarist, and ensured that political considerations were always placed ahead of military considerations. Ritter was to expand on these views in a four-olume study Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk (translated into English as The Sword and the Scepter), published between 1954 and 1968, in which Ritter examined the development of militarism in Germany between 1890 and 1918. In Volume 2 of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Ritter commented that it was only after Bismarck's sacking in 1890 that militarism first appeared in Germany. Accordingly, a review of the first years of the 20th century was "not without a sense of psychological shock". Ritter wrote that "the prewar Germany of my own youth, which has for an entire lifetime been illuminated in my memory by the radiant splendor of a sun that seemed to grow dark only after the outbreak of the war of 1914" was "in the evening of my life" darkened by "shadows that were much deeper than my generation-and certainly the generation of my academic teachers-was able to perceive at the time". For Ritter, it was the radicalizing experience of the First World War that had finally led to the triumph of militarism in Germany, especially after 1916, when Erich Ludendorff established his "silent dictatorship", which Ritter believed was a huge break with Prussian and German traditions. It was the unhappy results of that war that finally led to the "proletarian nationalism" of the Nazis gaining a mass audience and to the "militarism of the National Socialist mass movement" coming to power. Moreover, Ritter placed great emphasis on the "Hitler factor" as an explanation for Nazi Germany. In 1962, Ritter wrote that he found it "almost unbearable" that the "will of a single madman" had unnecessarily caused World War II. Critical views on German history Though many regarded Ritter's work as an apologia for German nationalism and conservatism, Ritter was at times critical of aspects of the German past. Though Ritter commented that many nations had bent their knees in submission to false values, "the Germans accepted all of that with special ardor when it was now preached