1945, Ritter revised his work to publish it as a four-volume study of German militarism. Assassination plot Ritter was involved in the 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg assassination plot and was one of the few conspirators not liquidated by the Nazis. His friend and political associate, Carl Goerdeler, was slated to become the new chancellor under a post-Nazi regime. If the coup had succeeded, the plotters planned to bargain with the Western Allies for Germany to keep territories in Eastern Europe, which were being invaded by the Soviet Union. Goerdeler was executed by the Nazis in 1945. Ritter, who also belonged to the conservative German opposition to the Nazis, was imprisoned in late 1944 for the rest of the war. Themes after World War II Source of Nazi evils Two major themes of Ritter's writings after 1945 were attempts to prove that the Bismarckian tradition in German life had nothing to do with national socialism and that it was democracy of the masses, rather than aristocratic conservatism, that had caused the Nazi movement. After World War II, Ritter wrote the book Europa und die deutsche Frage (Europe and the German Question), which denied that Nazi Germany was the inevitable product of German history but considered that it was rather in Ritter's view part of a general European drift towards totalitarianism that had been going on since the French Revolution; as such, Germans should not be singled out for criticism. In Ritter's opinion, the origins of National Socialism went back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the volonté générale (general will) and the Jacobins. Ritter argued, "National Socialism is not an originally German growth, but the German form of a European phenomenon: the one-party or Führer state", which was the result of "modern industrial society with its uniform mass humanity". Along the same lines, Ritter wrote that "not any event in German history, but the great French Revolution undermined the firm foundation of Europe's political traditions. It also coined the new concepts and slogans with whose help the modern state of the Volk and the Führer justifies its existence". Ritter argued that throughout the 19th century, there had been worrisome signs in Germany and the rest of Europe caused by the entry of masses into politics but that it was World War I that marked the decisive turning point. According to Ritter, World War I had caused a general collapse in moral values