throughout the West, and it was that moral degeneration that led to the decline of Christianity, the rise of materialism, political corruption, the eclipse of civilization by barbarism and demagogic politics, which, in turn, led to National Socialism. In Ritter's view, the problem with the Weimar Republic was not that it lacked democracy but that it had too much democracy. He argued that the democratic republic had left the German state open to being hijacked by the appeals of rabble-rousing extremists. In Ritter's view, if his much beloved German Empire had continued after 1918, there would have been no Nazi Germany. Ritter argued that democracy was the essential precondition of totalitarianism because it created the window of opportunity for a strongman to make himself the personification of the "popular will". That led Ritter to conclude that "the system of 'totalitarian' dictatorship as such is not a specifically German phenomenon" but that it was the natural result of when "the direct rule of the people derived from the 'revolt of the masses' is introduced". Ritter argued that the precursors of Hitler were "neither Frederick the Great, Bismarck nor Wilhelm II, but the demagogues and Caesars of modern history from Danton to Lenin to Mussolini". Rescue of German nationalism Ritter saw his main task after 1945 of seeking to restore German nationalism against what he regarded as unjust slurs. Ritter argued that Germans needed a positive view of their past but warned against the appeal of "false concepts of honor and national power". He belonged to group of German historians that rejected reconciliation with victim of Nazi aggression but supported Germany its pursuing national interests. He railed against the fact that the Allies occupational authorities had confiscated German archives at the end of World War II and had begun to publish a critical edition of German foreign policy records without the participation of German historians. He used his official position as the first postwar head of the German Historical Association to demand the return of the records and held the opinion that their absence was hurting his own research projects the most. In his treatment of the German Resistance, Ritter drew a sharp line between those who worked with foreign powers to defeat Hitler and those like Carl Friedtich Goerdeler who sought to overthrow the Nazis but worked for Germany. For Ritter, Goerdeler was a patriot, but the men and women of