Spanish Flu Chatter and Nazis?

A study was completed and released in the past couple of days.  So the hint of the study was that in the period of 1917-1919....the Spanish Flu wiped out a significant number of Germans, and because they didn't exist.....the Nationalist Socialists came to have more support and power.  The flu....was the path to Hitler.

I've sat and read two different articles chatting over this.  The position by the journalists is that we are emerging from the Coronavirus, and 'dark' times are ahead of us.....likely to bring new Hitlers around.

After about an hour of looking over the story, and the research effort....I just started laughing.

It was a marginalized effort by this guy.....an intellectual, no doubt.....to convince you that all this disease and death stuff would lead to some reality where Nazis would exist.

First, NO one can clearly say how many Germans had the Spanish Flu, and died from it.

Chief reason?  The Kaiser's folks put all negative or demoralizing information like this into a forbidden column.  No newspaper published the stuff in 1918 or 1919.  There were various accounts by people....talking over the effect to their family or town later....but in terms of actual data or trusting numbers?  Nothing.

Add to this problem....there was no national level collection point of information or data to the Spanish Flu.  What you had was a city-by-city 'fight', and efforts to bury folks as soon as possible.  Maybe if some Germans put a massive amount of effort (into the tens of thousands of man-hours), you might get some reliable data, but such an effort has never been accomplished.

The numbers that get thrown around....are typically model-type 'games', or reflect estimates by doctors.

Second, what the guy leaves out in a big way is the affect of the arrival of the radio in 1925 to 1930.  This media device transformed Germany in various ways....and introducing Hitler was one of them.

Third, he has almost no discussion over the civil war period that erupted at the end of 1918, and went into the spring of 1919....with Marxists/Communists....fighting veterans of the war, and various other groups.

Fourth, let's be humble and admit that TB was killing off tens of thousands a year in Germany up until the war.  Advancements in medicine in this period (1900-1930s) helped to halt that problem.

Finally, why not spend a moment and chat about the plague from five-hundred years prior, and wiping out hundreds of thousands a year?

Sorry, but trying to establish a disease path to bringing Hitler and the Nazis onto the scene just isn't that realistic.  There are a hundred different variables to this chat, and he obviously missed that point.