Having been firmly convinced by Rudolph Binion’s dazzling and brilliant Hitler Among the Germans (1976) that the Führer and his confederates were indeed driven by a kind of inner compulsion to relive the traumatic shock of defeat that they had experienced in 1918, I find myself much more skeptical about Binion’s present contention that the fall of the Fourth French Republic in 1958 constituted a traumatic reliving of the Third Republic’s 1940 demise. Much of my skepticism centers around the related questions of exactly what was being relived in 1958 and who was doing the reliving.
Barry M. Shapiro (Sat,) studied this question.