The most "consequential" man you've never heard of...

[Brian S]

My original point with regard to von Brockdorff-Rantzau's action was that had he not let the communist-socialist revolutionary genie out of the bottle , there would have been no catalyst for the national socialist revolution and possibly no second world war at all.

Remember the socialist movement was not Lenin's alone. It was a philosophy that would have survived to inflame Hitler with or without Lenin in power. Marx came out of Trier, Lenin learned from his writings and along with him many other German groups. It was those German groups (and anyone else) Hitler was fighting in the streets.