Once More with Feeling?
The Ligue des droits de l’homme went into freefall after 1937. It was not the Nazis who killed the Ligue, but rather the crisis which came to a head in 1937. In 1938 and 1939, the Ligue underwent a financial and membership crisis. The last two pre-war Congresses were rather tired affairs. The Munich crisis, the invasion of Prague, the question of Danzig, and the fall of France did not change the political/historical analysis of the minority which continued to explain the crises of 1938–40 through the lens of the Great War. The collaboration of some members of the minority during the Second World War was due to their dissenting position on the origins of the Great War. The Ligue’s papers were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg shortly after the Germans reached Paris in June 1940, eventually to be transported back to Berlin for analysis.