Take, for instance, the history of the Second World War. The Third Reich lasted twelve years and four months, but it caused a holocaust of destruction on this planet more violent and earthshaking than anything that the world had ever experienced. At one point, the Germans reigned supreme from the Atlantic to the Volga, from Norway to the Mediterranean. But then the tide turned, and the German people were thrust down to the uttermost depths of destruction, desolation, and despair. During the days of their power, the Germans instituted a far-flung reign of terror that outdid in savagery all of the oppressions of the past.

By the end of September 1944, the Germans had seven and one-half million slaves to do their will. Most of those people had been dragged from their homes and transported to Germany in boxcars from all over occupied Europe. They were put to work in the factories, the mines, and the fields. They were beaten, starved, and deprived of proper clothes and shelter. Families were savagely broken up as a matter of course. Children were beaten, brutalized, put to work, or killed. Jews and Slavs were looked upon as subhumans who were unfit to live and exterminated by the millions. Prisoners of war, especially Russians, died in captivity in vast numbers. The Germans retaliated for acts of sabotage by freedom fighters. The formula was one hundred to one—one hundred hostages rounded up at random and shot for every German life lost. The fate of Jews was death in the extermination camps. At Auschwitz alone, at the peak of operations, six thousand Jews were gassed every day. The joke among the German exterminators was that Jews came in by way of the gate and left by way of the chimney. Atrocious medical experiments, barbarously conducted with great cruelty, were routine. And millions of people died on the battlefields as a matter of course. The whole world became engulfed in the carnage.

The human cost of Hitler’s attempt to seize world power staggers the imagination. Thirty-five million lives were lost. On the battlefields, one out of every twenty-two Russians was killed, one out of every twenty-five Germans, and one out of every 150 Britons. The toll on the Jews was even higher—two out of every three European Jews perished in Hitler’s attempt to rid Europe of all of its Jews.

This vast conflagration was kindled by one man’s tongue. Adolph Hitler was an orator, a master at whipping his audience into a frenzy. He could mobilize men by the millions at a word. His rages cowed visiting statesmen, and his tirades paralyzed his top generals. And his countrymen, urged on by the lash of his tongue and mesmerized by the power of his words, fought on and on, long after the war was lost, until all of Germany was reduced to rubble.

James was right! How great a forest can be set ablaze by a mere match. Europe was the forest. Hitler was the match.