Twice it was mentioned that the cause of WWII was boredom. Is this actually a real theory?
I'm not a professional historian by any means, but I think Ernst Nolte's opinion (he was a German historian) that WW2 was actually an European Civil War fought between fascism and communism is right (you can read an introduction into the whole discussion on his wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte). His basic idea was summed up by another historian, Norman Davies (you can ignore the "leftists" part at the end):
> Ten years later, in The European Civil War (1987), the German historian Ernst Nolte (b. 1923) brought ideology into the equation. The First World War had spawned the Bolshevik Revolution, he maintained, and fascism should be seen as a "counter-revolution" against communism. More pointedly, since fascism followed communism chronologically, he argued that some of the Nazis' political techniques and practices had been copied from those of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, such propositions were thought anathema by leftists who believe that fascism was an original and unparalleled evil.
People in the States and generally speaking in Western Europe tend to forget how much communism (Bolshevism as it was called back then) was seen as a threat after WW1. I happened to view a video on YT a couple of days ago of German Radio's official announcement of Hitler's death. I don't know German but the only word that I could distinctively comprehend was "Bolshevism" (or whatever its spelling is in German), which shows that even with Hitler dead and defeat just a few of days away the Germans were still thinking about the big bad man coming from the East (as far as I could heard no mention was made in the same announcement about the "Amerikaner").