I think its more likely that Germany and some of these other places that ban Holocaust denial are just engaging in bad policy. It was probably a handful of politicians that wanted to make hey out of confronting Holocaust denial and being on the right side of history.
It's probably a bit exaggerated but it was horrible enough.
The reason places like France didn't respond to Hitler -- is because they thought he was full of shit at first. They assumed he was playing nationalist politics to consolidate his power and restore a bit of the German ego after WW1.
In WW1, war favored the defense. There were no tanks or planes and motorized vehicles were more rare. When you had artillary and trenches set up, good luck getting past it during WW1.
Generals in Germany -- like France and England -- assumed Hitlers plans would never work well in reality because their experience and education was from WW1. When one general finally confided that the men were unsure -- Hitler acted like Hitler and flipped out and punished the man. Eventually the army fell in line. Germans are damn good at engineering and there planes and tanks ended up tipping the balance in favor of offense.
See tanks can serve to protect infantry from machine guns as they close into the trenches. Planes are also very useful for bombing entrenched positions. Relatively cheap and effective anti-aircraft and anti-tank hardware wasn't yet developed. Motorization was a big deal for the German strategy of "Blitzkrieg" where enemy forces would be pierced and then German forced would penetrate deeply into enemy lines and come back from behind the rest of the enemy force.
A fun way to see how tanks changed things is to just watch the movie Fury (2014). But there was also some political ideas at the time that rendered places like France deeply skeptical there would ever be a major war again. WW1 was such a disaster for all those involved -- it was thought that everyone kind of learned their lesson. Unfortunately Chamberlain has provided a lot of ammunition for war hawks about "appeasement," and how everything is Hitler in 30s and you can never back down from a challenge.
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