The so-called "Prussianisation" of Germany, beginning with Bismarck, is or used to be a fertile source of blame for the first World War and other evils. Prussia, it is frequently claimed, infected all of Germany with its own arrogance and militarism, though in reality most of the Prussian kings, had not been particularly warlike, and the core of Prussia as a state lay more in its civil service and its tradition of devotion to the state than in its army. In fact, Germany was at peace between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, which tumbled the Hohenzollern dynasty into the dust and dethroned the Prussian ruling classes from what remained of their old powercentre. The Allies finally dissolved Prussia as a state in 1947, making it a scapegoat for Hitler who hated it and destroyed most of its civic traditions and institutions a strange historical irony.