A few aspects of the time leading up to WWII that I have found interesting, and might make good paper fodder:
1. Hitler in his youth. Probably we would have had someone else leading the same sort of Nazi regime - it was a widespread movement, after all - but it is interesting to look at what could have happened if Hitler hadn't had his cancer-struck mother treated (improperly, although the doctor had no way of knowing what the experimental treatments were really doing) by a Jewish doctor, or if he had been accepted to the Vienna School of Art and Architecture. How would other possible leaders of the Reich handled things differently? Would they have done as well as they did? Would they have won?
2. Luftwaffen. Germany had a pretty advanced (for the time) jet engine program. The details surrounding why that superiority never saw effective use in the war are pretty interesting stuff.
3. Nationalisms clashing. I may get flamed by someone for this, and I promise to any Jews reading this that I mean no disrespect (I have a great deal of respect for your beliefs and culture, and took two years of Hebrew at college in the pursuit of more knowledge of it), but it has always seemed to me that there is a paper or two in this: Before and especially after World War I, Germany and the areas of the former Holy Roman Empire saw relatively large numbers of Jews, who were either already wealthy or soon became so, moving into them.
Poor after the war, many Germans found themselves increasingly forced to pay Jewish doctors, lawyers, landlords, etc, for things they had to have. The Jewish belief system has, as you are probably aware, at its core the belief that they are G-d's chosen people - a very nationalist view, and indeed, Jews everywhere today are considered citizens of Israel, regardless of where they live. It had to be a little grating for the poor German worker who not only had to scrape to pay his landlord, but who also knew (or thought he did, or was being told in his church) that landlord regarded him and his family as unworthy of G-d's love, or some such. As people generally do of people they resent, the Germans began to demonize the Jews in their communities. They enhanced their own renewed sense of nationalism with the idea that they were a 'Master Race' - a "superior" people - and the notion that Jews were an especially inferior, unworthy race. I know there were a lot of other factors involved, but it has always seemed to be that this was an almost intentional, horrible irony - adding insult to injury, so to speak.
4. Gay Germany. The inconsistent treatment of homosexuals in Nazi Germany is pretty interesting, too. Many were rounded up and placed in camps, and forced to wear pink stars analogous to the yellow ones Jews were made to wear. And yet, one of Hitler's most commendated military units was one made up entirely of gays....
I don't know that I'd call myself a "Hitler Buff", either, but I have read a good bit about him and Germany leading up to WWII. Being of primarily German descent, I was pretty concerned with whether or not that meant I was automatically nuts for a little while, while I was in high school.
