Ukip leader believes Germany should have been forced to unconditionally surrender, even if it cost 100,000 more casualties

Britain and its allies should have continued the first world war for another six weeks in order to achieve an unconditional German surrender, even at the cost of another 100,000 casualties, according to the leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage.

Describing the armistice that ended the first world war as the biggest mistake of the entire 20th century, he claimed that a slightly longer conflict would have prevented the conditions which led to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis coming to power in Germany some 15 years after the Treaty of Versailles.

“I believe we should have continued with the advance,” Farage said as he delivering the annual Tom Olsen Lecture at London’s St Bride’s Church on Monday night, hours before Armistice Day was due to be marked across Britain, parts of Europe and the Commonwealth.

“We should have pursued the war for a further six weeks, and gone for an unconditional surrender. Yes, the last six weeks of the war cost us 100,000 casualties, and I’m prepared to accept that a further six weeks of war might have cost us another 100,000.

“But had we driven the German army completely out of France and Belgium, forced them into unconditional surrender, Herr Hitler would never have got his political army off the ground. He couldn’t have claimed Germany had been stabbed in the back by the politicians in Berlin, or that Germany had never been beaten in the field.”

The Ukip leader said that the reason why Hitler had been able to get his party off the ground in Germany – drawing on “the myth of the stab in the back” at the treaty of Versailles – was because one of those marching through the streets in support of him in 1923 was Erich Ludendorff, a commander of the German army during the first world war.

He added: “It was Ludendorff who gave Hitler credibility. Yet none of this would happened if someone had made Ludendorff surrender unconditionally.”

Farage, lecturing on “the effects of the Great War and the legacy to contemporary Europe”, was this year’s speaker in the Tom Olsen lecture series, which dates back to 1991 and is named after the distinguished Fleet Street journalist.

The Ukip leader, whose hobbies have included touring first world war battlefields with a group of friends, said: “The consensus is that the treaty of Versailles was too punitive. It led directly to German hyper-inflation, which in turn led to seven million unemployed, and which in turn led to National Socialism.

“But I don’t actually think Versailles was the mistake. I believe the real mistake, the anniversary of which we remember today, was the armistice.”