I realize I am coming to this thread...
a year late, but a post on another forum and my re-reading of McMillan's work prompted it. That said,
Canadian historical scholar/author Margaret Macmillan takes the position that "The allies (she says), were not the caricatures history has remembered: vengeful Frenchmen, pusillanimous Brits, or naive and bumbling Americans. And to blame the treaty for World War II (she says), is ‘to ignore the actions of everyone–political leaders, diplomats, soldiers, ordinary voters–for 20 years between 1919 and 1939.’ ‘Whatever the treaty,’ she argues, ‘Germany would have been an unhappy place in the 1920s.’ Reparations were initially set at $33 billion.
But MacMillan maintains that Germany paid only about $4.5 billion in the entire period between 1918 and 1932. Slightly less, she points out, than what France paid after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71–with a much smaller economy. And the French paid in gold, on time and in full (Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World", McMillan)
Stephen Schuker, a University of Virginia historian and author of "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919- 1933", believes the Germans, by using the proceeds of American loans to pay off their debts in Europe, ultimately paid no reparations at all. And when the Germans defaulted in the early thirties as a result of the "depression" (Schuker argues), American bankers had effectively paid reparations to Germany. Indeed, according to Schuker's calculations, the total net transfer from the United States to Germany in the period 1919-1931, adjusted for inflation, "amounted to almost four times the total assistance that the United States furnished West Germany under the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1952."
"It is much easier to make war than peace," complained French Premier Georges Clemenceau during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. (Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World", McMillan)
Hitler, for one, claimed in the 1920s and '30s that the European boundaries drawn at Versailles unjustly separated thousands of "ethnic" Germans from their brethren in the Fatherland. But many historians now believe Wilson stayed as close to his declared principle of drawing boundaries on the basis of ethnicity as was economically and strategically feasible at the time. Czechoslovakia and Poland, for example (both of which were "created" by the peace conference) could not have survived ethnic homogeneity. The Czechs needed the mountains to the north, the Sudetenland, to protect their cities and industries in the valleys below, and the Poles, to be commercially viable, required access to the sea. As a result, tens of thousands of those ethnic Germans living in those areas ended up Czech or Polish.
If the Allies had drawn boundaries on ethnicity alone, as Boston University historian William Keylor points out, they would have made postwar Germany bigger than it was in 1914! And that, after four years of fighting and millions of deaths, "was politically impossible (unthinkable)."
When you look at Europe at the end of 1919, says Keylor, author of A World of Nations: the International Order Since 1945, "it (Versailles) comes as close to an ethnographic map as any settlement before or since."
So why has it taken historians so long to reconsider Versailles, and give it a fair shake? For one thing, because the conventional view makes such a good story, says MacMillan. "We like to believe that statesmen are a bunch of boobs anyway, if not wicked," and for many years after the settlement respectable voices said just that.
She credits the end of the Cold War, though, for bringing many historians into her camp. Civil wars in the Balkans, rebellions in Africa, fighting in Palestine, the squabbling of minorities in Iraq–all are the same issues faced by the peacemakers in Paris. Today, as western leaders continue to struggle with these same problems, she says, we can see that Clemenceau was right: "Making peace just isn't as easy as we thought."
"Hitler did not wage war because of the Treaty of Versailles, although he found its existence a godsend for his propaganda," the Canadian-born historian writes. As for the three peacemakers, she believes they were genuinely well intentioned: "They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. This was up to their successors. When war came in 1939, it was a result of 20 years of decisions taken or not taken, not of arrangements made in 1919."
The traditional view is that onerous war reparations drove the German economy to the collapse that brought Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933. But Ms. MacMillan demonstrates that the reparations demanded of Germany were less than those paid by France after its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Further, she notes, Germany paid only about one-third of what it owed in compensation for its occupation and destruction of Belgium and northern France.
Rather, she believes, the real problem was that Germany did not feel defeated. "They didn't think they had lost the war," she said during a recent visit to Paris. "They'd never seen foreign troops on German soil. The German army marched back in good order to Berlin. German industry was intact. Germany was still the biggest European country west of the Soviet Union. It never really disarmed, and it was strong enough in 1939 to conquer most of Europe."
In my own opinion here; that Hitler and the Nazis "saved" the German economy is a common, but erroneous position. Look up the "Dawes Plan", the "Young Plan", the German banker Haljmar Schacht, the Krupp family, Fritz Thyssen’s industrial and banking support, and the cancellation of the Versailles reparations all BEFORE Hitler actually came to power.
Post 1929 the entire world was falling into depression, and the new Young Plan might well have pulled Germany out faster than the now superseded Dawes Plan which had done the job from early 20's until the "crash", with Weimar Germany’s unemployment in the single digits, and inflation controlled. After the "crash" of '29 the situation world-wide altered in ways NO-ONE could have predicted. The Young Plan addressed the "new" reality, but before anything besides the forgiving of the reparations payments could be instigated pre-Hitler, there he was spouting his Greater Germany theories!
Those two plans (Dawes early, Young last), were both before Hitler. He rose to power after the "crash", and before the Young plan could be put into effect in total. Even though the reparations had been "forgiven" before his rise, he took credit for "standing up to the financial interests (read Jew bankers)", even though he had nothing to do with it. The Weimar Government had unilaterally refused to pay any more of the payments, and the Lucerne group overseeing the gathering of the payments took Young's advice and approved the forgiving of the reparations. The rest of the Young plan never was implemented until post-war.
Economically Nazi Germany was similar to a giant "Ponzi" scheme (named after the Italian immigrant Carlo "Charles" Ponzi and used originally in America directly after WW1). However in the Hitler version the original wealth still in their control was spent to build weapons of war to conquer and/or assimilate other nation's wealth (Austria, Czechoslovkia, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway) rather than pay off old investors. The first defeat on the field of battle was the "death knell" for the scheme. No new material "wealth" coming in, and the internal "wealth" stretched to the limit.
A "Ponzi" only works as long as there is new "input". As soon as the "input" is less than the "output", it collapses. It was not that it was one ( a Ponzi scheme), just that the driving force was similar to one. Incoming wealth paying for expenditures made in the immediate past, but maybe the "rob Peter to pay Paul" statement would have seemed better. It as my own analogy, not one from any book or anything, I just thought it sounded "right".
Another common mistake is that Nazi policy shrunk unemployment. Well, in the "official numbers", perhaps, so you kind of have to give ‘em that one if you only look on the surface. Looking a bit deeper, one would be well advised to look in to the "how" the numbers shrunk. Shortly after coming to power Hitler had passed the "Enabling Act" which outlawed all but the Nazi party in Germany, so if you wanted to keep your civil servant job you either became one (a Nazi), or lost your job. And then who could be a Nazi? It wasn't just every German by any stretch. Because even before the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws were passed, Jews knew they couldn't join the NSDAP.
So about a year after taking complete control of the German government, Jews, Gypsies, and other "untermensch" were NOT citizens, couldn’t vote, were dismissed from any professional jobs they had held, and were NOT counted as either "employed or unemployed"; as they didn’t "officially" exist inside the Greater Reich. Also married women doctors and many female civil servants were dismissed the year before (in 1934), and from June 1936 on, no woman could act as a judge or as public prosecutors.
The year the Nazis came to power there were 18,315 women students in Germany's universities. By 1939 this number was 5,447. Hitler also removed 800,000 German women, married and single, from the non-professional work force within his first four years. In August 1933 a law was passed that enabled married couple to obtain interest free loans to set up homes and start families. To pay for this "state" largess; single men and childless couples were taxed heavily.
The Second World War wasn’t JUST because of the Treaty of Versailles, nor JUST because of the Depression, nor JUST because of the rise of Communism in the immediate years after WW1. I would espouse that it was a combination of those three, plus the demise of all but the most benign monarchies as governing bodies, and the tenuous hold most colonial powers had on their colonies even if they were ON the winning side of "The Great War". As I mentioned, just my opinions here.
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Happy Trails,
Clint.
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