Treaty of Versailles - War Starter?

I suppose you could argue this point but frankly, that's a pretty far-fetched and narrow assessment of the situation. Though I do believe Hitler used that as part of his explanation . . .

 

The "war" took a turning point when Germany invaded Poland and England declared war on Germany.
There are several reasons leading up to that point which all cumulated into one giant flammable mess of rags - which was ignited by Germany invading Poland and England declaring war.

Otherwise... one could argue it was 600 years of Judaism in Poland that sparked something in the end which would finally and fatally be decided at Wannsee. Now, did the second world war really begin in the 1300's with Jewish settlers? I highly doubt it. World War II started when Germany... took Poland and England declared war.

 

While WW2 started with the invasion of Poland. I think the point of the discussion is if the treaty of Versailles caused Germany to go to war again?

I personally think that it did not help prevent war. Here are a couple of my others posts on the subject in another thread.

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-general/19422-causes-world-war.html#post229787

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-general/19422-causes-world-war.html#post230349

 

Thanks for this interesting discussion. Somehow we could ask two complementary questions :
1. If, instead of the « harsh » Versailles treaty, we would have had a blank peace (no reparations, no restitution of territories, no guilt clause), what would have happened ?
My hypothesis is that the German top brass would have resumed war within 1 or 2 years, as Ludendorff planned in the fall of 1918 when he was pushing politicians to ask for an armistice.
2. What really humiliated Germany ? We find a deep feeling of humiliation, of wounded pride, as soon as the 1rst battle of the Marne in 1914. Many German officers diaries expressed a feeling of an « unfair defeat » (while the Schlieffen Plan was going so smoothly, and the French and Brits were so evidently inferior).
Besides it would be interesting to study the link between the representation of the Versailles treaty as « too harsh » and the appeasement policy, in Britain, in the US, in the French left-wing (typically Briand, later Marcel Déat).

Perhaps some of you know the phrase coined by the French royalist leaders : « The Versailles treaty is too harsh for its mellowness and too mellow for its harshness. Therefore it plants the seeds for another war ».

« In 1918 the Germans were actually WINNING the war to some extent. » This could be true until June 1918 (although Germany was only winning battles against an enemy who was absolutely determined to win the war). Not later. An army which suffers 100,000 deserters (in late Summer 1918) can hardly be considered « winning ». Hence Ludendorff policy: He needed a winter of peace to gather forces and resources again.

 

I've posted parts of this in other threads, but it seems an apropos spot to do so again.
The 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 recognized but not "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."

I (Clint) agree with this portion most strongly, the German Heer marched back in parades where they were feted and applauded, almost as if they had won something. The Allies allowed the new Weimar government to not only demobilize and shrink their army, but to disarm them, and try the 900+ accused war criminals as well. The army was shrunk (on paper at least), but many small arms and machineguns remained outside of their control. Only about a dozen war criminals were tried at all, and most were released with "time served" as their sentences.

If on the other hand the Heer had marched back into Germany disarmed, and following an armed foreign army who paraded in Berlin, the German populace may have felt less "betrayed by a stab in the back"; and fully recognized their defeat.