It really doesn’t matter if they really weren’t so bad, it only matters what the German people believed in the 1920s.
Could a B-29 have delivered Einstein’s bomb without English airfields?
THe US wouldn’t be fighting Germany if Hitler had half a brain. The Japanese didn’t back him up when he invaded the Soviet Union yet he unconditionally committed Germany to fight the US for Japan? Madness!
There is a lovely old board-game called “Origins of World War II.” (Here’s a link to a quick review on BoardGameGeek.)
The lesson the game tries to show is that aggressive and unified allied diplomacy, from 1935 to 1940, could have prevented WWII. The trouble is that the allies were divided by individual national goals – France wanted Alsace; Russia wanted the Baltics – and so couldn’t coordinate the necessary diplomatic opposition to Hitler’s strength.
This seems the obvious difference. The post 1945 situation wasn’t simply ‘harsher’ on some one dimensional scale. It was harsher politically, to a significant extent dismembering Germany, till 1990 as far as the post WWII ‘East’ and permanently as far a significant German territory further to the east. OTOH the US/British/French occupation was relatively short lived, though still more extensive in time and space than the post WWI occupation. But the settlement was much more friendly economically, with the western part of the country given reconstruction aid rather than being forced to pay reparations, and relatively quickly invited into a western trading system.
I wouldn’t entirely dismiss the argument in the link insofar as perhaps arguing the outright economic burden after WWI might be overemphasized in the conventional wisdom. Or not, no expert on it. But it’s clear enough the German nation blamed a lot of its economic ills on Versailles, and the collective opinions of Germans was the key to the rise of Hitler. And again OTOH the country was left more intact with less outside political influence and the ex-Entente quickly tired of what relatively little there was.
Also post WWII there was a Soviet threat to unite the West including West Germany, in contrast to the post WWI situation of unrealistic goal of ‘peace forever’ in parallel with grim worry about a renewed rise of an aggressive Germany even before the Nazi’s.
No, but it would have shown the Germans that they lost. They couldn’t think that they would have won without the stab in the back and would have seen that the German army couldn’t prevent the Allies from taking the country.
The Soviets wanted to bring West Germany under their control?
I think they wanted to bring Western Europe under their control.
I don’t think any one thing can avoid it, but maybe you can make it shorter: You don’t give Hitler the Sudetenland in the Munich agreement, and England and France pledge support to Czechoslovakia. Hitler gets his “little war” against CZ, but will have a harder time than he had in Poland: his victim isn’t fighting a two-front war, and the Czech fixed defenses and the terrain would have made for tough going. He’s not likely to get a total victory like he got in Poland - and definitely not as easy. But fighting Czechoslovakia as the first war instead f Poland first also means no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which in turn means no invasion of France and the Low Countries (can’t leave your back open to Russia). So Hitler has to go after Russia next - and now he is fighting a two-front war, as France & England will come in immediately (for violating Czechoslovakia). War is over in '42, even without the USA getting involved.
A little late for this, isn’t it?
It’s never too late to learn from history. Although we’ve pretty much discarded ALL the lessons from WWII, even the one where we promised never to let another Holocaust happen. Genocides have continued to happen, with very little interference from what’s supposed to be the enlightened part of the world.
Same as the argument about whether the Versailles reparations were really that much of an economic burden on Germany. Germans by and large were convinced so, a national humiliation more relevantly. It’s of secondary relevance (though not zero) to reconsider the real effect in dollars and cents.
Likewise the West by and large thought there was a serious Soviet threat in the wake of WWII, especially in the period where the postwar order in the West was set up, which embraced West Germany in contrast to the attitude toward Weimar Germany. It’s again not of zero relevance in general to reconsider actual Soviet/Russian intentions, but secondary in considering the reasons why the postwar order embraced WG.
I can live with that, except that we aren’t talking “conventional wisdom” here but the wide consensus of some very learned and brilliant historians (across the spectrum, including economic history), many of whom were there at the time. It’s not a newspaper poll of Joe Citzes.
There is always room to go into the historical record and pull out an alternate interpretation - that’s what the profession of history is, in a nutshell. But when you do it by cherry-picking your points and dismissing the great weight of other interpretations, it’s pretty shaky.
Maybe summary discussion puts too much weight on the economic burden being “the cause of WWII” - but I believe that discussion all the way down to the last turtle can only give that factor great weight, and reasonably postulate that had we been gentler economically (that is, to the populace) and sterner politically (working to prevent militarization and rearmament)… we may have had a succession of smaller wars, but not a devastating global conflict. WWII as we know it would have been averted by that one policy change.
WWII could have effectively been prevented as late as 1936. When Hitler decided to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936, military and civilian experts felt even a modest attack by French forces could have easily defeated the German forces. Hitler would probably fallen after that, and the dictatorship that would likely would have replaced him would have been a non-expansionist type like Hungary or Poland. Of course, had Laval and Baldwin stood up to Mussolini over Ethiopia instead of setting up sham sanctions and backroom dealing, the Rhineland crisis wouldn’t have happened at all.
Wow, every single one, huh? :dubious:
I’ve seen this before - handwaving off troublesome facts because well, it’s just a “blog”.
As opposed to the dismal economic state state of numerous other countries that didn’t turn to fascism and military aggression?
This would have been a good idea, along with Germany’s new political leaders demanding joint public appearances and statements by the military, conceding that Germany was defeated and helpless to prevent an invasion if it didn’t agree to the Versailles Treaty.
Feel free to cite a historian of WWII that can fairly be described as “major” who deprecates the economic burdens of post-WWI Germany as a major cause of the rise of Hitler and what ensued. Pre… 2000 would have greater weight for my taste, but suit yourself.
And I said fueled the rise… not caused it. Fueled. You have to have something to fuel for that to make sense.
Hmm…retreating from “every historian of the last 100 years” to someone who “can fairly be described as ‘major’”. 
Gosh, we may have to debate “major”, but the following article cites a historian who believes Versailles was not strict enough.
A similar mistake was not made after WWII.
*"(Margaret Macmillan) even goes so far as to state that: “Of course things might have been very different if Germany had been more thoroughly defeated.” When they surrendered in November 1918, Germany’s armies were all on foreign soil. Despite the terrible ravages of the British blockade, the country had not suffered the kind of domestic physical destruction that “Bomber” Harris was to visit upon it in 1940-45.
Because of this a Dolschstosslegende (stab-in-the-back-myth) was allowed to germinate. Yet had the treaty actually been harsher on Germany, specifically if it had divided the country as happened in 1945, then there might have been no via dolorosa - from the Rhineland, to the Anschluss, to Sudetenland and Danzig - for Europe to travel between 1936 and 1939.
The problem with Versailles was not that it was too punitive, or “Carthaginian”, as J. M. Keynes so eloquently argued in his influential philippic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, but that it was not harsh enough. When someone tried to persuade the American general Mark Clark of the dangers of imposing a Carthaginian peace on Germany in 1945, he lugubriously observed: “Well, we don’t get too much trouble from those Carthaginians nowadays.”
A peace which partitioned Germany and Austria in 1919, perhaps even returning Germany to the pre-Bismarckian days of a dozen or so states, or even the pre-Napoleonic days of scores of self-governing entities on the Holy Roman Empire model, would have prevented the Second World War. Adolf Hitler could have ended his days as prime minister of the hereditary fiefdom of Linz, stirring up minimal trouble for the rest of Europe."*
Or maybe WWII could have been averted with the help of a Versailles Treaty provision requiring massive education of the German people as to causes of the war and the immense suffering Germany’s aggression inflicted on its neighbors.
However, dogmatic stupidity is hard to fix.
For all your pompous snark, you can’t seem to distinguish between economic and military/diplomatic punishment. There was basically no disarmament/demilitarization/anti-nationalist position too strong… but those were weakly written and left essentially unenforced. There was a huge potential downside to heavy economic sanctions… and those were imposed, and upheld, to disastrous effect.
The idea that the economic punishment alone was of no significant effect is very recent stuff, the kind of crap that gets written when you’re in a field where five generations have already written everything that can be written on the topic. Gotta write some damned sparky thing to catch journal, U-press and commercial editors, and same-old is just too boring. So hey, let’s get some publications by tackling what everyone of note before me thought was obvious.
Don’t have a WW1.
Duh.
This is maybe a dumb question, but how do you get the military leaders to agree to that? The military leaders under the Kaiser hated the new government, figuring they were just a bunch of socialist traitors.