One of the first things slightly more advanced students learn about WWII is that it had its roots in the crushing terms imposed on Germany at the end of WWI. At Versailles, the victorious powers buried Germany’s future under reparations and other burdens meant to make them a third-world power for a generation. Fury and rebellion against these impositions, in an already-exhausted country, led to the rise of Hitler and to WWII.
One of the more surprising points I’ve learned in my WWI readings is that this is the second time crushing terms, intended to hobble a nation for a generation and take it out of the military realm for longer, were handed down at Versailles. The first time (in the modern era, anyway) was when the Germans did so at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. Having won a quick and decisive victory, they demanded an enormous tribute from France (millions of francs) and a victory parade down the Champs d’Elysees. They got both, and intended for France to be impacted for a generation or more.
The victory march was down an absolutely empty avenue draped in black.
The “crushing” reparations were repaid in three years.
France did not spawn a Hitler and a second, even more destructive war.
I’m sure excellent historical analyses of the two have been written. Must find one. But just the bare facts change the color of the German interwar period a little.
The reparations for the Franco-Prussian war were set to five billion gold francs in five years time, which is actually a pretty good sum. In today’s currency it would be almost 100 billion, which is enough to wreck many smaller economies, and also huge quantities of gold isn’t so easy to come by unless you already have a very large economy with plenty of colonies that can be looted for anything valuable, which of course Germany did not possess. In fact, those reparations were what influenced them to adopt the gold standard.
Also, on top of even higher war reparations, the Weimar Republic had to deal with some minor inconveniences such as the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and runaway inflation, which should suggest to most people who have read beyond the opening paragraph in a history book that the two situations weren’t exactly analogous.
Plus there’s simply the fact that the Franco-Prussian war was orders of magnitude less destructive than World War I. Other than that unpleasantness in Paris, it was pretty much business as usual after the war and so skimming a bit off the top of the economy wasn’t a huge issue. With the post-WWI reparations, the German economy was already devastated from the war and it’s more that the reparations retarded the recovery than actually wrecked it themselves.
On a more psychological level, there’s also the fact that World War I didn’t come to a decisive military conclusion like the Franco-Prussian war had. There were certainly those who thought Napoleon III had been too quick to surrender, but there was no question the French had lost the war. In Germany, though, there were lots of people who thought that Germany hadn’t actually lost the war but had been betrayed by some group within the country, with the Nazis of course coming up with the idea that it had been Jews and Communists. Heaping punitive and humiliating peace terms at the end of a war that had been fought to no obvious conclusion greatly helped strengthen that idea. It’s quite possible that if the western powers had allowed more equal peace terms, political conditions wouldn’t have been as receptive to the Nazis’ scapegoating ideology.
I didn’t mean the two situations were analogous; all of the above points are of course completely valid. I just found it startling how two similar acts had such vastly different outcomes. It may be much less startling when you include the other burdens of post-WWI Germany and the relatively civilized nature of Eurowar ca. 1870, but it being the same players and the same location for the meeting makes it all just too-too.
Remember that France had just been down the road of the charismatic despot two generations earlier, under Bonaparte. That experience may have diminished their appetite to do that again.
I think the political and social circumstances were a little different as well. Even though there was the Paris Commune in 1871, it doesn’t measure up to the difficulties in Germany in 1918/1919.
And as you mention, the Franco Prussian war was a quick and decisive victory. The Great War was long and costly and the German population were starving due to the blockade impose. When you start from such a base, it is difficult to rebuild.
Look at it this way. In 1871 the Germans humiliated the French. In 1919 the French have the choice of taking Woodrow Wilson’s high road or, (along with Britain) really sticking it to Germany. They decide on revenge.
Now your Germany and it’s your turn. What do you do?
More advanced students study further and learn that the scorn heaped on Versailles is simplistic.
Firstly: what else could have been done? A nice treaty would have handed Germany the continental domination they fought for.
Secondly: postwar history is a constant retreat from Versailles
Thirdly: WW2 broke out because Britain and France finally realised that Hitler didn’t merely want to reverse Versailes, but actually had a limitless appetite.
Fourthly: while Versailles may have contributed to German misery and made extremism more appealing, can you really blame the treaty for the fact that Germans, instead of picking an everyday fascist - a Teutonic Mussolini - who could have been satisfied without a world war - instead. They picked the complete lunatic.
Finally , treaties aren’t magic. If you have your enemy in a headlock, your future security is not determined by the promises you can force out of them.
In conclusion: blame the idiots who started WW1: and blame Nazis
Another difference between the 1870 war and WWI is that Germany lost 45 000 men in the former and France 1.4 millions in the later. Germany was untouched in the former, a large chunk of France devastated in the latter. There were some reasons to be a little bit irritated.
Besides, it’s not like Germany was exactly lenient when she had the opportunity, as shown by the peace treaty imposed on Russia. The treaty of Versailles was incredibly nice by comparison.
Finally, it could be argued that WWII could have been avoided by imposing harsher conditions on Germany. Look at Turkey or Austria before and after the war.
Yes, and the amounts of food and money demanded by the German Army from every Belgium town they conquered (whether you have sympathy for Belgium is not that important). It was written into German Army instructions at the turn of the century that this action was necessary.
It was not a random policy- it was ingrained (so to speak).
Perhaps if Germany had been occupied rather than an armistice (such as happened after WW2) would have not allowed a lot of the problems that surfaced to occur.
The idea that the German Army had never been beaten on the field of battle was nonsense- as was the idea that no enemy munitions were landed on German soil.
When the French went into Germany after the war, they realized that Germany was almost untouched by the war, while France had been devastated. If Germany’s reaction was runaway inflation, that was their fault. Germany managed to raise enough money to remilitarize (and shame on England and France for not enforcing the ban on remilitarization. The problem with Versailles was that it didn’t hold Germany down hard enough.
What gets me is when some people claim we learned our lesson from World War I and imposed a more reasonable peace after World War II.
Well, no, we didn’t. The terms we imposed after World War II were much harsher than those we imposed after World War I. We charged Germany more reparations than we had charged them in the first war. We took away more territory than we had taken away at Versailles. We forced German populations to move out of places we were taking and resettle within the new borders we established. We occupied Germany which we hadn’t done after World War I. And rather than simply make Germany acknowledge its guilt in a general sense, we held trials and imprisoned and executed Germans for their roles in the war.
And these terms worked. So arguably the mistake we made at Versailles was to go too easy on the Germans.
While certainly true, there were more than a few mitigating factors involved with the end of WW2:
Germany had undeniably lost. Not merely worn down, not economically defeated. Lost. The armies were in shambles, they were reduced to sending Hitler youth into the woods with a Panzerfaust and not much else. Wheras the German Army of WW1 had been stopped and defeated, but not destroyed.
Occupation. Hard to really argue with any peace conditions when the armies of at least 4 nations are in your borders. This is as opposed to the end of WW1 where the Germans soldiers were still in France.
Guilt for actions. While at the end of WW1 Germany could, on some level, say “What did we do that you other nations weren’t doing?” at the end of WW2 the allies could reply ‘holocaust’, along with hundreds or thousands of other war crimes.
Rebuilding. After WW1 all Germany had to look forward to was the slow looting of what little they had. At the end of WW2 the allies made efforts to feed, rebuild and renew Germany… at least West Germany.
Americans. Yes, I know, but the US was a big part of the peace process and didn’t really have the cantankerous history that France and Russia (and to a smaller extent England) had with Germany. It was a bit different when it was Americas big fat butt sat on you until you stopped the squabbling that had had resulted in a European war every 30-50 years.
The bigger threat. This is probably the biggest answer in the long run was the start of the Cold War. If (West) Germany didn’t play nice at the peace conferences then the Soviets might have the run of things as they did in the rest of Eastern Europe. Most of the people who fled their homes weren’t fleeing the Western allies, they fled the Soviet armies.
Most of these things were a result of the unconditional surrender demanded by the allies. A lot of folks have been critical of that decision over the years, I am not one of them.
I doubt that even harsher treaty conditions at the end of WW1 would have resulted in the changes that happened after WW2. It could have resulted in a re-igntion of the war or made the Germans even more testy.
In both cases, the wars ended when Germany said it was giving up. What were we going to do after that? Keep attacking?
The fact that Germany gave up earlier in World War I then they did in World War II didn’t entitle Germany to any favorable conditions. If Hitler had given up in 1944, we would have given Germany the same terms.
And it’s not like we popped a surprise on the Germans with the treaty. We gave them substantially the same terms we had said we were going to give them during the war while they were still fighting.
As far as I can tell, the German belief in 1918 was that they could agree to stop fighting on the terms we had stated. And then they figured there would be a negotiation where they could treat the terms they were agreeing to as an opening offer. They seemed to think they could negotiate up from those.
So they were surprised when we produced a treaty that was pretty much what we had said it would be. Their position was essentially, “Well, sure, we agreed to those terms but we didn’t mean it when we said it and we didn’t think you’d hold us to it.”
I’m not saying they were entitled to anything, I am saying their attitude is bound to be different if you’ve utterly destroyed their army vs. having merely stopped it. There’s a lot more you can inflict on an enemy when they have accepted unconditional surrender as you demanded.
As for what would happen if Hitler accepted unconditional surrender in 1944 - I really doubt that was ever going to happen. He wanted separate peace with the Western allies but that wasn’t going to happen.
Hell yes. That’s exactly what General Pershing wanted to do in World War I. He had no use for an armistice. He wanted to press Germany all the way to unconditional surrender, after which the Allies would presumably have occupied the entire country.
I have no idea whether the peace terms would have been harsher or easier if Pershing’s views had prevailed.
Of course. Germany says she’s giving up, allies state their conditions (say, you disarm your army and we occupy half your country), and if Germany doesn’t like them, the fighting continue (ok, we’ll occupy it whether you like it or not, then). That’s what happens in any war.
What I remember from High School history classes–and I realize to my horror that my High School history classes were closer to WWII than they are to today–was that the treaty of Versailles wound up being a compromise, which is what set the stage for WWII. England and France wanted much harsher penalties, and America wanted much lighter penalties. Either way might have avoided round two, but the compromise led to something that hurt Germany a lot but did not kill her–never a safe thing to do to an opponent.