Link to the History Channel production.
Viewers, what did you think? I found the story of Henry Tandey particularly interesting.
Something obvious finally occurred to me while watching: The Axis Powers got screwed at Versailles!! I was shocked that it took until the OBAMA administration to finish paying the reparations!!
Central Powers.
Amazing: To clarify what I meant
- Italy didn’t get the territory promised
- Japan was flat out ignored
- Germany was forced to accept total blame, and pay crippling reparations
So it’s easy to see why they started WWII
Had no idea this was on. Thanks for the heads-up! I’m a big WW1 buff and am always interested in new productions (books, documentaries, etc) about it.
Watched about an hour, set to record. Liked it so far.
Very interesting facts and tidbits, such as the time it took to pay reparations, the origin of Hitler’s mustache, and the fact that he survived WWI at all. While neither of the last two examples are hard facts, google searches shed further light on their both being more plausible than not.
We met Hitler, Churchill, Patton, MacArthur, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, and that’s it, right? And the Lusitania wasn’t even mentioned, was it?
Roosevelt showed up too. So did Rudolf Hess briefly (the guy typing Mein Kampf) And the Lusitania was mentioned.
It wasn’t bad, wasn’t great. A lot was oversimplified, some was just wrong, (Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar? Really?) but I think a lot of it was that they were trying to do too much in too little time.
I didn’t watch the show so I don’t know how much detail it went into. But there was a technical clause in the eventual reparation agreement that long delayed payment. In 1953, it was agreed that Germany could defer paying reparations while the country was divided. So no payments were made until 1995.
Saying Germany was paying reparations from the end of World War I to the Obama Administration sounds like a huge amount of time. But the only two periods when Germany was actually making payments were 1921 to 1932 (when Hitler stopped paying) and 1995 to 2010.
It’s not even hindsight that reveals this. Many at the time thought that Versailles virtually guaranteed a Great War Redux. But France, particularly and understandably, was in no mood for magnanimity.
John Maynard Keynes is probably the most famous of the anti-Versaillers, but as noted by Standingwave, revenge was more important to the winners than pragmatism.
I’ve said this before but the Versailles Treaty was not the draconian peace that many people believe. It was actually pretty reasonable. But Germany just refused to accept that it had lost the war and kept complaining about the outcome.
On a tangent, Britain - hi! - we only finished paying our war debt to the US in 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm?ls
“Britain will settle its World War II debts to the US and Canada when it pays two final instalments before the close of 2006, the Treasury has said. The payments of $83.25m (£42.5m) to the US and US$22.7m (£11.6m) to Canada are the last of 50 instalments since 1950. The amount paid back is nearly double that loaned in 1945 and 1946.”
So I guess all those P-40s and Sherman tanks are ours now, to do with as we please. And the tins of Spam, the trucks, jeeps etc. The silk stockings, the earthmoving machines, the destroyers, the jazz records, coca cola etc. They’re ours now.
The article ends with :
“Despite the favourable rates there were six years in which Britain deferred payment because of economic or political crises. There are still World War I debts owed to and by Britain. Since a moratorium on all debts from that conflict was agreed at the height of the Great Depression, no repayments have been made to or received from other nations since 1934.”
Question for the board; as I understand it the conditions at the end of the Second World War were in some respects even worse for Germany, with German patents being made public domain, the country’s top scientists spirited away abroad, the military utterly slashed, hundreds of thousands of Germans remaining in POW camps in the USSR until the 1950s, large chunks of the country blown to ruins, plant forcibly exported abroad, millions dead, etc, and yet within twenty years they had the VW Beetle and the wiltschaff… weltschaff… weltangshau… wirt… the economic miracle.
Part of it was surely due to economic aid, but was it in fact the Great Depression that totalled Weimar Germany, and not Versailles at all?
in the end, but it’s a combination of things. The Depression hurt Germany hard because its economy was being propped up by American loans that had been granted to Germany to let them pay the reparations payments. The Depression hit, American loans dried up, and businesses started closing.
Calling it revenge seems a bit unfair. France suffered enormous damage, including economic damage in WW1, most of which was fought on French soil, with a good chunk of France under German occupation throughout the war. It wasn’t just about punishing Germany, it was about actual reparations for the enormous damage that had been done to France (over and above all the soldiers who had died).
This Churchill character is pretty interesting. Can’t wait to see how he plays out.
And the reparations charged to Germany in 1919 was figured out using the same formula the Germans had used to charge reparations to France in 1871 and to Russia in 1918.
So the German complaint seemed to be “What? You’re going to treat us by the same standard we treated you? That’s unfair.”
I just finished watching the first episode on line. Some thoughts off the top of my head:
The first thing that hit me was the date of Hitler’s blinding gas attack: in the opening, they seemed to imply it occurred in October 1914. Off by four years.
Hitler didn’t “try out” for the Austrian army. He evaded national service until the authorities tracked him down in Munich, and was found physically unfit for service after being examined under threat of imprisonment.
Hitler “looking for work” with the German army (in civilian clothes) after the war. He wasn’t mustered out with the rest of his regiment; he did everything he could to stay in the army as long as possible. This included delivering ideological lectures to his fellow soldiers and spying on nascent political parties. He stayed in uniform until, I think, 1920, when his political future was assured.
Patton introducing himself to MacArthur as a lieutenant, when he’s clearly wearing the insignia of a lieutenant colonel.
Patton riding M-3 Stuarts and M-4 Shermans, which wouldn’t exist for another 20 years or so.
Patton standing in the middle of the firing range during target practice. If he actually did this, he was even more batshit crazy than everybody thought.
I loved the high-altitude contrail in the sky above St Petersburg. Very authentic!
From what I recall, the storming of the Winter Palace was pretty much a non-event. The Provisional Government had already vacated the premises, and nobody even tried to resist the Bolsheviks.
Interesting they never mentioned that Italy had been one of the original Central Powers, but failed to live up to its obligations.
They implied that the Japanese sent troops to fight on the Western Front. What they basically did was grab as many of Germany’s possessions in the Pacific as they could before the war ended, whether the Allies wanted them to or not.
German participation on the Italian Front was minimal, to say the least, and came very late in the day.
In short … I’m not real impressed with what I saw.
Oh, yeah: the Gallipoli campaign lasted eight months. It wasn’t over in a single day, as the show seemed to imply.
The alliance between the three countries was only invoked in a defensive war. There was no obligation to join in an offensive war. Germany chose to support Austria-Hungary in its attack on Serbia but Italy did not. It wasn’t a surprise; while they were technically allies, Italy and Austria-Hungary were not generally friendly to each other (they had rival claims around the Adriatic).