James Stokesbury wrote that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended up hurting the Germans.
First, it was so severe that the Bolsheviks resisted agreeing to it even though they wanted an end to the war. To force them to sign, the Germans launched a new offensive in Russia. The offensive worked - it captured more territory and forced the Russians to agree to German terms. But it also took several weeks - and that delayed the start of the more important German offensive in the west. Russia was already defeated so the Germans should have got them to sign quickly with relatively lenient terms so it can transfer its troops to the west where the war was still in doubt.
Second, as many people have noted, Britain and France were also in bad shape in 1918. And things were about to get worse as the Germans launched a major offensive which was surprisingly successful. The Allies might well have collapsed and asked for terms. But one of the key factors that kept the Allies fighting was having seen how harsh the German terms had been in the East. That convinced the British and French that bad as the ongoing fighting was it was still preferable to accepting a German peace. Again, Germany would have been better off having given Russia a lenient settlement, which would have encouraged a British and French surrender.
Churchill was an odd one, and he’s wrong. The U.S. was a major force trying to help Germany back on its feet, and was the major player pushing for a less onerous treaty initially and eventualy reducing the war debt. I have a LOT of differences with WOodrow WIlson, but his position there was perfectly correct.
Churchill was creating a linkage where there wasn’t one. The reason Britain was in debt was because it had borrowed money from American lenders. The reason Germany was in debt was because Britain had placed reparations on it. The two were separate debts.
Then Britain declared that it would use the money it collected from Germany to repay the money it owed America. But that doesn’t mean America was responsible for German’s debt situation.
You had the option to give independent Germany “what it deserved” after WWI and that would guarantee WWII.
At the end of WWII we decided to go down an entirely different route and basically decided there would never be a negotiated peace, and Germany would not be an independent state immediately after the war. While not intentional it ended up being divided for more than 50 years and it didn’t achieve true independence until the early 50s in the West and arguably was only pseudo-independent in the East.
Basically the Allies at the end of WWI wanted to give Germany what it deserved but they refused to recognize the consequences of what that would do. The interest should not have been in appropriately punishing the Germans but instead structuring a peace that would make a future war between France and Britain on one side and Germany on the other unlikely. Instead the peace did exactly the opposite of that.
Alternatively if the Allies felt that such a peace could not have been negotiated then they should have adopted a position of occupying all of Germany as a war goal and that would have required an invasion in which more battles would have to be fought.
In the context of recent history and German behavior no, Versailles wasn’t egregiously harsh. In the context of expecting WWI not to be repeated it was idiotic, the Allies had two options to prevent another major European war and their solution wasn’t one of them.
Well had Versailles been enforced, I don’t know if it would have so naturally led to WWII. If Germany had been stomped on when it broke the treaty, the history of the twentieth century might have been very different.
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Well had Versailles been enforced, I don’t know if it would have so naturally led to WWII. If Germany had been stomped on when it broke the treaty, the history of the twentieth century might have been very different.
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If the winners were in any position to actually stomp on Germany to enforce Versailles, especially in the 30’s, then WWII wouldn’t have happened. They weren’t and their actions in the immediate post-WWI period pretty much set the stage for WWI part II sometime in the future. If not in the mid-30’s then sometime, unless you think that they could have kept Germany down forever.
I think Martin Hyde hit it on the head with his post.
I don’t dispute that. But they weren’t aware in 1919 they would not be in the position in the 1930s. And they could also have done a lot more in the 1930s, not least stopping fascism dead in Spain.
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But they weren’t aware in 1919 they would not be in the position in the 1930s.
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They were short sighted and focused on the moment without a thought to the future. And it was that short sightedness that cost 10’s of millions of more Europeans their lives later on down the road.
I don’t believe they could have, considering the state of their own economies at the time. The French had poured most of it’s resources into purely defensive measures, and weren’t really in a position to project military force beyond their borders (or those of it’s empire anyway), and the Brits had radically cut back their military, and also weren’t in any position to project major force beyond their borders, not without major sacrifices by their public in terms of treasure. They had their hands full during this period trying to hold their empire together and keep the lid on.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and perhaps 20 years from now America will look back on our own period of military cut backs (assuming we go that way) and say ‘well, maybe we shouldn’t have cut back so much on the military’. It’s hard to say when you are in the moment and without the benefit of that hindsight.
U.S. was under no legal or perhaps moral obligation to forgive British war debt.
However, contrast their stance with the enlightened generosity of Lend-Lease and Marshall Plan of the 1940’s. The latter ushered in a great period of prosperity in Western Europe. The former … well, that’s the subject of this thread.
The Ukrainians, Poles, Latvians. Finns, etc. were satisfied to see Brest-Litovsk as it gave them nominal independence, these were not ethnically Russian territories. Nor did it try to economically cripple them. And Germany did not need to be divided up, it was needed as a stablizing influence in Central Europe and had Weimar survived or if a sensible dictator had taken over, it would have invaluable against Soviet infiltration.
Well one problem was that the Republic was heavily infiltrated by Stalinists and assorted Commies and did unpleasent things such as among other things massacre the clergy.
Although I know more about Germany than the average American, I never knew they controlled northern Schleswig before the Armistice. Even today its territory goes a considerable distance up the peninsula; it’s hard to see how it could go farther and not be in the main part of Denmark.
Well that’s the argument. I don’t think in 1918 the Great Depression could have been predicted. Absent the Great Depression, GB & France would have been in a significantly better position to require compliance with the Treaty.
In 1936, the German military was in no position to fight the French, let alone the French and British. When Germany chose to re-militarize the Rhineland, it was a bluff that it wasn’t called on.
And Britain and France could have supported the Republicans in Spain at minimal cost - providing hardware and blockading the fascists.
Yet again this is utterly irrelevant. Your rose tinted view of a Germany which had launched a brutal war of aggression doesn’t bear on the actual question of the thread. Brest-Litovsk is relevant because it is an indicator of the peace which the Germans would have sought to impose had they been victorious. That they lost, and were on the receiving end of a significantly milder peace makes it unlikely they should have expected better than they received.
A united Germany wasn’t a stablizing force in Europe, it was a threat. It repeatedly launched wars of aggression, resulting in the deaths of millions upon millions of Europeans and other British subjects. Take a train ride through Northern France and stop to walk in some of the huge graveyards; visit the Vimy memorial. Then you’ll get a small idea of the cost of German militarism on Europe, and also maybe an idea of why other European countries wanted to make sure there wasn’t a repeat performance.
An Germany divided was arguably worse, actually. The divided nature of the German states in the 1600s is a big part of the reason the 30 Years War could happen, and in terms of percentages it killed a far greater portion of Europe’s population than did either of the World Wars.
Anyway, “enforcing Versailles” would have meant “running Germany as an occupied country” which is exactly what the post-World War II allies did, for many years.
However, I can only assume the allied powers after World War I were not interested in being long term administrators of Germany. It would be expensive, it would be potentially dangerous, and it would eventually become politically unpopular at home.
When I said above the allies had two options when it came to preventing a second war I was implying that one of those options was negotiating a peace that would not radicalize Germany and the other was occupying Germany and rebuilding it from the ground up. “Enforcing Versailles” essentially would have been the same thing as just picking the second option.
I think this was a big part of it. The German populace had made all these sacrifices, and was being asked more because victory was always just around the corner, and when it all collapsed it was far more comforting to believe that treachery and betrayal had caused it rather than the incompetence and and lies of their own leadership.
Plus, aggressive countries always seem to have a rationale for why they are “forced” into war against their neighbors. The story is almost never “you have what we want”. It’s almost always, “You done us wrong and you’re going to pay for it”; or “You’re about to do us wrong and we attacked to stop you from doing it”.And the story is used both internally and abroad.
When the domestic population believes the cover story, and then they lose the war, they can’t stand the idea of being the bad guys, or the patsies of the bad guys, in a morality play. So they twist their view on reality any way they need to to keep themselves the good guys in their own minds.
There were 37 clergy who were massacred before the civil war started. Then the right wing started the civil war in a successful attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government. During the course of that war approximately 220,000 people were massacred - three quarters of them by the right. Plus about 500,000 people killed in the fighting. Then after the war was over, Franco killed approximately 30,000 more political opponents.
So it’s pretty one-sided to point the finger at the assorted Commies in Spain when the anti-Commies started the war and killed a lot more people.
My best friend once said, “The only good thing the Communists ever did was try to stomp out religion.” He was wrong though, because they were in fact trying to replace traditional forms with a religion with the State as the God.