Treaty of Versailles - Modern Reappraisal

[spmetla]

I don't really find this to be a persuasive argument for harshness considering that Britain, as a victorious power, and the victorious power which had been continuously actively fighting for the longest, lost most of our overseas territories after WW2, and the trading base that was the basis of our power. Germany were in no shape to significantly continue resistance by the time the armistice was agreed, and the subsequent treaty reflected their lack of power, just as Brest-Litovsk reflected Russia's lack of power to resist anything Germany might wish to impose on them. Such is war. The later rise of the Nazis was due to two factors. Firstly, the worldwide depression, whose cause had little to do with Versailles. Secondly, the myth that the German Army hadn't been beaten, but was sold out by the civilian government. This second point would have been argued whatever the terms of the treaty, simply because the Allies treated the Germans as the defeated (which they were), while the Germans deluded themselves that they hadn't been beaten.

From all the accounts I've read, the Germans in WW2 had a similar attitude, and if peace had been concluded while they were still in Belgium and Poland, they would have kept a grudge against the Allies, and looked to avenge their so-called defeat in the next war. This arrogance was only knocked out of them by taking the fight into Germany, and showing them they were indisputably the losers of the war.

But Britain didn't have to lose it's colonies it simply gave up most of them due to the various independence movements and its war exhaustion. If Britian or France or really any of the colonial powers had wanted to maintain their colonies they could have at the cost of another colonial war. This is not comparable to stripping Germany of its colonies, Britain gave up its empire due to cost, public opinion, and war exhaustion, not because it had to.

I don't despute that Germany would have lost WW1 after 1918 but it would have been at the cost of many more allied lives, the armistice was welcomed by both sides as an end to the fighting but don't imagine that there was no will left to fight in Germany. I'd rather not do "what ifs" but I think it wouldn't be too hard to accept that the german military extablishment would not have agreed to an armistice if they knew what the terms of Versailles would have been.

A respectable peace treaty that didn't try to turn a great power into a weak one would probably have been more effective for peace than Versailles. The Nazies were able to make use of the stab in the back myth because Germany was treated so harshly after the armistice and the German populace obviously thought they were given an undeservedly bad deal.

As for the German attitude in WW2, I think that many Germans probably accepted that the war was lost by the end of 1943, with it's tremendous defeats by the USSR as well as the vast increase in bombing from the Allied powers. The various German memoirs I've read seem to show rather a surprise that they weren't able to conclude a peace with Britain after the fall of France and would have liked to conclude a peace with the western powers if it allowed them to concentrate their effort against the soviets. The assassination attempt against hitler (I refer to the one in 1944) was an attempt to bring about a German government with which the allies would have been satisfied to conclude peace with.
The rise of the German idea of military superiority seems to only have occured during and after the Franco-Prussian war. By all accounts the Germans expected the French to invade Germany in that war which it didn't due primarily to the inefficiecy within the French mobilization system which gave the German nations a numerical superiority which detered the French invasion of Germany and allowed a German invasion of France. Only after the German victory in 1871 did they seem to think that the military solution would always result favorabley to them. Once again I think that a peace treaty that didn't seek to punish Germany so harshly would have allowed Germans to accept that they were defeated instead of being led to believe that their state of affairs was a result of a stab in the back.

Also, shouldn't this thread be in the monastery?