VERSAILLES: THE VERDICT
Acknowledgements
Terms: asiatimes.com Leaders: en.wikipedia.org Hitler: ndtv.com Kaiser: ecampusontario. press books.pub Rhineland: www.uen.org
WW1-
It has to be said that the Versailles peace agreement – one of the most controversial armistice treaties in history – clearly failed, in fact, to keep the peace. Just twenty years later the world was once again engulfed in a conflict which -
As far as the Allies were concerned, matters were not helped by the lack of agreement between the three men who were very largely responsible for drawing up the terms. This was particularly the case over the payment of reparations (the amount of money to be paid by Germany by way of compensation, and the length of time over which it should be paid.) The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau argued, understandably, that Germany had seen fit “to gratify her lust for tyranny by resort to war”. She must now pay the price. The payment of reparations for wrongs inflicted was “the essence of justice”. Lloyd George, the British premier, fearing that Germany, clearly facing an economic crisis, might throw in its lot with Bolshevik Russia, adopted a less vengeful approach, whilst the American President, Woodrow Wilson, as one would expect, called for extreme leniency. It was eventually agreed for reparations to be set at £6.6 billion. This was appreciably lower than earlier figures proposed (£44 billion at one point!), but, according to British economist John Maynard Keynes, writing at this time, any more than £3 billion would bring “general disorder and unrest”, and a depth of inflation that could result in the overthrow of the entire capitalist system. (The Great Depression began in October 1929!) As quoted earlier from T.E. Lawrence’s work The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, “When the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took over victory to re-
Furthermore, and ironically, the territorial settlement placed Germany in a stronger position in any future conflict. The country was left virtually intact; had a population almost double that of France, plus a large presence in Czechoslovakia and Austria ; and, given the reduction in size of countries in eastern Europe (and the diverse nature of their people), faced no powerful neighbour other than France itself. Furthermore, there was no longer the prospect of a war on two fronts. By then Bolshevik Russia was clearly seen as an enemy by the Western democracies. Europe was now less stable than it was in 1914.
But perhaps the most serious failing of the Versailles Treaty was the lack of determination to enforce it. There was one occasion when French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial area of the Ruhr (January 1923 to August 1925), because Germany fell behind in its reparation payments, but that was about the sum of it. Wilson’s ambitious League of Nations was up and running, and guaranteed each member’s independence and territorial integrity, but the United States decided not to join it; Germany withdrew from it in October 1933, and Russia did not become a member until September 1934! In any case, it was little more than a talking shop, it had no teeth. In this “new world order
”, decisions had to be unanimous, and that was a most unlikely scenario. Nor, after the trauma of war and the luxury of peace, was any country anxious to take up arms for what were seen, individually, as reasonable infringements. In March 1936 the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, having already started building tanks, battleships and aircraft, rearmed the Rhineland and, two years later, formed a union (an Anchluss) with Austria. All three acts were expressly forbidden by the treaty, but no action was taken. Appeasement ruled the day.
The Treaty of Versailles, of course – as noted above – played a vital part in fuelling German nationalism and bringing about the Second World War. It was seen as “an indelible stain on national honour”, particularly as the public were informed by General von Hindenburg, no less, that the German army had not been defeated in the field, but had been “stabbed in the back”, be it by social democratic politicians anxious to seize power, or by an international Jewish conspiracy. But another factor was also at work. Since the formation of the German Empire in 1871, for example (following the humiliating defeat of the French army), the German people had constantly been fed with the need for Germany to take its rightful place among the great nations of the world. When Kaiser Wilhelm II (pictured here), came to power in June 1888, he embarked upon his aggressive “New Course”, a movement which included a build up of military strength (particularly within the navy), plus a campaign specifically aimed at giving a hefty boost to Germany’s growing status as a world power. When, in the 1920s, Hitler began his campaign to reassert the authority of the German state, he gained much from this ground swell of patriotic support, gradually but firmly built up over some fifty years. It wasn’t all down to the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
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