Could it be argued that the Treaty of Versailles was the most significant cause leading to WW2?

No foreign soldier set foot on Germany.

The Germans essentially refused to pay the reparations and nobody did shit.

The 100,000 man army was never enforced.

The people here would rather have you dead than anything else, Hans.

It's proof when you half-ass something. The Allies should've either been lenient with the newly democratic Weimar Republic or gone full-out repressive. What Versailles turned out was just enough to make the Germans asspained, but not enough to restrain them from future aggression.

Personally, this is what I would've dictated:

- The Kaiser and the other German royals were banned indefinitely
- Their property was to be seized to pay for the damages to Belgium and northern France
- The Rhineland would be occupied for only 10 years to ensure German good behavior but its resources and industry benefit the German nation. The only money that goes to the Allies is to pay for the upkeep of the occupational forces.
- No war blame clause
- Reparations within reasonable means over an extended period of time. Meanwhile the Allies (particularly the US) work to help rebuild the European economies
- Limit naval and air strength but retain a modest-sized army to deal with the Soviets
- Allied occupation over ALL of Germany and not that sliver in the west

You were taught apologist revisionism (like many unfortunately)

It's not hard to understand how lenient Versailles was.
Even without talking about how reparations went unenforced, just compare how Versailles treated German sovereignty (country remain united, one tiny region occupied for 10 years) to how post WW2 peace treated it (country divided in two parts, entirety of the country occupied for 70 years and counting)

The issue is that it went too far to be enforced with just an armistace, if you look at how the Austrian and ottoman empires were completely dismantled (and the Russian empire was not reassembled) but the German empire was left intact, but insulted and given an outrageous reparations bill it raises the question. Could ww2 have been avoided if Germany was broken up into a few different countries.

I agree with the return of Alsace-Lorraine and Schleswig-Holstein back to France and Denmark, but Danzig and the Polish Corridor caused a clusterfuck. What should've happened is that the eastern parts of Prussia should've been given to Poland so that it has a seacoast and port, but there isn't an enclave separating East Prussia from greater Germany.

I agree. The Polish Corridor is what ultimately led to the Second World War. I don't know exactly how you would give parts of Eastern Prussia to Poland without the Germans getting annoyed much like Alsace-Lorraine though...

Gradual population transfer over the course of 20-30 years; inhabitants have to move out or choose Polish citizenship with guarantees for their rights to be respected and enforced.

It's better to keep Germany intact instead of Prussia cut off by the corridor. Germany was lucky to be clipped and not severely partitioned after WWI.

Good point although i still don't see how Hitler wouldn't use that as an excuse eventually to invade, like he did with the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Maybe Poland would take the historical place of Czechoslovakia.

Same here, Cambridge teacher said those things as well about the Treaty being too harsh and it was the main motivation for Hitler to caused WW2. Redpill me more guys.

Nope, you're wrong.
Moron.

Except Poland would be willing to fight unlike Czechoslovakia. Without access to the tanks and other equipment from the Skoda Works, the Germans would suffer badly in an invasion of Poland.

I agree with You're a bit on the slow side though.

But they did invade? and Poland got slaughtered?

I was actually implying that YOU are slow

Only AFTER Germany took over Czechoslovakia and its arsenal of tanks from Skoda. German tanks at the time were inferior to what Skoda produced. If Germany fought Poland straight-up without the Sudetenland takeover, there'd be enough blood shed that even if the Germans win, it'll give encouragement to France and other Europeans to jump in.

>No foreign soldier set foot on Germany
Are you stupid? The French and Belgians literally invaded the fucking Ruhr in the 20's because Germans refused to pay denbts.

Would occupation really work out though? I mean, with the Cold War, part of the stability of 2-state Germany was due to both sides investing heavily in rebuilding their parts to show how successful their ideology was and by mass producing propaganda against each other, which occupied the mind of their citizens more than the fact they were occupied by a foreign force.
Who would have been in charged of the occupation? A joint coalition by France and England? What's from stopping one of them from simply trying to extend their reach to control more of Germany, or allowing their part to grow in-order so they can aid them in the future? What would have happened if Communism gain traction under absolute occupied Germany as it did in Eastern Europe and Russia, and ally themselves up with them to usurp their occupiers?

I think this is a short-sighted response. Had complete occupation been the case I don't think the Germans would've gave up that easily

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_occupation_of_the_Rhineland

It was only a small part of Germany, but foreign soldiers DID set foot and garrisoned there.

Occupation worked for Napoleonic France. Give Weimar politicians and society time to reform themselves as a democratic and peaceful society that can act as a bulwark against the Soviets. The Allies withdraw because they now have Germany as a partner on the continent instead of a pariah.

It would have prevented the war that just exhausted the entirety of Europe to this day.

Basically if you want to squash a nation you got to go all out or they'll come back pissed right the fuck off.

As late as 1928, the Nazis only had 2% of the vote. The economy was growing in 1924-1929, as a result of the Locarno treaties international tensions were decreasing. It was the Great Depression that really fucked things up. Even then, if the Western powers had actually challenged Hitler over shit like the reoccupation of the Rhineland, war (or at least as long and devastating a war as actually occurred) could have been avoided.

German revisionism was more based on the fact that were butthurt about losing the war then the actual specific provisions of the Versailles treaty.

What would examples of this be? Prussia, Bavaria, and Savoy?

There was a reason Germany was kept together and the other was not. Germans were one nation.

Mate, the Treaty of Versailles is the most important event of the 20th century, if not that then when Princep didnt realize it was just a prank bro

No. It's an annoying meme made up by the same people who say that everyone was at fault for starting WW1.

>b-but everyone bullied poor Germany
Of course.

>When on 12 July 1922, Germany demanded a moratorium on reparation payments, tension developed between the French government of Raymond Poincaré and the Coalition government of David Lloyd George. The British Labour Party demanded peace and denounced Lloyd George as a troublemaker. It saw Germany as the martyr of the postwar period and France as vengeful and the principal threat to peace in Europe.

>Daves Plan
>The Ruhr area was to be evacuated by foreign troops
>Reparation payments would begin at one billion marks the first year, increasing annually to two and a half billion marks after five years
>The sources for the reparation money would include transportation, excise, and customs taxes
>Germany would be loaned 800 million marks, chiefly from the USA and Britain
So evil.

>The Young Plan reduced further payments by about 20 percent. Although the theoretical total was 112 billion Gold Marks, equivalent to US $8 billion in 1929 (US$ 110 billion in 2016) over a period of 59 years[citation needed], which would end in 1988, few expected the plan to last for much more than a decade.[1]

>Great Depression
>Under such circumstances, U.S. President Herbert Hoover issued a public statement that proposed a one-year moratorium on the payments. He managed to assemble support for the moratorium from 15 nations by July 1931. But the adoption of the moratorium did little to slow economic decline in Europe.
>However, the system had collapsed, and Germany did not resume payments. Once the National Socialist government consolidated power, the debt was repudiated and Germany made no further payments. By 1933, Germany had made World War I reparations of only one eighth of the sum required under the Treaty of Versailles, and owing to the repudiated American loans the United States in effect paid "reparations" to Germany.

Unironically this.

And let's not forget about this:

>Locarno Treaties
>Locarno divided borders in Europe into two categories: western, which were guaranteed by Locarno treaties, and eastern borders of Germany with Poland, which were open for revision, thus leading to Germany's renewed claims to the German-populated Free City of Danzig and mixed ethnic Polish territories approved by the League of Nations including the Polish Corridor, and Upper Silesia.[2][3][4][5][6]

For stormfags and other idiots history of Germany looks like this:

1914-1918 - WW1
1919-1933 - HYPERINFLATION, SUFFERING, PROSTITUTION, DEGENERACY, POVERTY, JEWS CONTROLLING EVERYTHING, EVIL ALLIES BULLYING GERMANY, COMMUNIST UPRISINGS
1933 - Fuck yeah, Hitler saved Germany!

A lot of things happened during the Weimar period.

>making a harsh peace treaty with an enemy army that still occupies a portion of your country

They were practically begging for the stab in the back myth to happen. Should have pushed their shit in to Berlin and then start peace negotiations. I mean they went through the trouble of invading and occupying Germany AFTER the war, so why not do it during the war?

Holy shit, this. Germay should've been annexed or split up into multiple countries like it was before Bismarck. A unified German state is the biggest threat to Europe and the world in general.

It can be argued the the Treaty of Versailles was either

A) Not hard enough on Germany and should have imposed much stricter terms.

Or

B) The Treaty of Versailles was too harsh and a post war plan like that of Marshall plan would have been far more useful.

But in short yes, the Treaty of Versailles was one of the more significant causes of the Second world war.

Attempting that would be a waste of time. Times had changed and a German national consciousness existed. They were not Austria, the Ottomans or Russia.

>But in short yes, the Treaty of Versailles was one of the more significant causes of the Second world war.

Not specifically Versailles, but the German analpain about having lost WW1 (which was left unchallenged by the lenient Versailles)

Germany as a country had existed for less than 50 years
It would have been very to dismantle it

No, it wouldn't. Installing puppet governments in those countries and giving them huge loans to have leverage over their economies is not a waste of time if that means preventing a world war from happening.

>The franco-prussian war treaty as harsh

lmao what type of revisionist bullshit is this? The Prussians occupied the country and could have annexed the whole of France if they wanted to, but decided to be lenient and took only two small provinces to help pay for the cost of the invasion and formation of the German state (which the French had for centuries done everything they could to prevent). Reparations are a bitch, aren't they frogs?

I bet you think the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was too harsh on the mexicans too.

You are completely forgetting about how Poland got invaded by the Soviets too. Even with the Germans using shitty tanks Poland was doomed regardless.

>A unified German state is the biggest threat to Europe and the world in general.

That's not how you spell Russia, Satan.

>The Prussians occupied the country and could have annexed the whole of France if they wanted to

How retarded are you?
The Prussians were absolutly frightened by the few partisans they faced in the small areas of Northern France they occupied (It's that trauma that caused the Rape of Belgium during WW1 btw)
There is no way they could have occupied the whole country, let alone annex it

The fact you even think it's possible to annex a major country with a different culture just because you won a (not even total) war proves you understand nothing about history and should go back to R*ddit

You need to be careful of the memesters here, there is no educational requirement to posting on Veeky Forums and some people just spout opinions instead of fact.

On one hand, The figure given (something like over 30 billion USD) was artificually inflated and it was never intended for Germany to pay all of it. The total was divided up into bonds, of which Germany only had to pay something like 2/3rds of. This was done to appeal to the public abroad to make it seem harsh - which it still was.

It is true that for some time Germany shuffled around about paying jack shit, although by the 1930s they had paid back about 5 billion USD worth of their debt.

The issue is their industrial capacity and manpower were both wrecked, sanctions such as removing the Saar region from german control only gimped it even further. Could they have paid back the reparations? Yes, but their economy would have been squeezed even tighter during a time of crisis. Keynes argued that they could not have been able to pay the reparations back - I argue they could, it just would have been a lot more legitimate hardship and economic stress.

Was it the only contributor to WW2? Nope. Was it a major one? Absolutely.

Good post here. Moreover, it represented a conflict of interest at the treaty of versailles between Clemenceau and Wilson. Wilson did not want any nation to fully absorb the blame of the war, and felt that indemnities were an archaic remnant of wars fought in the past that did nothing except saddle the nations they were incurred on with debt.
Clemenceau, who I tend to agree more with, wanted to destroy Germany as a united state completely. This was to make sure that Germany would never have the power to destroy Europe or threaten France again, as they had done in the Franco-Prussian War, and in the Great War. Clemenceau wanted areas rich with raw mining materials taken away, the Rhineland demilitarized, a larger indemnity than what was given, many of Germany's important ports given to other countries. If Wilson was not involved, the resulting treaty would have been draconian, if not much more effective.
So, in the end, what passed was treaty that left just enough wiggle room for a nationalism to exploit the unhappy people of a floundering, major European country.

Hi, I just want you to know i'm OP of and I wrote "t.fag" because you guys are faggots and your mindset is shit. I guess it flew over your heads because you get off of buzzwords and ludicrous fantasies of German annexation, genocide, etc.

This board will always remain shit.

This post is totally wrong. Wilson had not no objection to reparations in principal. He was opposed to punitive indemnities, but the reparations in Versailles were not that. They were meant to pay for damages Germany had caused. Wilson was fine with this. In fact Wilson and Clemenceau basically agreed entirely on reparations (not on other issues, obviously).

It was actually the British who wanted higher reparations, not the French, because they wanted to include pensions for soldiers in the costs of the war that Germany would be expected to pay, while the French just wanted payment to repair material damage (which was unacceptable to the British because it would mean all the money going to France and Belgium and basically nothing for them).