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Don’t Blame Versailles
Like all peace treaties, the Treaty of Versailles had its imperfections, although, as historian Victor Davis Hanson has explained, the treaty was “far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917—or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War” (emphasis mine throughout).
Perhaps Versailles was a little too demanding on some points, but it was no harsher than peace accords imposed by Germany on France and Russia—and, after all, Germany had caused a conflict that ultimately snuffed out 10 million people!
“What ultimately led to World War ii,” explained Hanson, “was neither the Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.”
What was the true cause of World War ii?
If the Treaty of Versailles really was why “the Second World War had to follow the first,” as Spiegel put it, it would be logical that World War ii only became inevitable after Versailles, and, realistically, after years of built-up resentment and anger over its “unfair” and “harsh” stipulations. How then do revisionist historians explain the facts showing Germany began planning World War ii toward the end of World War i—before the Treaty of Versailles even existed?
“Nazism, the fascist phase of Pan-Germanism, was initiated in Germany immediately after the armistice of 1918 by direct instigation of the German General Staff,” explained Michael Sayers and Albert E. Khan in The Plot Against Peace (1945). The Treaty of Versailles wasn’t signed until June 1919; the seeds of Nazism were sown in Germany after the armistice in 1918.
So the spirit of Nazism, which ultimately transformed Europe into a cauldron of death during the Second World War, was operating inside Germany before the Treaty of Versailles existed. Historical evidence shows that Germany was even preparing physically for World War ii—developing new weapons and restocking armaments—as early as 1921, long before Versailles’ “harsh” and “humiliating” stipulations had the chance to take full effect.
The logic is undeniable: The spirit of Nazism that caused World War ii was not born of animosity among Germans toward the Treaty of Versailles!
Select leaders in Germany were planning World War ii before the First World War even ended. Many in Germany did not accept World War i as a defeat. The truth is, these people exploited the idea that the Treaty of Versailles was “harsh” and “humiliating” as a vehicle to advance the Nazi agenda to launch World War ii. Nazism thrived in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s when the Nazi propaganda machine fomented German pride and humiliation over the defeat, and blamed the country’s postwar woes on the Allied impositions of Versailles.
“The Treaty of Versailles created a political climate in Germany in which the right [Nazism] put all the blame on everything that went sour onto the treaty and the lost war,” explained prominent German historian Wolfgang Mommsen. “And that created this climate in which many people then began to think one had to fight the war once again.”
The Versailles Treaty was tough, and it created some hardship in Germany. But it was not the cause of World War ii. The cause of World War ii was the pervasive, war-mongering spirit of Nazism, injected into Germany before Versailles, which used Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party as its mouthpiece and “sold the Second World War to the Germans as righting the wrongs of Versailles” (ibid.).
Ridiculing the Treaty of Versailles as “harsh,” “humiliating” and unfair was a Nazi tactic designed to provoke frustration and hostility among Germans toward America, Britain and France. It was a gigantic lie by which the Nazi propaganda machine groomed the minds of Germans for World War ii. Perhaps some Germans went to war thinking they were remedying what they saw as the mistakes made in the Treaty of Versailles, that they were fighting to reclaim the territory they had been forced to cede, particularly in Eastern Europe.
Not Hitler. His goal was to establish the Third Reich over all of Poland, all of France, all of the Balkans, all of Europe—including Britain—and ultimately the entire world! His goal was to purge Germany, then the human race, of the Jews.
Hitler didn’t care about righting the supposed wrongs of Versailles. He was a genocidal maniac gunning for world domination!
The Holy Roman Empire
Although the immediate cause of World War ii was German Nazism, led by the genocidal mass-murderer Adolf Hitler, there was a more fundamental reason for the war. As Sayers and Khan observed, “[A]lmost all the peculiar features of Hitler’s regime, its unbridled aggressiveness, its inordinate brutality, its homicidal racial chauvinism, have been characteristic of past political manifestations of the Pan-German secret ruling combine of Junkerism, Prussian militarism and economic feudalism.”
There is another common name for Germany’s long-standing quest for global domination: It’s called the Holy Roman Empire!Put simply, World War ii was a short and vicious eruption of what historians admit is a long-held German goal for continental subjugation—and world dominance.
That is why the growing proclivity to blame World War ii on the Treaty of Versailles, and on the Allied powers, is so dangerous: It classifies the Second World War as a historical aberration, caused by unique political and economic conditions, that will never be repeated. The truth is, World War ii was actually a violent eruption of Germany’s enduring ambition for global domination—an ambition that remains rooted in the German national character today!
) was an unknown entity in 1948 and in typical British fashion and they may have wanted to hedge their bets.
