Chapter 1: From One War To Another, pp. 7-16
The peace settlement of 1919 was complicated by a series of compromises primarily among the victors and secondarily between the victors and the defeated. Four major factors in the situation affected these compromises. First, the unanticipated suddenness of the German defeat -- coming a year earlier than expected, after German victories over the Allies in the East, Southeast, and South Europe, and before the Allies had invaded Germany herself -- meant that there were substantial limits on the choices of the victors and no clear recognition of total military defeat in Germany....
This same set of circumstances, the early and unanticipated German defeat, left the people of that country dazed by events. A succession of great victories had led the Germans to anticipate possible total victory; the bitter, drawn-out fighting and the deprivations imposed on Germany's home front had led some Germans in the latter part of the war to fear or to hope for a compromise of some sort; but almost no one expected a total defeat. The decision of Germany's military leaders to call for an end to the fighting in September of 1918 rather than risk a collapse at the front meant that the guns stopped firing when the war maps still showed German troops deep inside the territory of Germany's enemies.
The shock of being told that the war was lost almost immediately produced a collapse of the German home front and the disappearance of its dynasties and institutions; and this in turn made the country practically defenseless. ...[This collapse] would later be transposed ... with the defeat at the front which had actually preceded and caused it. The stab-in-the-back legend thus created -- the false claim that action at home had caused defeat in battle -- would have a large number of fateful effects....
[But] the immediate result of the of the German military collapse would be that the victors became more concerned that there should be a government of some sort in Germany to accept the terms of peace than about possible German rejection of whatever was proposed.... The second major factor at work in the peace settlement was the desperate fear of German might. The very fact that it had taken most of the world to crush Germany and her allies and then only in a long, bitter, and costly struggle, with the Allied defeat averted by the narrowest of margins, suggested that the German state at the center of the continent, newly formed less than half a century earlier, was extraordinarily dangerous to the welfare, even existence, of others....
...Such measures [to limit German power] were, however, halted short of eliminating [the German experiment of nationhood] by a fundamental assumption and principal of the peacemakers, the third of the conditioning elements of the peace settlement. This was the belief that Europe should be organized on the principle of nationality, and that violations of this principle had had a large part in bringing on the war.... The first and by far most important [result of this principle] was that there would continue to be a German state.... The continued existence of a German state, however truncated or restricted, was taken for granted by all.
...The fourth major factor conditioning the peace settlement was the sense shared in some way by all alike that the war had changed the world, and that these changes had to be accommodated to the national interests of the victors...and combined with some new machinery to try to prevent any recurrence of the disaster they had all been through. ...These idealistic aspirations...were almost certain to be shattered by the other terms of any peace settlement. As the human and material costs of the war had mounted, only the hopes for a better world to follow had sustained much of the enormous effort required of the participants. But the very escalation of sacrifice supported by rising expectations of a new and improved world in the post-war era practically guaranteed disillusionment. How could a world in which over thirty million people had lost their lives or their health in combat, in which millions had been uprooted, and in which the ingenuity of advanced industrial societies had for years concentrated on the maximum destruction of the material resources of mankind, be so much improved over the by then shadowy pre-war world, now surrounded with a halo of memory conferred by the intervening horrors?
....The economic provisions of the treaties were drawn to impose on the defeated all of the was costs of Belgium together with those costs of the war of the other allies which were still to come, primarily the reconstruction of damage caused by the war and the payments to survivors of those killed in conflict. These impositions were called "reparations" to distinguish them from the punitive payments, usually called "indemnities," exacted by the victor from the vanquished after prior wars....
Since the economics of Germany's European enemies had been damaged much more by the war than [Germany's] own, this arrangement, if implemented, would have operated at least to some extent to off-set the relative strengthening of the German economy as a result of the war. But this was not to be.
The terms of the peace settlement were attacked vehemently by the Germans at the time and subsequently, and these attacks came to coincide with the general disillusionment about the new world which had emerged from the war and the peace among the former allies. There was a popular delusion, widespread at the time, sedulously fostered in the 1920s and 1930s by German propaganda, generally believed then and remaining the staple pablum of history textbooks today, that Germany had been most terribly crushed by the peace settlement, that all manner of horrendous things had been done to her, and that a wide variety of onerous burdens and restrictions imposed on her by the peace had weakened her into the indefinite future.
On the basis of this view, a whole series of modifications was made in the settlement, all without exception in favor of Germany. The occupation was ended earlier than the peace treaty indicated, the commissions to supervise disarmament were withdrawn, the reparations payments were reduced and eventually canceled, and the trials of war criminals were left to the Germans with predictable results, to mention some of the most significant changes made. If at the end of this process Germany -- a bare quarter of a century after the armament of 1918 -- controlled most of Europe and had come within a hair's breadth of conquering the globe, there was obviously something wrong about the picture generally accepted then and later.
The adoption of the national principle as the basis for the peace settlement meant that the most recently created European major power, Germany, would survive the war, her population in Europe only second to Russia's and her industrial and economic potential less affected than that of her European enemies, since it had been on the back of their...economies that the war had been fought out. Though weakened by the war, Germany had been weakened less than her European enemies and she had thus emerged relatively stronger potentially in 1919 than she had been in 1913.
....The very portion of the peace treaty that all Germans found most obnoxious, the revival of Poland, protected Germany from her potentially most powerful and dangerous adversary, Russia. The various arguments over the details of the new boundaries between Hungary and Romania, between Poland and Czechoslovakia, between Bulgaria and Greece, between Austria and Yugoslavia, all only underline two facts of extreme importance: that Germany was now actually or potentially infinitely more powerful than any of her eastern and Southeastern European neighbors, and that there was practically no likelihood of those neighbors joining together against Germany.
The modifications introduced into the peace settlement reinforced rather than mitigated the stronger relative position of Germany. The prime example of this was the reparations question. The Germans shook off the reparations payments by simple refusal to pay, by destroying their own currency -- in part to demonstrate inability to pay -- and by more than off-setting what payments were made through borrowing abroad, followed by repudiation of most of these loans in the 1930s.
The process and the international public discussion of it fed an illusion
of fateful significance. Because Germany did not pay reparations, it came
to be widely believed that no or almost no reparations were paid at all.
This, of course, is nonsense. All the reparations were paid: the devastated
towns were rebuilt, the orchards replanted, the [ore] mines pumped out
and all the pensions to survivors were paid (with some still being paid).
The bill was simply shifted to other shoulders, primarily the very countries
that had seen their economies suffer most from the war. This shifting of
the burden of repair costs from the less damaged German economy to the
more damaged economies of others thus served to redouble rather than off-set
the impact of the war itself. Only when a realistic perspective is restored
to an examination of the peace settlement, its impact, and its modifications,
can one begin to understand how a period of supposed German enfeeblement
could culminate with less than two decades in a Europe, even a world, again
terrified of German might.
Weinberg is the author of numerous books and articles on the origins and course of World War II including "Germany, Hitler and World War II" and a prize-winning two volume study of "The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany". Since 1974 he has been the William Reand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill.
A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II
Cambridge University Press, 1994
ISBN 0-521-55879-4 (paperback, 1178p)