From the Dept. of We Thought it Was a Good Idea at the Time (Div. of Unintended Consequences):
One Hundred years ago today the Treaty of Versailles was signed. It formally ended the Great War, at least against Germany (there wasn’t an Austria-Hungary left by that time; in any event a separate treaty was signed to end its war). By one of history’s gentler ironies, it was signed five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip.
A recent thorough treatment of the circus that came of the Paris Peace Conference is Paris 1919.
The general terms of the treaty were fairly onerous, but in truth, not more than any country ought to expect which intentionally precipitated a general war in Europe and then so far forgot itself as to lose. Huge loss of territory? Yup, that happens. [N.b. The world seems to have forgot that point in connection with the efforts of Islam to extinguish the state of Israel. The land belongs to Israel by right of conquest. Full stop; end of inquiry.] Have to confess yourself a bad boy? That too. Pay up for all the destruction you caused in other folks’ back yards? Folks are funny that way, y’know. Give up your implements of destruction? Do you think we’re suckers or what?
[To get an idea of what Germany was up to behind the lines, the two books to read are The Englishman’s Daughter and The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I; the Germans even stole the doorknobs for the brass. All the way down to the doorknobs, fer cryin’ out loud. And they wondered they were expected to buy new.]
[To get an idea of what Germany was up to in the U.S., even before April, 1917, the book to read is The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice.]
So yeah, Germany took it in the shorts. But they had it coming.
The problem turned out to be that they didn’t understand they had it coming, because they were never forced to confess themselves beaten. They signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, not a surrender. Their army marched home under arms. But Germany was well and truly beaten. The Allies kept up the blockade of Germany all the way up until the treaty was signed. Several tens of thousands of German civilians died during those months, of starvation. Countries which are not beaten don’t get done that way.
But on the surface, there was a fundamental mismatch between the end of the war and the terms of the peace.
Looking below the surface, in a very real sense Germany had no choice but to sign the treaty. But the German people didn’t see it that way. Their leaders told them that they didn’t lose the war but were “stabbed in the back,” and the Treaty of Versailles wasn’t what they had coming to them, but rather a sell-out. Lies, all of it, peddled by mountebanks after no more than power. The German people enthusiastically embraced the cynics who sold them that bill of goods, and marched off to do it all over again.
Needless to say, a generation later the Allies didn’t repeat the same mistakes. We saw to it that in large areas there wasn’t much more left than would throw a shadow. We so thoroughly cured Germany of militaristic aggression that today their air force is more or less grounded and their navy rusted to its moorings.
Of course the big alt-historical question is, had the Allies pursued the Kaiser’s disintegrating army all the way back into Germany, had we insisted on a surrender, would German society have responded more along the lines that it did in 1945?
I’m not so sure it would have, in truth. I don’t think one may doubt that, had German cities and towns been overrun with the detritus of a destroyed army, had German civilians seen with their own eyes the ragged, half-starved, terrified survivors of units which had abandoned their weapons in the mad scramble to do something, anything to get as far from the killing zones as possible; had they seen the endless columns of well-fed, warmly clothed Americans marching across their squares and their farms, the National Socialists and the various nationalistic right-wing parties would have had a much tougher sell than was the actual case. But as they say in the military: The enemy gets a vote.
How would German society have responded to crushing defeat in 1918/19? I don’t think we can ignore the reality that a good part of why German inner resistance crumbled so completely in 1945 was precisely the fact that it was the second lost war in a generation. After the first one there would be a more-or-less natural human tendency to think in terms of, “Well, next time we’ll know what to do; next time we’ll get it right.”
What I very much do not think is that the Treaty of Versailles, imposed after a genuine, unmistakable German defeat, would have somehow prevented the birth of National Socialism in Germany. That movement flourished in the manure of the Dolchstoßlegende, it is true. But the seed sprouted independently. Let us not forget that fascism first came to prominence and power in Italy, which was on the winning side in the war after all, and which benefitted enormously at Austria-Hungary’s expense at the peace table. It wasn’t a loser’s movement, in other words.
The nationalistic strain had been present for generations, ever since (at least) the Napoleonic invasions (see, e.g., “Frühlingsgruß an das Vaterland,” by Max von Schenkendorf in 1814, and later set to pretty dramatically rousing music). And by 1914 the socialists had long been the largest single party represented in the Imperial Reichstag. There is exactly zero reason to suppose that, looking south over the Alps, it would have occurred to no one to combine those two strains.
Would National Socialism have grown as powerful as it did, though? I think not. The German officer corps retained so much of its influence in German society largely as a result of its pretense that the Army had not lost the war. And it was the Nazis’ successfully winning over the officer corps that ensured them the backing of the conservative element in society. In this connection it is very much apropos to remind Gentle Reader that National Socialism began and remained very much a left-wing, radical political movement. The conservative elements in German society, and especially the officers, originally wanted nothing to do with the Nazis; but when the Army came over, it became sortable–hoffähig in German.
William Shirer tells the story very well of Hitler’s testimony at the court-martial of three or four junior officers who were being tried on charges of having disseminated, contrary to regulations, Nazi Party propaganda among their troops. Hitler testified for the prosecution, and it was his assurance to the senior command that his movement posed no threat to their position in society that won them over. The liquidation of the SA as an independent power center on June 30, 1934, was another step in that process; Ernst Röhm very much intended for the SA to be a fully-functional army beside (and of course, eventually supplanting) the Reichswehr. [Side note: Hitler had no intention of keeping his end of that bargain, and didn’t. Just like a parasitic wasp eventually sucks dry its host, Hitler progressively emasculated the officer corps, to the extent that they watched supinely as one of their own was baselessly smeared as a sexual pervert and cashiered in 1938.]
Now consider what if everybody and his cousin knew jolly good and well that the generals had lost the last war? What if they were as discredited in 1918-19 as they were in 1945? Who would have brought over the wide swathe of German society that wanted nothing more than a return to the stabilities and certainties of the Kaiser’s empire? The National Socialists would not have enjoyed the mis-branding which support by the Army permitted them to indulge.
So no, I don’t think the National Socialists would have come to power had Germany been physically and undeniably confronted with the fact of its defeat in 1918.
In terms of what it accomplished, the Treaty of Versailles must be said to have turned out to be one of history’s larger misconceptions. The Allies weren’t willing to fight a total war to a total war’s finish, but they wanted to, and did, impose a peace that could only last if built upon the foundation of that degree of victory.
But it seemed like a good idea at the time.
By way of pettifogging detail . . . Germany’s final payment on its (by then heavily discounted) World War I reparations was made on . . . October 3, 2010. And to close the circle with another irony: October 3 is Reunification Day in Germany, celebrating the final liquidation, in 1990, of the 45 years’ separation that they got to enjoy in consequence of their having believed themselves unbeaten in 1918.
