The Versailles Treaty And World War Two - Essay Example

The Versailles Treaty And World War Two History challenges the logician in us all. It is a most basic human faculty to attempt to assign reasons for the occurrence of events. This stems from the innate human desire to live in a world based upon order and not chaos. If a leader is shot, it is because an assassin wanted him/her dead. If a war breaks out, one nation, in Clausewitzian fashion, seeks to satiate its needs with a politics “by other means.” Whether it is greed, power, envy, fear, or conquest, the aggressor nation has a reason(s) to engage in war, even if that reason is later deemed to have been illegitimate or unwarranted. Wars, though they sometimes appear otherwise, occur as a result of concrete human decisions and actions. As the Italian thinker and philosopher of History Benedetto Croce framed it, there is but a question of distinguishing proximate causes from the more profound and fundamental ones (1989, pp. 91-100). The First World War, for example, in the schoolboy version, was provoked by a Serbian anarchist who took it upon himself to murder an Austrian Duke while the latter rode through the streets of Sarajevo. Admittedly, an historian could trace the events that followed the assassination: the spread of news of the event, the mutual recriminations among the powers, the threats, the saber-rattling, and, finally, the outbreak of hostilities such that the catalyst would be construed as having been the hand of the Serbian assassin himself. The skeptic, however, could object to this reasoning by pointing to the fact that all the powers which took part in the First World War, prior to the murder of the Austrian Archduke, already boasted enormous standing armies, bloated military budgets, mutual defense pacts, and rampant jingoism. As such this same skeptic might then state that it is the height of naiveté, given all those precursors, for a person to really believe that the Serbian “caused” the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. More likely, all the bellicose elements pre-existed; they merely sat patiently, waiting for some casus belli. To paraphrase the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, they were “war-elements in search of an excuse.” The history of World War Two involves similar intrigue regarding its causes. Very often historians and commentators have pointed to the failures of the Treaty of Versailles when describing the roots of this second great conflict. The approximate causes related to Hitler invading Poland and the Appeasement policies of the Allies. But the “big” causes often are attributed to the 1919 Treaty. It is the argument here that the failure of the Treaty of Versailles to truly resolve the issues underlying the First World War, not to mention the fact that it created added tensions, can be directly tied to the outbreak of the Second World War. There are certain restrictions to this claim. The Treaty was after all a document, thus its failure or success must be seen as relating to the human factors involved in its creation, enforcement, and eventual abandonment. This should, however, not detract from the main point to be made: the Versailles Treaty’s terms and conditions were structurally flawed, made excessively punitive demands on Germany, differed from that which was promised by the Armistice, shamelessly sought to cater to the rapacity and longing for vengeance of the victors (particularly France), countermanded the promises made by the Allies to Italy, and ultimately did little more than to provide Hitler with an excellent talking point and ensure the outbreak of another war. It is difficult today to reconstruct the sense of idealism and elation surrounding Wilson’s role and aims in the drafting of the Treaty. Even though the war had grinded on for four years, its end signaled a new era of peace, international cooperation, and friendship among the peoples of the Earth. Upon returning to America from the Peace Conference in July of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the treaty was a deed derived from the “hand of God…It was of this time that we dreamed at our birth. America in truth shall show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else” (Black 2003, p. 114). That path led to Wilson’s famous “14 Points,” or so he thought. The sense of idealism supposedly so much a part of the spirit of Versailles (though perhaps not of its actual stipulations) was not limited to Wilson. In a speech he gave in 1930, George Clemenceau’s personal secretary Jean Martet said the following: …M. Clemenceau, who had through his father come under the influence of the great ideologists of the romantic school, and had never, in spite of all the vicissitudes of life, rid himself of it, held ideas in high honour. Now if this War more than any other was a war of brutal, frightful force, this peace, likewise more than any other, was a peace of ideas. Victors have always wanted their peace to endure, but 1919, for the first time in the history of the world, the conquerors realized that their peace, if it were to last, must rest on something other than might. The tried to found it upon law, reason, justice, and such things. (1930, p. 786) Once the delegates all met outside Paris in 1919, much of this idealism fell victim to the individualized desires of the countries represented. It is important to emphasize that Germany’s agreement to an armistice in 1918 was based upon its belief that it would receive fair treatment and not receive complete blame for the entire conflict. All parties, in their eyes, shared in the responsibility for the war. Their country, most Germans believed, had surrendered on the understanding that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for the peace treaty. ‘The people,’ reported Ellis Dresel, an American diplomat sent to Berlin, ‘had been led to believe that Germany had been unluckily beaten after a fine and clean fight, owing to the ruinous effect of the blockade on the home morale…but that happily President Wilson could be appealed to, and would arrange a compromise peace satisfactory to Germany.’ The country would undoubtedly have to pay some sort of indemnity, but nothing toward the costs of the war. It would become a member of the League of Nations. It would keep its colonies. (MacMillan 2003, p. 461) Sadly, Germany would be let down on every one of these beliefs, save admission to the League of Nations, which anyway did not happen until several years later. As time showed, Germany was to receive all of the blame and little in the way of clemency. It came down to the buzzer whether or not the Germans would sign the Treaty in its complete and final form. Many of its sections were completely prejudicial to any hope of Germany securing an “honorable” settlement. Days prior to the final signing “the majority [of the German government] was willing to sign the treaty except for Articles 227-31 (the clauses on war criminals and war guilt)” (Luckau 1945, p. 216). Many in the German government and delegation made the observation that the Treaty could not possibly be acceptable or seen as dignified by the German people, still naively believing that they would receive fair treatment. In the end, with a tacit French threat to invade Germany if its delegation did not accept, the German delegates signed the Treaty. Two such delegates were quoted as saying that “[t]hey believe[d] it to be impossible to avoid this last and personally most difficult sacrifice, made necessary by the terrible suffering…which would result from a failure to sign…” (Luckau 1945, p. 220). The Treaty, in its final form, was far more harrowing than anything the Germans had imagined back when they still believed that Wilson would be their salvation. The Treaty itself affected many aspects of the European political and economic landscape. Concerning those sections which would most contribute to the rekindling of hostilities towards the end of the 1930’s much could said. The provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, taken by Germany from France in 1871, were returned to France. Parts of Germany were partitioned and Poland was reconstituted as a sovereign nation. Germany was forced to cede all its African colonies to either Great Britain or France, surrender its once proud navy, and reduce its once mighty military to “a shadow of its former self.” As the historian Charles Beard put it, “[i]n several respects the terms imposed on defeated Germany did not conform to the war aims which President Wilson had so eloquently proclaimed to the world” (1944, pp. 434-435). The demands made upon Germany ensured that country’s lasting enmity. It was forced to give up the Rhineland, cede commercial coal rights to the Saar Basin, and give up Silesia. In the end Germany gave up some 13% of its territory and over 10% of its population. To make matters worse, Germany was forced to formally accept responsibility for the war. Clauses 227-231 of the Treaty can rightly be viewed as having greatly contributed to the outbreak of World War Two. The so-called “war guilt”clause “had been put in to establish German liability for reparations.” As the sociologist Max Weber put it, speaking to a group of intellectuals, “[w]e do not deny the responsibility of those in power before and during the war, but we believe that all the great powers of Europe who were at war are guilty” (MacMillan 2003, p. 466). As a consequence of accepting guilt, Germany also agreed to pay tens of billions of dollars in reparations to France and the United Kingdom. These facts together would later form the nucleus of German shame and Hitler’s ruthless rise to power. The importance of the American Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty must not be given an insignificant meaning. By the negotiations’ end, Wilson famous “14 Points” had been whittled down to basically one: the League of Nations. When the Senate rejected the Treaty, it obviated any chance of America joining the new international body. Though this did not concern a specific failure of the Treaty itself (with respect to its wording), it very much concerned the enforceability of the organization. The Republicans led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge effectively outwitted the then dying Wilson. They set American on a course of isolationism not to be broken until the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941 (Beard 1944, p. 439). This could be classified as a structural weakness of the Treaty. Aside from shaming Germany, it ultimately did not lead to a very large role played by the United States in world affairs. That coupled with the ruinous reparations, it seems hardly surprising today that Hitler was able to rise to power in the way that he did. As the French leader Marshall Foch said of the Versailles Treaty in its final form: “This is not a peace, it is a twenty-year armistice” (Black 2003, p. 114). The role of France in the negotiations at Versailles and that country’s subsequent actions in the years that followed decisively contributed to the ultimate failure of the Treaty to prevent another major war and even added to the likelihood that another war would in fact occur. It has often been said that the “Allies won the war, but lost the Peace.” This position gains some credibility when the case of France after the war is examined. It must be remembered how much the loss of the war against Germany in 1870-71 had damaged and wounded French honor. Still thinking of themselves in the spirit of Napoleon, the French could not reconcile themselves to the loss of that war and the cession of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Their foreign policy of the years 1871-1914 was notable for its claim of “La Revanche” (“the Revenge” in French) which sought to regain France’s lost territories. “[France] did not actively seek war after 1871; [it] simply accepted it as inevitable” (Black 2003, p. 27). Thus the French desire to avenge 1871, not to mention the killing fields of 1914-1918, became obsessive during the war and pathological at Versailles. The figure of Clemenceau, the French representative at Versailles, had himself been in Paris in 1871 when Bismarck proclaimed the German Empire and thus was very well-versed in the feelings of the French people, many of whom wanted to see Germany punished. His secretary Martet defended him in the 1930’s when it became fashionable to criticize the terms of the Versailles Treaty. He did not say that Clemenceau’s conduct was perfect, but he did seek to enumerate the two main goals which Clemenceau sought to see fulfilled at Versailles and after. In the first place, France must regain her pre-War honour and independence, her territorial integrity, her agricultural and industrial prosperity. Germany had fired the train; she must make amends. She must restore to us the two provinces which she had criminally torn from us in 1870. M. Clemenceau might possibly have demanded the restitution of a few fragments of French territory such as Landau. But he would never have exacted the cession to France of an inch of German soil. In his view, once suffices for the follies of a Bismarck. Further, there must be a formal guarantee against Germany’s ever in years to come repeating her action of 1914. In consequence: disarmament of Germany, occupation of the Rhine bridgeheads. (1930, p. 787) The Rhineland was occupied by France for several reasons. The main reason was a matter of security. Twice the Germans had swept through there on their way to attack France. The French considered it a necessary precaution to prevent another war. As well the region had many coal fields and thus served some commercial purposes. And yet the French government seemed intent on punishing Germany to an extent few had foreseen. Clemenceau, as Martet claimed, was a relative “dove” when it came to punishing Germany. He wanted to see France regain her honor but was not so naïve as to think that overly-punishing Germany could do anything but push that country, in the years to come, towards a strong longing to regain a sense of honor and dignity. “They were of two kinds: those who marveled, to the point of accusing him of betraying his country, that France derived so little profit from the victory; and those who tried to deny her the right to gain what she did” (Martet 1930, p. 787). Thus Clemenceau, in voicing the French position, was forced to constantly contend with many conflicting political intrigues of several different parties. The French desire to regain its honor often blurred the extent to which it simply wanted to pursue greedy aims. The seizure of the Rhineland and the rights that France exacted from Germany over the Saar coal mines were two great points of anger for the Germans in the years that followed. When Clemenceau seemed to be wavering on those points, men like Foch assailed him for “abandoning France.” “Deputies and senators urged Clemenceau to stand firm on France’s legitimate demands. Foch inspired a press campaign demanding the occupation of the Rhineland” (MacMillan 2003, p. 200). Many in France were blinded by either anger or greed. They punished Germany so much that another war was guaranteed. The obviousness of this was not lost to all in France. “Leading politicians, journalists, and soldiers, went to warn Poincaré that France was heading for disaster. Clemenceau was throwing away any chance of security against Germany (MacMillan 2003, p. 200-201). The same feelings of shame and dishonor which France felt after 1871 were to be revisited two-fold against Germany. The Versailles Treaty can be seen as having contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War as much for what it did not do as it can be for it what it did. This was visible in what it demanded of Germany compared to what Germany had been promised at the Armistice. It was not honorable, it did not maintain German territorial integrity, and it did not distribute blame for the war equally among all the participants. Italy had a similar experience and set of feelings when the precise details of the final version of the Versailles Treaty came to be known. Italy of course fought alongside Germany in World War Two and thus it comes as little surprise to find that it, like Germany, felt wronged by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. This displeasure towards the Treat markedly contributed to these two countries’ later alliance. For, if Italy was, in fact, a power dissatisfied with the postwar settlement and fascism symbolized that dissatisfaction, there existed a strong temptation for Mussolini to intrigue with other disgruntled elements in Europe…From a brief visit to Germany six months before he gained power Mussolini returned with the distinct impression that, notwithstanding Weimar Germany’s democratic and pacific front, pre-1914 German militarism and nationalism still lived and awaited an opportunity to capture the state and launch an attack on the Versailles settlement. (Cassels 1963, p. 138) In many ways then, feelings towards the Treaty of Versailles formed a focal point of interest and commonality between Germany and Italy and would later have disastrous consequences for the world. This is not to downplay Italian anger towards the Versailles settlement as being something later voiced only by Mussolini to further the relationship with Hitler. Even without an alliance with Nazi Germany, Italy surely would still have felt betrayed. Italy had, for much of the late nineteenth century, been an ally of Germany and Austria. After 1914, it began to see its interests better served by an alliance with Britain and France. In 1915 it signed the secret Treaty of London with the Entente Powers. In exchange for joining them, Italy was promised vast territories in the Austrian Tyrol and others areas to Italy’s northeast. The problem came at Versailles when the Treaty of London came into conflict with Wilson’s 14 Points and the more immediate needs of the French and the British. “The fact that the United States, Great Britain, and France were mainly interested in the German settlement did not help the Italian case” (Albrecht-Carrie 1941, p. 837). Italy’s participation in the war came with the promise of new territories. When that promise, due to other political imperatives, became null and void, Italian sentiment towards Versailles transformed from delight into outright disgust and dissension. That, coupled with the outward sympathies between Italian fascism and German National Socialism, drove Mussolini into Hitler’s outstretched arms. Their first conversations together no doubt revolved around the subject of the Versailles Treaty and the need to render it meaningless. A structural flaw in the Treaty of Versailles concerned the mandate that Germany pay reparations. Outwardly, this seemed justified for many. Germany should have to pay for what they saw as its crimes. Economic realities after the war meant something else. Germany’s ability to pay the billions of dollars in reparations could only be possible if its economy could produce the prosperity needed to do so. The truth was that Germany could not pay them. This was no accident: the British and especially the French wanted to punish Germany in a most vindictive way. The system of finances which developed in the 1920’s, themselves a direct result of the Versailles Treaty and World War One more generally, was not only dependent upon Germany paying reparations but also of America providing the necessary capital. The truth was probably that British designs on German reparations derived from their own need to pay off loans they owed the United States. [The] Acting British Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs…requested those governments to make arrangements for dealing to the best of their ability with the loans owing by them to the British government. He took occasion to explain, however, that the amount of interest and repayment, for which the British Government asks, depends not so much on what debtor nations owe Great Britain as on what Great Britain has to pay America. ‘The policy favored by His Majesty is,’ says the Earl of Balfour, ‘that of surrendering their share of German reparation, and writing off, through one great transaction, the whole body of inter-Allied indebtedness.’ (Finch 1922, p. 611) A system in the 1920’s developed whereby America loaned Germany money which it in turn used to pay reparations to France and Britain. These latter two then used these reparations monies to pay the debts to the United States they had accrued during the war years. The arrangement worked, more or less, until the crash of 1929. Thereafter the United States itself no longer had any money to loan, causing the entire system to collapse (Black 2003, pp. 196-197). The British then, in addition to wanting to see Germany punished, had a particular, though unofficial, interest in the levying of reparations against Germany: they wanted to be able to afford their loans to the United States. Interestingly, “[w]hen Hitler ceased to pay [in 1933]…he did one of his very few favors for the British and the French by taking the pressure off them” (Black 2003, p. 291). Without any reparations money, the British and the French no longer felt inclined to pay Uncle Sam. They had installed the reparations, in part, for greed-bound financial needs intended to shame Germany. The unintended consequence was that, in order to re-establish its own sense of dignity, Germany halted reparations payments and rearmed. As the biblical Paul once put it: “You reap what you sow.” The most flagrant and destructive consequence of the Versailles Treaty was then the shame and sense of wrong which it bestowed upon Germany. This must be seen as a central part in Hitler’s rise to power and, thus, the outbreak of World War Two. Despite the mind-numbing clarity with which many saw in the Treaty the potential for renewed conflict, the vengeance visited upon Germany by France and Britain did not directly cause Hitler’s rise to power. There were many other factors related to the domestic situation in Germany that were unrelated to the reparations. And even though the National Socialists fared well in the 1929 elections, they did not gain real power until after the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the economic depression of the 1930’s. All these events cannot be directly attributed to the 1919 Treaty. But Germany’s shame and desire to reassert itself must be given the due that they warrant. It was Hitler who, over the course of his rise to power and rule, ceaselessly exploited the perceived wrong done to Germany by the Versailles Treaty as he aggressively asserted his country’s place in Europe. This is the single greatest link to be inferred between the Treaty and the Second World War. It is important to recall the domestic situation in Germany when the Versailles negotiations and signing occurred. The country was economically, politically, morally, socially, and even spiritually devastated by the four years of destructive war. It was the Kaiser’s Imperial government that had vaunted Germany’s military prowess prior to the war, took it down the path to war, and led it during the war. In 1918 the Kaiser abdicated and the German Republic was founded. The Treaty and reparations were “not imposed on Germany’s imperial government and military leadership, where the responsibility for Germany’s disastrous diplomatic and military policies belonged, but on a German civilian ‘representative’ government, which the Allies had every reason to support” (Rich 2000, p. 284). Thus democratic governance came to be associated with the “betrayal” of Versailles in addition to also being associated with poor economic performance. In many ways the Weimar Republic was doomed before it even began. The budding German nationalist movements wasted no time in blaming the Weimar government for the Versailles Treaty, the German defeat and humiliation, and the loss of its overseas territories. Germany looked with shame and anger as Poland, a country which it had always viewed as a subordinate, reasserted itself in Europe and which now ruled over a few million German-speakers (as a result of land allocations of the Versailles Treaty). “…Poland was looked upon by many as the great crime perpetrated against Germany…[its grievances] were associated with three names: Upper Silesia, the Corridor, and Danzig” (Albrecht-Carrie 1940, p. 9). With the help of Hitler, these grievances reached a feverish pitch as German aggression in the 1930’s began to worry and threaten the governments and states of Europe. Hitler seized power by claiming to be the man to re-establish Germany as a major global power worthy of all the pomp and respect thereof. In some ways Hitler described his rise to power and his role to play while in power as one long and uninterrupted quest to right the wrongs of Versailles. Though Germany was not initially a member, it joined the League of Nations years after Versailles. Hitler “withdrew from the League of Nations and formally renounced the Treaty of Versailles” (Black 2003, p. 292). The Treaty, like any other, was occasionally ignored or violated by one or more of its signing countries. In 1935 Hitler reinstated “compulsory military service in Germany and thus informally repudiat[ed] the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles” (Fenwick 1935, p. 675). Hitler had no trouble heeding the part of the Versailles Treaty concerning the Saar region. It had been stipulated that the Saar, in 1935, would hold a plebiscite to determine if it would stay with France or revert back to Germany. The people there almost uniformly voted to rejoin Germany. For Hitler this was portrayed as a major victory for the Reich. Hitler was both a master orator and a master political strategist. In this hour the German government renews before the German people and before the entire world its assurance…that is does not intend in rearming Germany to create an instrument for military aggression but, on the contrary, exclusively for defense and thereby for the maintenance of peace. In so doing the Reich government expresses the confident hope that the German people, having regained their honor, may be privileged in independent equality to make their contribution towards the pacification of the world in free and open cooperation with other nations. (Shirer 1984, p. 217). The Rhineland had been seized by France after the end of World War One. Though it eventually reverted back to Germany, by treaty it remained a demilitarized zone. Hitler saw this as an offense against Germany. In 1936 he ordered German troops to occupy the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Hitler had had enough with treaties, it was time for Germany to right a few of its perceived wrongs. Germany therefore no longer feels bound by the Locarno treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defense, the German government has reestablished, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone! (Shirer 1984, p. 244). The ghosts of the past had come back to haunt Europe. Hitler thought he was opening a new chapter in the history of the human race. Very soon his troops would cross the Rhineland, the same Rhineland taken from a humiliated Germany back in 1919, and the Second World War would be underway. Thus the events at Versailles in 1919, and the eponymously named treaty, form a series of interconnected links, both direct and indirect, with the outbreak of the Second World War. There were of course other factors; chance even played a role. But the responsibility of the Versailles Treaty, insofar as a document can be said to have caused an event, must not be underappreciated. Germany lost much of her country and honor and was forced to pay enormous reparations to France and Britain. Aside from wanting to make Germany pay for its “crimes,” these two countries wanted a means by which to pay their debts to America and shamefully exploited Germany to that end. France sought to gain power and territory at the expense of the defeated Germans. Italy felt that it had been wronged by Versailles despite being on the winning side. All these factors together formed a concatenation of causes and effects linking 1919 to 1939. The scholar Marc Trachtenberg once wrote what is now an obvious truth: “The historiography of the Paris Peace Conference has always been highly political” (1982, p. 487). Taking a position in this debate necessitates taking a position on a number of other issues: the Great Depression, Hitler’s rise to power, the origins of Italian fascism, and the causes of World War Two. In recent years many scholars have begun to view the World Wars as one long and protracted conflict and not as two separate ones. In the spirit of Croce, World War Two had many contributing factors and causes, some immediate and some more fundamental; as did the Treaty of Versailles. They were both linked by the immediacy of politics as much as by the profundity of economic and social realities. The rest is history. Works Cited Albrecht-Carrie, Rene. “Versailles Twenty Years After.” Political Science Quarterly 55:1 (1940): 1-24. Albrecht-Carrie, Rene. “Italy and Her Allies, June, 1919.” The American Historical Review 46:4 (1941): 837-843. Black, Conrad. Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2003. Beard, Charles A. A Basic History of the United States. New York: Doubleday, Doran, & Company, 1944. Cassels, Alan. “Mussolini and German Nationalism, 1922-25.” The Journal of Modern History 35:2 (1963): 137-157. Croce, Benedetto. The Theory and History of Historiography. Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1989. Fenwick, C.G. “The Denunciation of the Disarmament Clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.” The American Journal of International Law 29:4 (1935): 675-678. Finch, George A. “The Revision of the Reparation Clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and the Cancellation of Inter-Allied Indebtedness.” The American Journal of International Law 16:4 (1922): 611-627. Luckau, Alma. “Unconditional Acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles by the German Government, June 22-28, 1919.” The Journal of Modern History 17:3 (1945): 215-220. MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919. New York: Random House Inc., 2003. Martet, Jean M. “M. Clemenceau and the Versailles Peace Treaty.” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 9:6 (1930): 783-800. Rich, Norman. “Book Review.” Central European History 33:2 (2000): 283-285. Shirer, William L. The Nightmare Years 1930-1940. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Trachtenberg, Marc. “Versailles After Sixty Years.” Journal of Contemporary History 17:3 (1982): 487-506. Read More