If WW 1 had never happened, Adolph Hitler’s rise to power would never have happened. He used Germany’s defeat and the crushing war reparations from the Treaty of Versaille as a political battering ram in his mad rise to power.
“If WW 1 had never happened, Adolph Hitler’s rise to power would never have happened. He used Germany’s defeat and the crushing war reparations from the Treaty of Versaille as a political battering ram in his mad rise to power.”
This style of argument is called “proximate causation.” If you take one event and change it then all events stemming from it are altered in whatever way you choose to imagine. But both wars were due to conditions at the time.
Say a tornado destroys a town. Somebody with a time machine goes back in time and drops a bomb into the tornado to break it up. Does that save the town? Not necessarily. Tornados (like wars) are due to a massive, widespread difference in air pressure (or social/economic conditions.) A Mississippi-sized river of air is flowing along and the tornado is just a swirl effect inside that air. (It’s the equalization actually happening.) Wars are the localized swirl effect caused by social and economic conditions.
The social and political forces of which World War one was a localized effect, were huge. Industrialization, bad working conditions, disease, old creaking social structures were all ripe for reforming (equalizing, if you will.) Had we somehow avoided a massive world war the old empires would have been ripped apart in equally widespread revolutions. The global powers would have intervened on different sides as they saw their interests being destroyed. So, they inevitably would have come into conflict. Just different from what it was. Recall also, that a big driver of the war was the interlocking treaties. Those alone would have eventually brought on a wider war in the no World-war-one scenario.
As for Hitler, if not him, then it would have been someone else. As for the treaty of Versailles, if not that, then something else. Would it all have been different? Yes. Less destructive? Maybe, maybe not. But the communism resulted from the liberals of the day naively trying to create utopia, as they are still trying today. (Utopia has no conflict, hence their desire to eliminate humans through birth control, abortion, global warming taxes and development restrictions.)