[RandFan]

It is complicated but you’re right the reparations drove the Nazis to power.

[dfwgator]

Frankly, whoever won between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, should of have of no concern to the other countries.

But France’s alliance with Russia, empowered Nicky to mobilize his troops, setting all the wheels in motion.

[DugwayDuke]

RandFan wrote: “It is complicated but you’re right the reparations drove the Nazis to power.”

It was the 1929 Wall Street Crash that opened a pathway for Hitler to come to power.

[Zhang Fei]

[It is complicated but you’re right the reparations drove the Nazis to power.]

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I’d disagree. At root was the national sense that Germany was a Johnny-come-lately to empire, that all the good real estate had been conquered, that the best possible way for Germany to catch up was to conquer the metropoles around which European empires revolved. It dovetails with what rulers have sought throughout history - to make themselves famous. China and Russia are ramping up because their rulers recognize what makes reigns significant - armed conquest.

German reparations were small relative to what France had to pay Germany after losing the Franco-Prussian war. What irked Germans was the sense that as the superior race, it was humiliating to have to pay their inferiors across the Rhine.

The conclusion to WW2 was far more humiliating for Germany - partition and indefinite military occupation. And the destruction dwarfed WW1 by a factor of thousands, with entire cities razed. But at the end, with 8m dead, vs 2m from WW1, Germans finally had to acknowledge they had been beaten, as they did not after WW1. Countries don’t only have to be defeated, they have to feel they have been defeated. That was why the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender despite the high cost of such a demand - to break the spirit of entire Axis populations, forestall the resurrection of the threat.