Posted on 07/25/2019 7:10:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Treaty of Versailles was signed in Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. Neither the winners nor the losers of World War I were happy with the formal conclusion to the bloodbath.
The traditional criticism of the treaty is that the victorious French and British democracies did not listen to the pleas of leniency from progressive American President Woodrow Wilson. Instead, they added insult to the German injury by blaming Germany for starting the war. The final treaty demanded German reparations for war losses. It also forced Germany to cede territory to its victorious neighbors.
The harsh terms of the treaty purportedly embittered and impoverished the Germans. The indignation over Versailles supposedly explained why Germany eventually voted into power the firebrand Nazi Adolf Hitler, sowing the seeds of World War II.
But a century later, how true is the traditional explanation of the Versailles Treaty?
In comparison to other treaties of the times, the Versailles accord was actually mild — especially by past German standards.
After the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war, a newly unified and victorious Germany occupied France, forced the French to pay reparations and annexed the rich Alsace-Lorraine borderlands.
Berlin's harsh 1914 plans for Western Europe at the onset of World War I -- the so-called Septemberprogramm — called for the annexation of the northern French coast. The Germans planned to absorb all of Belgium and demand payment of billions of marks to pay off the entire German war debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
It wasn’t only the onerous Versailles Treaty that contributed to the malaise that later plagued post WW1 Germany.
It was also very deep corruption, a never-ending series of financial scandals, a depression, rule and domination of Germany people hostile to the German people themselves (as in the USA now), widespread communist agitation and a deep erosion of public morals, making for an “anything goes” digusting atmosphere.
Germany then was a tinderbox, quite apart from the unsound aspects of the Versailles Treaty.
How true is the traditional view? It’s spot on. Versailles not only had a guilt clause for a war Germany obviously didn’t start and not only carved off chunks of territory, it also required reparations that wrecked the German economy. In addition to that, Austria was not allowed to join Germany which its citizens had voted democratically to do in 1919. Furthermore 3 million ethnic Germans were handed over to a brand new Czechoslovak state without consultation because the land they inhabited was militarily useful as a barrier because it was mountainous.
Oh that Alsace- Loraine that Germany took from France in 1871? Yeah. It was really Elsass-Lothringen which the French had taken from Germany and been allowed to keep in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna brokered by Metternich at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. Anybody who has heard their local dialect will immediately recognize it as a German dialect. Speaking of which, there was no guilt clause for the French even though they had obviously started that decade and a half long conflict. Large swathes of their territory inhabited by French speakers were not arbitrarily carved out of France and given to neighboring countries.
So yes Victor, the Germans were treated quite differently from how the French had been treated after the previous round of continent wide warfare in Europe. The Trianon Treaty the Entente Powers imposed after WWI was similarly harsh toward the Hungarians and created the monstrosity that wasYugoslavia under Serb rule as a reward for actually starting the war. We were still dealing with that mess in the 1990s as Yugoslavia predictably blew apart. Wilson was awful about a lot of things, but he was a helluva lot more clear sighted than Clemenceau or Lloyd George.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Basically, the German people lost all faith in their ruling class and their government.
Which is happening here.
Yup, numerous aspects of the Weimar Republic parallel the USA now.
And there is that little matter of an AMERICAN COUP that was laid bare for the whole country to see yesterday.
So YES, absolutely.
I have a dream that Clemenceau and Hitler are chained together in Hell.
OK. After calming down a little bit, I decided that a little history lesson is in order here:
1. Serbia did NOT start WWI. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY started it by INVADING Serbia after Serbia refused to allow Austrian troops to enter Serbia to ostensibly "search" for the conspirators in the assassination fo Archduke Ferdinand. Something about national sovereignty. Surely you heard of the concept.
2. Ferdinand was assassinated by BOSNIAN Serb terrorists (Bosnia was ethnically a majority Serb region that was given to Austria by the European powers in 1870 when Turkey withdrew). The Kingdom of Serbia had just concluded two Balkan wars against the Turks and then the Bulgarians, and had less than zero desire to go to war against its much larger and more powerful Western neighbor.
3. Once Austria invaded, the Serbians fought them tooth and nail, actually winning the first several battles against a far superior enemy. The tiny kingdom lost a total of over a MILLION people to all causes during WWI (including anywhere from 20-40% of ITS ENTIRE ADULT MALE POPULATION BEFORE THE WAR.
THAT was the reason why the grateful allies 'rewarded' the Southern Slavs with their own nation (Yugoslavia). The Pan-Slav movement was NOT a "Serbian-only" movement, and was created by Serb, Croat and Slovene intellectuals in the 19th century. Serbs, being the most numerous people and also on the winning side in WWI, came to dominate the new nation, which of course caused tension from the git go, especially as the more economically advanced regions (Slovenia and Croatia) were asked to help rebuild the devastated Serbian portion of the country. So in that sense Yugoslavia was a well-meaning, though doomed, project.
Prince Regent Alexander (King Peter having ceded authority to his son during WWI due to old age) could have gotten a "Greater Serbia" that included Bosnia and the border Srbian regions of Croatia from the allies, which would have been a far more tenable state - but a combination of ambition and allied feeling that Slovenia and Croatia were too small to exist on their own expanded the project into Yugoslavia. A historical mistake that all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, and Serbs in particular, bemoan to this day.
Lastly, I can show you a photo of my Serbian grandmother's family from just before the Balkan wars started. One great-grand uncle is in his military uniform,one of his younger brothers in his finest suit. One died in one of the Balkan wars, the other in WWI, one of the sisters died of illness during the war. Two of my great-aunts grew up with family members, never having known their father. EVERY Serbian family has a photo like this. fold.
WWI was the greatest tragedy for the world since the Black Death (given the carnage, the revolutions, and the WW2 sequel and collective loss of faith in the West that it spawned).
*BUT*
Don't blame my ancestors for it. The tiny Kingdom of Serbia was the first and greatest casualty of WWI. It did not start the war. The God-damned MF-ing Austrians & Germans did. We should have killed them ALL when we had a chance in WW2.
Well guess what? THEY were the ones who started WWI, and THEY ruled over a majority Serbian population in Vojvodina. Losing an aggressive war can be a bitch.
As far as those poor Hungarians went, when Yugoslavia was overrun in APril WW2, they came back to Vojvodina. In my grandfather's birthplace of Sremski Karlovci, the Serbian families who foolishly did not flee South were lined up and machinegunned to death.
One of my mother's childhood friends was the only survivor of that massacre. (She was about 10 and hid under one of the beds as the Hungarian Nazis executed her entire family outside).
The lesson here for you is to THINK before posting stuff you know very little about.
World war one was merely a warm up as it turns out “the great war”
World War II which pitted Germany Japan and Italy and many Muslim nations against the allies was the fight for world survival against totalitarian government and guess what ? we won
Brest-Litovsk. The Bolsheviks really didn't have a lot of choice in the matter, but they did get a few licks of their own in during 1919.
Thanks to Pilsudski, the Red Army didn’t march through the rest of Europe in 1920.
“Oh that Alsace- Loraine that Germany took from France in 1871? Yeah. It was really Elsass-Lothringen which the French had taken from Germany and been allowed to keep in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna brokered by Metternich at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars.”
The troublesome history of that little patch of land goes back a lot further than 1815. I believe it has been disputed and tossed back and forth between various powers going all the way back to the division of land between Charlemagne’s heirs!
And let's not even get into the Sykes-Picot Agreement drawing arbitrary lines on the map of the Ottoman Empire and dividing it between the French and the British, with little regard to the various people living there, dividing some and forcing others together. Most of the mess in the Middle East today can be traced to that.
The Serbs were the ones who started WWI. It was their state sponsored terrorism that lit the fuse.
You also neglected to mention the 800,000 Hungarians placed in Czechoslovakia (Slovakia today) without a vote and the 2.3 million Hungarians in Transylvania places under Romanian rule - the largest ethnic minority population in Europe.
It is you who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
One is never too old to learn new things.
Back on topic - Austria-Hungary was looking for an excuse to pick a fight with Serbia - and the actions of that moron, Gavrilo Princip, gave them the excuse. Yes the 'Black Hand' had lots of support in Serbia proper - what about the faction in Austria that was looking for a military solution with Serbia? Were they blameless?
1. Yes, Serbia DID start WWI. It was their intelligence service which sponsored the Black Hand. They passed along information, money and weapons. The Browning model 1910 .380 caliber pistol used by Princep and another of the Browning pistols used by the terrorists were traced directly back to......take a wild guess......Serbia. When you commit an act of war like assassinating the heir apparent of a foreign country, you can fully expect that other country to fight back. How would we react if sat, Cuba assassinated the US president elect? We would invade. Nobody is going to tolerate that.
3. Yugoslavia was a monstrosity from the start. Did anybody ask the Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Albanians, Hungarians, Germans and other ethnic groups in those lands if they approved of being placed in a new Serb Dominated Country? Of course not. There was massive strife from the very beginning. These people did not want to be ruled over by Serbs.
There’s no question average Serbian people suffered horribly in WWI and again in WWII. Their leadership though was most certainly not innocent. They were constantly agitating and provoking the Hapsburg Empire until they really went too far with the murder of Frank Ferdinand and his wife. The ironic thing is that far from being some cruel oppressor about to come to the throne, he was well known to be s liberal reformer - and the Hapsburg Empire was pretty slack as it was compared to most.
The Serbs were not the victims. They were the ones who committed an act of war against their neighbor. All that antagonism toward the Hapsburgs eventually provoked an inevitable backlash.
Serbia had long been trying to pick a fight with The Hapsburg Empire to realize their greater Serbia project. They did eventually get that.....then got another world War, vicious payback from the Croat Ustache who were genocidal and eventually their greater Serbia collapsed anyway. Others did not want to be ruled over by them any more than they wanted to be ruled by others.
Agree with most of your take on it. Here’s mine!
I think Austro-Hungary bears most of the blame, specifically Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf the head of the army. He thought a war would be good for his army & the state. The Emperor Franz-Josef certainly didn’t want a war. He was old frail and didn’t have the energy to restrain Hotzendorf. I think Franz-Josef thought that at some point like in the past there would be international mediation. Things quickly spiraled out of control before that could happen.
Now I think the Serbs wanted a crisis but not necessarily a war. A crisis that could be mediated and that they could manipulate to their advantage. If there was going to be a war, I think they thought it would be a local or regional war. Serbia with Russia support (but not necessarily military intervention!) against A-H and again it would be short, & mediation at conference would occur just like before. The 1000 lb gorilla was Russia military intervention and the fact that they had no way of doing a partial mobilization. Once the inflexible Russian mobilization system started panic occurred in Germany, and sparked everything else. Even Nicky’s assurances to Willy that it didn’t mean anything could stop it. By then things were out of control.
Now I also think that France aided and abetted the panic. The wanted a war with Germany in order to recover Alsace-Lorraine. With Russia threatening Germany in the east, France could easily snatch back Alsace-Lorraine. Or so they thought!
The UK had absolutely no business being involved. Sucked into by their treaty guaranteed Belgium sovereignty and their archaic policy of trying to maintain a balance of powers on the continent.
Well that’s my two cents!
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