[Zhang Fei]

[Germany being forced to pay reparations was one of the factors that helped Hitler come to power. Be careful what you wish for...]

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That’s a myth. These reparations were smaller, relative to the size of their respective economies, than those demanded of France in 1871, the first Versailles. Read up on the Franco-Prussian War. Keynes ginned up a whole industry around blaming the West for German territorial ambitions. Nothing wrong with ambition, given that all countries everywhere favored territorial expansion in that era, but blaming the West for German ambition was just off the wall.

[meowmeow]

Then I stand corrected! Thanks...will do some homework there.

[x]

Keynes ginned up a whole industry around blaming the West for German territorial ambitions. Nothing wrong with ambition, given that all countries everywhere favored territorial expansion in that era, but blaming the West for German ambition was just off the wall.

Before the First World War British officials interpreted every German move as aggressive and hostile, while the British and French were busy gobbling up territory on their own. Historians picked up on that after the war.

Germans wanting to build a Berlin to Baghdad railroad was considered aggressive. Britons building a Cape to Cairo railroad was just the way things were. It was an aggressive provocation for the Kaiser to send a telegram of support to the South African leader for fending off a British raid. Britain crushing the South African Boer republics was the march of progress.

I don't think it was that dissenters were trying to blame German aggressiveness on "the West," but they were trying to put it into context. There was much that was wrong about what the Germans did, but there was an awful lot of blindness and hypocrisy among the British and the French for not seeing the parallels between the Germans and themselves.