John Maynard Keynes was key in spreading that particular lie, and German politicians like young Adolf Hitler incorporated it into their "stab in the back" propaganda.
The truth is quite different and includes:
- The 1919 Treaty of Versailles was no harsher on Germany than Germany had been on defeated Belgium or Russia.
Defeated Germans had every reason to expect the same level of punishment meted out on them as they themselves inflicted on countries they conquered. - However, German propaganda in 1918 did not tell the German people that they had been thoroughly defeated on the battlefield.
Germans only understood that no foreign armies had entered Germany and so believed Germany deserved a more accommodating peace treaty -- the "Peace without Victory" promised by US President Wilson, not the reparations inflicted by Versailles. - In fact, Germans only paid the full annual reparations for the first year, and that was the root cause of their early 1920s runaway inflation.
- After the first year of actual reparations, future years were paid by borrowed money, from western banks, mainly Americans.
In other words, the German Weimar government borrowed money from Americans to pay off reparations to France & Britain who used those payments to repay their war-loans from American banks. - That whole processes ended in 1929, when American banks refused to loan Germans any more money, which ended German payments to Britain & France, which ended British & French payments to American banks, which brought on the financial crash of October 1929.
- The 1929 financial crash lead to the Great Depression which was instrumental in raising the obscure NSDAP to prominence in German politics.
Call it what you will Putin is still a Soviet at heart."
It's critical to remember here that in 1992 both Russia and Ukraine, along with a dozen other eastern European countries, were on a path to NATO membership.
In due time, many of those countries became NATO members, while others, like Russia and Ukraine maintained friendly relations with NATO well into the early 2000s.
But at some point, Vlad the Invader decided that instead of joining NATO, which would have guaranteed Russia's security, what he wanted to do instead was reconquer the old Russian Empire, especially Ukraine, and that, naturally, made NATO his enemy.
And, also naturally, the more aggressive Vlad became, the more eager Ukrainians were to find allies against Vlad, especially NATO.