How about the 'Treaty of Versailles'?
You know, they hammered the "treaty of versailles sowed the seeds of ww2" into our heads throughout middle school, high school, and college.
A few years ago I really started thinking about it . . . it really starts to come off as a "its really our fault that Hitler and the German people started the war . . .we were mean to them." Then I started thinking about the people who said, "its really our fault the hijackers flew those planes into the buildings . . .we were mean to them"
I agree that it was the French insistence on inflicting massive debt and other penalties on a fledgling representative government that gave Hitler a chance to rise to power.
Bingo!
Lol, which one again?
A factor, to be sure. But you also could list these things as equal factors:
- The Russian Revolution (Hitler got a lot of support out of fear of Bolshevism)
- The Great Depression (Germany suffered greatly under it, which helped Hitler to rise to power)
The real reason, and a mistake not made after WW2.
"How about the Treaty of Versailles?"
The French and the Russians do seem to be the source of most of the 20th. Century's troubles, don't they? First Russia deploys its army to to attack Germany in 1914 (in those days you didn't do that for show) in defense of Serbian terrorists opposed to the rule of German ally Austria-Hungary. The Kaiser attacks France because they have a treaty to support the Russians in any war. America comes in (for reasons not in our national interest) and puts an end to it. At Versailles, the French demand the looting of German territory and "reparations" heavy enough to destroy its economy.
You know if, and this is a collosal IF, Hitler hadn't been a genocidal, racist maniac, his reaquisition of former German lands, and his war on the French and the Russians would have had my support. I have to admit, when reading accounts of the war between classy Germans like Manstein and Guderian and a loutish pig like Zhukov, I can't help but root for the Wermacht.
Unfortunately, Hitler was what he was. And what he was was just as bad as Stalin. But in terms of Roosevelt's foreign policy I have a question or two:
Why was it that the Japanese invasion of China neccesitated an economic blockade against them that precipitated their attack on us? I only ask because apart from our intervention on China's behalf, the Japanese wouldn't have given a damn about us. Sure, the Japanese murdered about a million Chinese. But Mao murdered over twenty million Chinese, and our Democrat administration wouldn't even support Chaing Kai-Shek against him in the civil war.
Further, when Stalin and Hitler simultaneously launched the war in Europe, why was Stalin not the bad guy? So everyone had to jump in and save Eastern Europe from German domination, just to hand it over to Soviet domination at the war's conclusion.
It does seem that we had a predeliction for fighting evil countries that couldn't have cared less about us, and then losing interest when even bloodier-handed communists, all of whom longed to END AMERICA at their earliest convenience, took home all the spoils. Great thinking FDR. Maybe it had something to do with so much of his administration (including V.P. Henry Wallace) being actual Soviet agents.....
Ding ding ding! You get an A on your final! The Treaty of Versailles set the stage for WWII.
100% correct...WWII was nothing more than a continuation
of WWI.