Why would they harbor resentment to treaties that gave them independence? Specifically, since you seem so confident, what in these treaties did they take issue with? What consequences did they suffer due to these treaties that made them hold a grudge for decades until joining the axis was deemed the natural thing to do?

I think the problem was sooner the way the war ended than the peace terms agreed upon. The war didn't penetrate German borders; the German military was not 'thoroughly' defeated (though, really, it was not going to put up much resistance in October 1918 given the state it was in). This meant that whilst ordinary Germans had verifiably endured great hardships during the war, it wasn't clear to them that they had actually lost the war: hence the 'stab in the back'. Contrast this with 1945, when the bitterness of defeat became incredibly clear to Germans.

This didn't make Nazism or WW2 inevitable, but it created the situation in which the Right could tell the tale of a strong, proud Germany, on the verge of victory, being fucked over by socialists hell-bent on ruining the country. Versailles was just part of this myth.

The myth is not of Hitler's making, though. It was peddled by Ludendorff and others at the end of the war to deflect blame. The German public was kept unaware of the disastrous state of the army at the end of the war as well as the fact that the state finances had been run into the ground. Going all in the German government had also taken on huge debts which they only realistically could repay if the war was won and they could have France, Russia and the UK pay war indemnities. This was a failed gambit that proved to be extremely costly.

Edit: typos (thanks autocorrect).

Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. Meanwhile Hungary too needed to rely on fascist Germany and Italy for trade after it too was hit hard by the depression, true it also joined the axis also due to the peace treaties but other nations such as Turkey did not join the axis also after having its empire dismantled.

One of the big lies that Hitler told was that German leaders stabbed Germany in the back, and the treaty of Versailles was a betrayal of the country. This was a point of view that was very appealing in Munich , but may have had only minority appeal in Berlin or Hamburg or other cities. National Socialists were successful in winning over the nation because they were first successful in Munich. The subsequent march to power of the Nazis is unique and absolutely unpredictable - it was not fated because of the depression or because of the treaty of Versailles. It was accomplished by turning a toe-hold into a foot hold and eventually turning a fire at the Reichstag into a cause for a power grab, then consolidating power by a night of murdering potential threats etc etc etc.

Denmark? That skeleton is clearly from Holland.

The successor states of the Austrian-Hungarian empire joined the Axis, why are you acting like they were peachy with the terms?

Many other treaties of Paris such as the treaty of Trianon and Saint Germain on Hungary and Austria were considerable harsher in comparison, their empire was dismantled and repetitions as well as demilitarisation were agreed. The money Germany was paying for the treaty of Versailles was helped by the Dawes plan where America helped Germany with its debts. This allowed Germany recover its economy in the late 1920’s, an era called the ‘golden era’ for the Weimar Republic after its turbulent early days of hyper inflation and political upheaval.

>Versailles added a bunch of injustice layers to a bunch of places.

The Treaty of Versailles was only between Germany and the allies; it didn't involve other states, unless you're thinking of newly formed states which emerged from previous German territory, like Poland.

Unfortunately, they arguably had no better choice.

France was understandably seeking the maximum reparations aso. they could and the USA obviously wanted to leave the expensive business of actively being involved in major wars / occupations to go back to being a passive profiteer and not an active participant, not to mention the Soviet threat looming in the background.

The UK fell kind of in the middle, not being as vengeful as France and not as relatively speaking, uninvolved as the USA and as a result, they all elected to compromise.

It was honestly a fairly decent outcome given the circumstances but fate ( in a non religious deterministic sense ) had other ideas.

[deleted]

In my understanding the treaty simply did not reflect the actual longterm power balance after the war, aka, the entry of the USA had shifted the situation in favour of the entente to the point where they could temporarily enforce a much harsher treaty that was not really rooted in the actual battlefield strength of France & the UK and when the USA eventually withdrew they were simply not able to reinforce their position accordingly, resulting in the enormous revanchism in Germany being able to flourish.

Basically: the treaty was too harsh but not in terms of its content but because it was fundamentally based on a participant who, for many years, had essentially only wanted to passively profit from the war economically and had practically no serious political goals when it finally entered into it aside from securing its returns which were not a result of targeted funding but the entente dominance at sea limiting the ability of the central powers to engage in trade across the Atlantic.

I know this second part is unpopular but I think that it holds up well when we look the political developments at the time.

TLDR: the central powers were not as weak as the treaty which was enforced with the help of the USA, which resulted in the collapse of the power war system when the latter left the picture again.

PS: a harsher treaty was not possible because the USA understood that if it wanted to dismantle Germany, this would have likely lead to the former being the one who would have to ultimately become involved in an unprofitable longterm commitment to secure half of Europe against Soviet communism, which granted, is quite ironic due to the later developments, not to mention that it’s anti colonial legacy meant that it as not willing to give the remaining European colonial empires all they wanted on the continent.

I would draw a link to what happend to France after the Napoleonic wars - the US-American goal was to establish a balanced Europe, mirroring the actions of great powers roughly a century prior.

[removed]

> The reparations Germany had to pay as stated in the treaty of Versailles was a infeasible amount of money

The treaty didn't stipulate any amounts to be paid, that was from a later commission.

The amounts determined weren't onerous, and instead based on Germany's capacity to pay. A lot of it was to be paid in in-kind goods for, surprise, literally destroying the industry of Belgium and North Eastern France, looting, etc...

Scholars today no longer view the treaty as having been "onerous" or that the reparations were "infeasible". Sally Marks was one of the first historians to make those arguments, and it has been strengthened by the work of later writers such as Margaret Macmillan and Adam Tooze.

Germany was permitted a civil defense force. It was explicitly forbidden an army offensive capabilities. The abolition of the General Staff was a critical part of that, because the senior officers in any army, the product of generations of training and experience, is something that would be extraordinarily hard to reproduce. The Allies didn't merely want to hamper Germany's ability to wage war, they wanted to actively terminate it. The Weimar government, by very quietly breaching the Treaty as regards to the General Staff, by calling them "civil servants" and then giving them the space and the time to pick up the pieces and begin planning for the next war, ultimately handed Hitler not only the expertise to wage another war, but the actual plans for waging that war.

Thank you for your suggestion

The standard thinking among academics is actually different - that the Treaty of Versailles was EITHER far too harsh OR far too lenient.

They needed to either choose to not build resentment and not load up punishing reparations, OR they needed to go much much further and make it literally impossible for Germany to have rebuilt at all, probably including standing troop contingents for a a decade or so.

They instead chose the middle ground, which was the worst of both worlds.

Having an army is not a crime, unless we're taking Versailles into account, so I'm not sure one should blame Weimar government for pursuing this.

Whether Nazism would have risen or not if Versailles had had easier terms is one history's great "what if" stories. What is clear, however, is that even the Weimar Republic was planning for a potential sequel to the Great War. One of the provisions of Versailles, the abolition of the Germany Army's General Staff, was secretly undermined by the Weimar government. The members of the General Staff were taken out of their uniforms, dressed up as civilian civil servants, put on the government payroll, and then spent the next decade planning the next war. When Hitler rose to power, he had a German Army; the high ranking officers, and all that was needed was the time to put the flesh on the bones.

Churchill's explanation was that the public sentiment in the Allied countries, and in particular in France, made it impossible for the Allied politicians and diplomats to do anything other than cut out pounds of flesh. A generation had been cut down in its prime, and the public weren't interested in nuance, only in punishment.

I didn’t propose it was proven by anything. You know, people also say aliens made the nazca lines, and when they do they harp on aliens being the only ones who could see the lines from above. I disagree with that logic, but i don’t harbor vitriol and scorn for people who have ideas and want to ask questions.

We don’t know a lot of stuff about ancient people, what they knew, or what motivated them.

> No that doesn’t make any sense unless an infant is going to start bean counting a few weeks after being born. Otherwise how does it make sense to you?

Correct, that would be absurd. But a baby born that time if year maybe raised to help fulfil that role when they grow up.

I didn’t say birth sign imbued people with magical talent at birth.

TIL AsahiSuperDry.com is the website I thought Asahi.com would be.

Thank god you didn’t…

But all kidding aside. What do you think is the reason German was so harshly punished?

I find it an oversimplification. Fascism and communism were on the rise in Europe anyways, ww2 was inevitable I think, in one way or another. Treaty of Versailles was just a pretext, like the stab in the back myth, trying to move blame away from extremists. Many countries suffered economically after ww2, not just Germans. Nazis would've done the same things regardless.