Peter2 wrote:n7axw wrote:I am thinking about the rather unsatisfactory to WW I that in essence left Germany intact to fall into the clutches of Hitler and the Nazis . . .
[snip]
Don
-
So was I.
But it wasn't as simple as that. I had a very good friend in Germany years ago (now tragically passed away, and still greatly missed) who was a very good historian. I still remember listening to him one evening, over a couple of bottles of a gorgeous Frankenwein, while he laid out the historical threads that spun from a pragmatic political decision by the Emperor Otto I in the 900's and led with almost psychohistoric (thank you, Isaac Asimov!) inevitability to World War I. It was one of the most enlightening explanations I'd ever heard, and how I wished my history teachers at school had had his skills!
Briefly, and if I can remember aright, Otto's use of the Prince-Bishops created a ruling class with both civil and religious authority, and who governed lands belonging to both their families and the Church. When they died, their family lands descended to their heirs, but the Church lands reverted to the Church. Over the years, this led to an increasing fragmentation of land ownership, until it reached the point at which a guy who could legitimately call himself a Markgraf had authority over land no bigger than a couple of city blocks, and the reputation of the German aristocracy dropped through the floor.
Coupled with that was the fact that neighbours didn't always get on with each other, and there were usually a few local conflicts going on in various places. Eventually this low-level warfare led to the rise of professional soldiers to help with the fighting – the Prussians. As an aside it's enlightening to take a car trip through Southern Germany and see how many (partially) walled towns are still around.
Imagine the state of affairs when Bismarck came along. A country whose ruling class had been looked down on for centuries by the aristocracies of other countries was suddenly unified and powerful, and it had some scores to pay off. And it had a first-class army at its command with which to do it.
Apologies to those more knowledgeable if I've got it wrong, but that's pretty well what I remember of that evening.
.
Germany was not left intact, realistically speaking, at the end of WW I. Here's an explanation that I passed by an economist who assured me it's basically correct:
In order to win the war, France and England borrowed huge sums of money from the US. When the war ended, both had two main objectives at Versailles: (1) make sure that Germany never again could make war on them, and (2) get from Germany the money to repay the US. Although they could not see this, the two objectives were not only contradictory but would make it more likely that they could not repay the US, as economist Keynes (who attended the assembly) wrote in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. When Wilson arrived and insisted that (1) was unacceptable, the result was a compromise that in many ways was worse: The French were given control not only of Lorraine (majority French, lost in 1870) but of Alsace (majority German), which contained the Saar, the coal mines that fueled most of German industry (btw, that's why Albert Schweitzer left Alsace for the Congo). Iirc, the control was provisional, until Germany paid off its debt in full, which France and England could pretty well guess would never happen. Meanwhile, Germany was required to pay off France's and England's debt on an unrealistically aggressive schedule.
The result was inevitable: Germany's new democratic government could come nowhere near paying off the debt, and yet France and England piled on the penalties. In desperation, the German government deliberately induced massive inflation, that essentially tried to fob off F&E with money that would become immediately worthless upon receipt. The message was received, at the price of serious suffering for the German middle classes: France and England eased their demands, and the German economy began to recover.
However, this left France and England in hock up to their eyeballs to the US. In a major display of shortsightedness, the US refused to forgive any part of the debt (President Coolidge is quoted as saying, "They hired [borrowed] the money, didn't they?"). The resulting stress on the English economy, transmitted to the US, is one of the major causes of the Great Depression.
But there was another bad decision causing the Great Depression and its bad effects on the US, France, Germany, and England: Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer) and his insistence on adhering to the "gold standard." This required that the English currency trade at a fixed rate against the gold that nations guarded as an "international currency". This had been in effect over a long time, and became increasingly unrealistic, especially in the depressed conditions of the mid-20s.
Btw, we are accustomed -- and rightly so -- to think of Winston Churchill as a usually-right savior of Britain and the Allies, and during WW II he certainly lived up to that billing. However, any fair assessment of his performance up to the mid-1930s would conclude that he may have done GB more harm than good, including his handling of the Irish problem, Gallipoli, and his stubbornness about the gold standard, which Keynes, for one, was vociferous in denouncing. What appears to have changed him was in fact his magisterial historical writings in the early to mid 1930s, in which his research apparently changed his views on many things.
At any rate, the resulting Great Depression (exacerbated in the US by Hoover's refusal to add money to the economy even by paying the Bonus Marchers, and by Churchill's gold standard in Europe, but ameliorated in France by movement to more of a floating exchange rate) fell hardest on Germany, still crippled by loss of the Saar and in hock to some extent. The far-right nativist movements that spring up in such circumstances were therefore greatest in Germany, giving Hitler the opportunity to win nearly 40% of the vote in the election (but by no means a majority of the Parliament) and then pressure Hindenburg via his fervent-Nazi daughter to give Hitler the leadership role in the Weimar Republic.
Hitler then immediately embarked on a massive program of make-work jobs that also served the purpose of indoctrination. This would have failed (indications are that Germany was at one point within weeks of going bankrupt) except for one of the great ironies of history: right at that point the European Great Depression began to lift and French and English companies began to have money to invest in Germany, which in turn led to Hitler being able to pay his debts -- and you know the rest.
