A Humilating and Vengeful Peace...a German View

[South]

Good morning Sid,

Re: "3)...while Germany after Versailles...delayed..." its indemnity;

The obligations of the treaty situation were much worse to the point that the indemnity could not even be established using a rounded-off banker's number for the computation.

The London Ultimatum of May 1921 established an amount due at 132 billion gold Marks.

The headache was that the Reparations Commission was allowed to demand interest on the unpaid portion of the reparation when the Commission believed there was a German financial recovery. Uncertainity about the total debt amount coupled to no inducement to run financial surpluses created more of a mess.

Germany was making indemnity payments but do factor in the November 1918 worker revolution that overthrew the Kaisertum. Reparations slowed to the Allies so as to allow the Weimar Republic to subsidize food, coal, railroad employment and coalmine employment so as to prevent a 2nd worker revolt.


Warm regards,

Bob

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi South,

The situation was further confused by German inflation, which some believe was initially stoked deliberately by German central bankers in order to ease the financial burden of Versailles.

My personal opinion is that the Germans decided they weren't going to pay if they could avoid it - and to a large extent they did avoid it.

Contrast this with the huge amounts of money Germany has voluntarily put into the EEC and EU since 1955.

I haven't seen any figures on this, but one has to wonder whether paying off the Versailles indemnity wouldn't have been cheaper than subsidizing the EEC and EU for the last 55 years.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Pavel Novak]

I think that reparations were prepared in that way that german inflation has no effect on value of payment. Inflation however allowed to german government to minimalize value of its debt to private german accounts.

[steverodgers801]

ALso much of the money used to pay the debt came from loans forwarded by the US.

[Qvist]

A really proper treatment of this vast and complex issue would have required much, much more space than is advisable or possible, so pray excuse me for keeping the following rather pointed, and with less nuance than one could ideally wish:

Germany naturally had no reason to be pleased with the treaty, but the hysterical sense of injustice that the OP in this thread faithfully reproduces with no attempt at a critical perspective is not a very fruitful basis on which to assess it on a more disinterested basis.
Ultimately, its chief weakness, in my opinion, lay not in the terms it imposed on Germany as such, but rather in the failure to construct and maintain an international system that could translate it into some sort of politically functioning Europe in the following decades. The simple and commonplace view is that the treaty was too harsh, and that the system therefore failed, resulting in a revanchist Germany and another world war.
This is in my opinion a much too simple analysis. The treaty might well have provided a Europe Germany could have lived with, although it was not perhaps the most promising of starting points. The chief cause for the collapse of the Versailles system was the inability and unwillingness of the victorious powers to enforce it. The americans withdrew from it altogether (save on the point of international finance and the bonds that created), the british were unwilling to make any practical commitment towards enforcing it on the continent and the French lacked the will (and to be fair, probably the capacity) to enforce it on their own. The Stresemann period appears to show that the Versailles framework had sufficient flexibility for it to be possible to accomodate Germany within it, given sufficient will – although significantly, it also shows that the price for this was de facto revisions of the treaty. Stresemann was in effect able to negotiate not just the re-admittance of Germany to the international system, but also the de facto abolition of reparations.
When Stresemann died, Germany was well on the way back to participation in a european order where it might well have a meaningful and satisfactory place. three major stumbling blocks remained. The first of these was the war guilt clause, which would have been smart by the victors not to include, and even smarter by the Germans not to develop a rather hysterical hang-up about once it was there – an essentially irrelevant and emotional issue. The second was the limitations on German military strength. The third was the territorial issues in the East.

Europe could not work without integrating Germany – this is the basic admission that underlays Stresemanns achievements. Given that, the only solution to above three problems lay in evolving some sort of European order that involved the three major powers in some sort of partnership, and where Britain and France acted in unison to credibly oppose any unilateral German revision of the Versailles order, while simultaneously giving Germany sufficient incentive to choose partnership rather than confrontation. Stick and carrot: Economic, political and security benefits from co-operation, but clear and effective opposition if Germany moved beyond certain well-defined lines. In retrospect, it is often forgotten how strong the cards held by the western allies actually were, how precarious Hitlers position was. Given for instance a clear and predictable willingness to respond forcefully against any remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Hitlers project becomes impossible. With Germany industrial base wide open and unprotected to French action, Germany is simply not in a position to act independently.

But the problem is less in figuring out how the Versailles order might have been made to work than in reconciling this to the political realities prevailing in all of the involved countries. Stresemann exemplifies not just the potential of a policy of european integration, but also its limitations. He was coming up against harsh political opposition at home, where it would have required gargantuan political genius to maneuver a course that required not getting too worked up about the war guilt nonsense and at least a temporary acceptance of forced disarmament and territorial losses while embracing a partnership with former enemies that did not offer equality as a precondition, but only as a future goal. In war-torn France, there was only so much willingness and ability to act as the Versailles policeman, and also to re-accomodate a Germany for which the French would have preferred a harsher peace. British policy was even more limited by a markedly pacific public opinion, with the result that british governments in effect abdicated from any ambition to enforce the Versailles order in partnership with the French, even before the Germans started to seriously challenge it.

And that, in my opinion, is the greatest condemnation against the Versailles treaty, and for that matter against the advisability of a major war in Europe in the second decade of the 20th century, for any major european power: It resulted in a basically unmanageable Europe. There simply was not the will or capacity to do what needed to be done in order for such a Europe to function – and that inability and unwillingness was general. In view of this, it seems relatively obvious in retrospect that Europe would have been better off with a different kind of treaty, although it is no easy task to judge what might have worked. A much more lenient or a much more punitive treaty would also have come with attached complications.....

[Qvist]

Well, Scheidemann's words leave scarcely any doubt that as a result of the "vae victus" of the governments of the Allied and Associated powers, Germany's very existance as a prospersous and unified nation was brought into question.

That is plainly a very great exaggeration.

As far-sighted men of the time correctly observed, the Constitution of the "Weimar Republic" (1919-1933) was, in a real sense, not the one the German parliament formally adopted on August 11, 1919. It was rather imposed by the dictated Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

Again, a very great exaggeration. In any event, that would not automatically make it a constitution onerous to Germany. In fact, most Germans would today regard it as a vast advance on what preceded it, not to mention what followed it. It was, by and large, a normal liberal, democratic constitution. That this was not what the average German preferred in 1918 does not neccessarily mean that it was bad for Germany, or that it could not have gained greater support over time.

As a result of the Treaty, each of the numerous governments of the "Weimar Republic" was inevitably faced with the same insurmountable problem. Each administration was obliged to carry out the Treaty's countless oppressive and devastating conditions, and thus act as an "agent" of the victorious powers. Each new government thus unavoidably discredited itself in the eyes of the people it represented, and therefore committed a kind of political suicide.

That crosses the line over into hysteria. Also, it is factually wrong to paint successive German governments as the helpless victims of a treaty they were compelled to blindly carry out. Within a decade, the German government had in fact managed to effect major revisions of the conditions. They could have achieved even more if it wasn't for the fact that German politics was so dominated by the sort of far right fundamentalist idiocy you happily repeat.

One political leader, though, defiantly vowed from the outset never to permit himself or his party to be blackmailed. This man was Adolf Hitler, and like many of his fellow citizens, were appalled and deeply shocked by the conditions that had developed in Germany, and he resolved to fight the "Diktat" of Versailles. The catastropic state of affairs he found in Munich after his return from the front defied his ability to describe them. Like most of his comrades, Hitler was drawn into the war in 1914 to fight for a free, strong and proud Germany. Now, in 1919, the 30 year old Hitler had to witness the establishment in Bavaria of a "Soviet republic" headed by communists and Jews. In his eyes, military defeat had given way to national catastrophe.

Oh, do spare us the emotive nonsense. That's nothing more than bla-bla to rouse the beer cellar rabble. The horrors of the bavarian revolution (not to mention of its suppression, in which Hitlers co-opinionists commited excesses that at least equalled those of the reds) resulted from Germany's losing the war, not from the Versailles treaty.


Generally: What you are repeating here is quite simply the nazi/far right nationalist creation myth. It is not there to describe reality, but to legitimise a political program through targeted distortion and exaggeration. It constructs an inflexible and monolitihic view of the peace as an absolute act of violence against the German nation, designed solely to enslave future generations of Germans. This in turn legitmises the rejection of the constitution, and with it the institutions of Weimar society, and by extension the whole legality of the Weimar order. This legitimises the sort of fisticuffs politics they liked to engage in. It is also a ready-made arguement against any policy of moderation, with the advantage that its applicability doesn't require the exercise of any brain cells either on the side of the speaker or the recipient. If that's how you want to approach the issues of the day, good luck.

[Michate]

My personal opinion is that the Germans decided they weren't going to pay if they could avoid it - and to a large extent they did avoid it.

Actually, Germany paid some money for WW1 reparations until last year. At least there were some news in the press about the end of such payments.

Contrast this with the huge amounts of money Germany has voluntarily put into the EEC and EU since 1955.

I would not like to have seen the reaction of our "friends and value sharers", if our state rulers had not decided "voluntarily" to pump so much money into basically each and every international or super-statist institution.

[michael mills]

Actually, Germany paid some money for WW1 reparations until last year. At least there were some news in the press about the end of such payments.

The last instalment by the German Government was paid in 2010.

As part of the agreement by which the Federal Republic of Germany gained full sovereignty in 1955, it was required, as recognised successor to the German State that had been abolished in 1945, to pay off the interest debt that had been accrued by that state since its cessation of reparations payments at the time of the Great Depression (I forget the exact year, but before Hitler came to power).

However, that repayment was postponed until German reunification, ie until the Soviet Occupation Zone had been integrated into the FRG.

When reunification was achieved in 1990, the German Government issued bonds to raise the money to pay off the interest debt. Since then it redeemed the bonds by annual instalments, the last instalment being redeemed in 2010.

That is what was meant by the media hype about Germany taking until 2010 to pay off the reparations for the First World War.

[michael mills]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2 ... y-of-guilt


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -ends.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... yment.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11442892

[pugsville]

The Recent Payments were NOT reparations payments. They were repayments on money borrowed 1919-1929. (while a large amount was used to make reparation payments it was also used to fund the budget deficit of the Weimar republic). There was a economic conference in the 1950's I think were West Germany agreed to repay some of the Wiemar debts 1919-1929, which included a clause that some further payments were to made in the event of German Unification. While widely reported as reparations payments they were NOT.

[JLEES]

The 1918 treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, respectfully, dictating the surrenders of Russia and Romania were unbelievably harsh German, Austria-Hungarian imposed settlements that stripped away lands and demanded reparation payments from there defeated foes. It should also be remembered that the Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest treaties were dictated on their vanquished foes a year before the Versailles Treaty. Yes, the Versailles Treaty was also unbelievably unfair and harsh, but had the Germans obtained the upper hand there is little doubt they would have imposed a reverse retaliatory treaty on the French that would have been equally punitive and humiliating. In fact, recorded history strongly suggests this would have been reality and this is the lesson to be learned from imposing these types of demands on your vanquished enemies. Although the Nazis did in fact have some justification for complaining about the ramifications of the Versailles Treaty, there is no reason to believe or evidence on planet Earth to think these guys would have ever played by the Queen’s Rules if they got the upper hand on anyone else.
James

[mlv-1967]

Brest-Litovsk was harsh, but the losses were of territories that were not inhabited by Russians in the first place. Versailles was different - Germany's losses were composed of several purely German areas.

[mlv-1967]

Arguments rage on and off about whether Versailles was too harsh or not harsh enough. The truth is that - as a peace settlement - it didn't work. Why did it not work? Because a harsh treaty cannot properly be implemented unless the enemy country is fully occupied for a number of years, as in 1945. Given that the allies (with the possible exception of France) were unwilling to invade and occupy Germany in 1919 the only option was to impose a treaty on the defeated country and make dire threats if the enemy did not comply.

In truth, Versailles failed because of the unwillingness of the allies to enforce its terms. When Hitler came to power the French government could have rolled some divisions into Germany, arrested Hitler and his supporters and restored democracy. Germany did not have a proper army in 1933 and could not have put up much resistance. The idleness of the allies helped Hitler.

[JLEES]

Everything that everyone is saying is basically true, however, one shouldn't leap to the conclusion that the Germans were innocent victims at Versailles. There is a well established amount of history that indicates they were desirously looking at other peoples lands and would have acquired them had they won. Yes, much of the territory stripped away from the Russians at Brest-Litovsk was not inhabited by Russians and some of the territory stripped away from Romania was not inhabited by Romanians, but there was also very harsh repartition payments and territorial losses stripped away from the vanquished foes. I don't think anyone living in 2013 would want to launch the argument they were just treaties, as they simultaneously condemn the Versailles Treaty for its harshness. Germany also had its eye on acquiring territory with no Germans living on it prior to their loss in 1918. I think when objectively looking at Brest-Litovak, Bucharest and Versailles treaties one can come to the conclusion non of them were fair and just settlements. Otherwise, one would completely miss the higher cognitive point of this discussion.

[mlv-1967]

Everything that everyone is saying is basically true, however, one shouldn't leap to the conclusion that the Germans were innocent victims at Versailles. There is a well established amount of history that indicates they were desirously looking at other peoples lands and would have acquired them had they won. Yes, much of the territory stripped away from the Russians at Brest-Litovsk was not inhabited by Russians and some of the territory stripped away from Romania was not inhabited by Romanians, but there was also very harsh repartition payments and territorial losses stripped away from the vanquished foes. I don't think anyone living in 2013 would want to launch the argument they were just treaties, as they simultaneously condemn the Versailles Treaty for its harshness. Germany also had its eye on acquiring territory with no Germans living on it prior to their loss in 1918. I think when objectively looking at Brest-Litovak, Bucharest and Versailles treaties one can come to the conclusion non of them were fair and just settlements. Otherwise, one would completely miss the higher cognitive point of this discussion.

Yes, but we are not talking about the German war aims here, we are talking about the Allied terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. The allies made the usual noises about 'democracy' etc but the imposed peace did not reflect the democratic wishes of people according to principles of self-determination. You cannot judge the allies by the policies of the German Empire, which was an authoritarian monarchy with a militaristic tradition; you have to judge the allies by their own self-proclaimed standards and values.