Treaty of Versailles
On 28 June 1919, the peace treaty that ended World War I was signed by Germany and the Allies at the Palace of Versailles near Paris. Allied interests were represented by the ‘Big Three’: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier George Clemenceau and US President Woodrow Wilson. The Great War had devastated Europe. Vast areas of north-western Europe were reduced to moonscapes; French and Belgian villages and towns had disappeared without trace. The conflict decimated Europe’s male population. Both sides suffered casualties on an almost incomprehensible scale. France had suffered more than 1.4 million dead, and more than 4 million wounded. In total, 8.5 million men had perished.
Many voices at Versailles held Germany responsible for the war, calling for the country to be crushed economically and militarily, rendered incapable of future aggression. Clemenceau was the most ardent advocate of this view. Backed by the French public, he wanted to bring Germany to her knees. He called for Germany to pay huge sums of money, known as reparations. Lloyd George was aware of Britain’s appetite for vengeance, and publicly promised to ‘make Germany pay’. Yet privately, anxiety produced by the Russian Revolution convinced him that Germany needed to be a bulwark against Bolshevism. If Germany was left destitute, extreme left wing politics would find support among the population. Germany should not be treated leniently, but neither should she be destroyed.
Wilson believed that Germany should be punished in a way that would lead to European reconciliation rather than revenge. Although the US public increasingly supported isolationism, Wilson called for the creation of an international peacekeeping organisation. Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’, his blueprint for the post-war world, called for self-determination for all European peoples, an end to secret treaties and European disarmament.
On 7 May, the treaty was presented to Germany. She was stripped of 13 per cent of her territory and ten per cent of her population; the border territories of Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France. Germany lost all of her colonies, 75 per cent of her iron ore deposits and 26 per cent of her coal and potash. The size of the army and navy was drastically cut, and an air force and submarines were forbidden. The Germans also had to officially accept ‘war guilt’ and pay reparations to the tune of £6,000 million.
For the Allies, the treaty had created a just peace which weakened Germany, secured the French border against attack and created an organisation to ensure future world peace, to be called the League of Nations. Yet the backlash in Germany against the Versailles ‘Diktat’ was enormous. Territorial losses to the new Polish state on the Eastern Front (where Germany had actually been victorious) outraged many Germans. The demilitarisation of the Rhineland and the incorporation of large numbers of Sudeten Germans into the new state of Czechoslovakia provoked similar feelings. Perhaps the greatest resentment, however, was caused by the ‘War Guilt Clause’, which forced Germany to accept full responsiblity for causing the war. In a nation that had lost 2 million men, and was quickly developing a myth that it had not been militarily defeated in the war, but ‘stabbed in the back’ by its own politicians, this was difficult to bear.
As Germany sought revisions to the treaty, the US Senate rejected the Versailles settlement and vetoed US membership of the League of Nations. This was to contribute to its failure as an international peacekeeping organisation in the unstable and dangerous years leading up to World War II. It was instability that the Versailles Treaty had done much to avoid and in the end created.
Nazi Germany
At the beginning of the 1930s, Adolf Hitler Nazi Party exploited widespread and deep-seated discontent in Germany to attract popular and political support. There was resentment at the crippling territorial, military and economic terms of the Versailles Treaty, which Hitler blamed on treacherous politicians and promised to overturn. The democratic post-World War I Weimar Republic was marked by a weak coalition government and political crisis, in answer to which the Nazi party offered strong leadership and national rebirth. From 1929 onwards, the worldwide economic depression provoked hyperinflation, social unrest and mass unemployment, to which Hitler offered scapegoats such as the Jews.
Hitler pledged civil peace, radical economic policies, and the restoration of national pride and unity. Nazi rhetoric was virulently nationalist and anti-Semitic. The ‘subversive’ Jews were portrayed as responsible for all of Germany’s ills.
In the federal elections of 1930 (which followed the Wall Street Crash), the Nazi Party won 107 seats in the Reichstag (the German Parliament), becoming the second-largest party. The following year, it more than doubled its seats. In January 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, believing that the Nazis could be controlled from within the cabinet. Hitler set about consolidating his power, destroying Weimar democracy and establishing a dictatorship. On 27 February, the Reichstag burned; Dutch communist Marianus van der Lubbe was found inside, arrested and charged with arson. With the Communist Party discredited and banned, the Nazis passed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which dramatically curtailed civil liberties.
In March 1933, the Nazis used intimidation and manipulation to pass the Enabling Act, which allowed them to pass laws which did not need to be voted on in the Reichstag. Over the next year, the Nazis eliminated all remaining political opposition, banning the Social Democrats, and forcing the other parties to disband. In July 1933, Germany was declared a one-party state. In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ of June 1934, Hitler ordered the Gestapo and the SS to eliminate rivals within the Nazi Party. In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws marked the beginning of an institutionalised anti-Semitic persecution which would culminate in the barbarism of the ‘Final Solution’.
Hitler’s first moves to overturn the Versailles settlement began with the rearmament of Germany, and in 1936 he ordered the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. Hitler became bolder as he realised that Britain and France were unwilling and unable to challenge German expansionism. Between 1936 and 1939, he provided military aid to Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, despite having signed the ‘Non-Intervention Agreement’. In March 1938, German troops marched into Austria; the Anschluss was forbidden under Versailles. Anglo-French commitment to appeasement and ‘peace for our time’ meant that when Hitler provoked the ‘Sudeten Crisis’, demanding that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany, Britain and France agreed to his demands at September 1938’s Munich conference. Germany’s territorial expansion eastwards was motivated by Hitler’s desire to unite German–speaking peoples, and also by the concept of Lebensraum: the idea of providing Aryan Germans with ‘living space’.
At the end of the year, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted across Germany and Austria. Kristallnacht – a state-orchestrated attack on Jewish property – resulted in the murder of 91 Jews. Twenty thousand more were arrested and transported to concentration camps. In March 1939, Germany seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia; in August Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of non-aggression with the USSR. The next step would be the invasion of Poland and the coming of World War II.
Appeasement
Appeasement, the policy of making concessions to the dictatorial powers in order to avoid conflict, governed Anglo-French foreign policy during the 1930s. It became indelibly associated with Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Although the roots of appeasement lay primarily in the weakness of post-World War I collective security arrangements, the policy was motivated by several other factors.
Firstly, the legacy of the Great War in France and Britain generated a strong public and political desire to achieve ‘peace at any price’. Secondly, neither country was militarily ready for war. Widespread pacifism and war-weariness (not too mention the economic legacy of the Great Depression) were not conducive to rearmament. Thirdly, many British politicians believed that Germany had genuine grievances resulting from Versailles. Finally, some British politicians admired Hitler and Mussolini, seeing them not as dangerous fascists but as strong, patriotic leaders. In the 1930s, Britain saw its principle threat as Communism rather that fascism, viewing authoritarian right-wing regimes as bulwarks against its spread.
The League of Nations was intended to resolve international disputes peacefully. Yet the League’s ineffectiveness soon became apparent. In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, the League condemned the action. However, without either the weight of the US or the power of its own army, it was unable to stop Japan. By 1937, Japan had launched a full-scale invasion of China. In October 1935, the League imposed economic sanctions but little more when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. In March 1936, a cautious Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland, forbidden under Versailles. The feared Anglo-French reaction never came. In the League’s council, the USSR was the only country to propose sanctions. British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ruled out the possibility.
Germany and Italy now realised that the democracies were seeking to avoid confrontation, so both countries continued to ‘test the limits’. During the Spanish Civil War, Hitler and Mussolini contravened the ‘Non-Intervention Agreement’, sending troops, equipment and planes to back the rebels. Their intervention was ignored by the international community. When Chamberlain became Prime Minister in May 1937, the pattern of appeasement had already been set. In March 1938, Hitler’s Anschluss (union) with Austria was once again met with Anglo-French impotence and inaction.
Czechoslovakia had been created under Versailles, and included a large German minority mostly living in the Sudetenland on the border with Germany. In mid-September 1938, Hitler encouraged the leader of the Sudeten Nazis to rebel, demanding union with Germany. When the Czech government declared martial law, Hitler threatened war.
On 15 September, Chamberlain met Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Without consulting the Czech authorities, he pledged to give Germany all the areas with a German population of more than 50 per cent. France was persuaded to agree. Hitler then altered his criteria, demanding all the Sudetenland. At the Munich Conference on 30 September, Britain and France agreed to his demands. Chamberlain was confident that he had secured ‘peace for our time’.
Appeasement was not without its critics. Churchill believed in a firm stand against Germany, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned in February 1938 over Britain’s continued acquiescence to fascist demands. The left-wing also attacked Chamberlain’s blindness. In March 1939, when Germany seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia, it was clear that appeasement had failed. Chamberlain now promised British support to Poland in the case of German aggression. A misguided belief in ‘peace in our time’ was replaced by a reluctant acceptance of the inevitability of war.
Credit to: http://www.history.co.uk for my source of this story
No comments:
Post a Comment