'You tell us that the situation today is like 1914, when the world was falling into a war it did not want but could not stop...That is not true. Your Majesty, we are today in a period like the 1930s, when a madman decided to annex his neighbours and the world did nothing. That led to World War I I -Saudi ambassador Bandar Bin Sultan Al -Saud, to King Hussein of Jordan, assessing Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. This overly simplified version of why a second major war broke out only twenty years after 'the war to end wars', is a view shared by surprisingly many people; it was all Hitler's fault. But the reasons behind the outbreak of World War II is many and complex, some people are in fact claiming that the period from 1914 to 1945 was one thirty year long war, but what I am going to focus on in this assignment is the way the Versailles Treaty and the international community's ineffectiveness in dealing with the actions of Adolf Hitler contributed to the outbreak of this war.'The war (World War I) killed perhaps 8 to 10 million soldiers, cost some 24.000,000,000, destroyed the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German empires leaving central and eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Near and Middle East without their traditional rulers. The Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War, was supposed to be the solution to all this, but it is by many looked upon as a failure and one of the main reasons for the outbreak of World War II. It was signed by the main defeated power, Germany, in Louis XIV's palace at Versailles on 28 June 1919, and it takes its name appropriately enough from the place it was signed. The fact that it has been looked upon as 'a failure, an inadequate answer to the world's problems in 1919 which sowed the seeds of future conflict', is according to Alan Sharp not entirely fair. In his article: Versailles 1919: 'A Tragedy of Dis...
