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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 Disappointment' he states that: 'It was because the great powers had started a war in 1914 that over 30 Allied and associated powers gathered to make peace in 1919. Four years of industrialised warfare on an unprecedented scale had solved few problems, made many worse and created new ones.' The main man behind the settlement was the American president Woodrow Wilson who also tried to identify the causes of the First World War. The Versailles Treaty was quite long, consisting of several hundred clauses, but I am only going mention the four most important features: 1. New borders for Germany. The new borders did not favour the Germans at all, in fact they were rather hard for the Germans to accept. In the west, Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, this removed one of the grievances that had made France eager for war in 1914. But the French did not stop with that, they also detached the coal and steel producing are of Saar from Germany and put it under the administration of the new League of Nations. In the east, new borders between Germany and Poland were drawn, but the 1919 border was no fairer than any other. It differed from the pre-war border only by including more Germans under Polish jurisdiction. 2. New states. A number of new states were created in central and eastern Europe on the principle of self-determination. The state of Austria consisting mainly of German-speaking members of the old Austrian Empire was forbidden to unite with Germany, and the new state of Czechoslovakia included about 2 million German-speaking people. 3. German disarmament. The Versailles Settlement imposed severe restrictions on German armaments, the army was limited to 100,000 men, the navy was limited to 15,000 men and a few ships and an air force was forbidden altogether. Areas of Germany, like the Rhine area bordering to France, were turned into a demilitarised zone. This meant that no soldiers could be stationed or any fortifications built in these areas. 4. Reparations. The Germans had imposed reparations on the French after 1871, to make them pay for the war, in 1919 a lot of British and French politicians were determined to make Germany pay for the great war that was just finished. In the end the demands were far beyond any reasonable ability the Germans had to pay. No figure was actually set and the treaty merely stated that the Germans would pay. The section on reparations also specified that Germany could be occupied by foreign troops if it failed to meet its payments. Germany never thought the Versailles Settlement was fair, as it based its judgements on three premises: that Germany had lost; that it fought a dirty war; and that it started the war, Germany never accepted any of these three premises. Other things the Germans had trouble accepting was: Alsace and Lorraine were taken away on the argument that it is wrong to detach territory from another state, at the same time the Saar was being detached from Germany. While Germans in the Sudetenland, Austria and South Tyrol was denied the right to national self-determination, new states were being set up everywhere on this principle. They also had severe restrictions on their armaments, and they were supposed to pay an unreasonable high reparation bill for the war. Also it was a dictated peace, Germany was not invited to the Versailles conference, they were just handed the completed treaty and told to sign within seven days. Looking at all this it is easy to draw the conclusion that the Versailles Treaty, due to its way to hard treatment of the Germans, was responsible for the rise of Hitler and therefore the World War II. But it could also be said that it was a mistake because of the lack of will to enforce it by the victors, and that if they had enforced it with the same strictness it was drawn up it might actually have worked. Another, in the view a lot of people, significant reason for the outbreak of World War II, was the international community's (especially Britain and France) ineffectiveness in dealing with the actions of Hitler. In 1932, at the time Hitler was made Chancellor it was not that many years left before the war broke out, but the European powers were very little prepared for it. In Britain in 1933 the Chiefs of Staff warned that the level of Britain's armed forces was not adequate to defend it self or its overseas dominion and possessions against attack by a foreign state. In France the conditions were not much better, they were lacking both war material and ammunition. This is off course could at least partly explain Britain and France's unwillingness to confront Hitler when he started to make aggressive moves. In Germany it took Hitler four years to destroy any chance for an opposition to him, in 1933 he used the burning of the Reichstag as an opportunity to destroy the parties on the left. In the summer of 1934 he and the German army broke the power of the Nazi left, and all the trade unions, professional organisations and so on were abolished. The same summer the old President Hindenburg died, and by a coup Hitler established himself as head of state. In 1938 he took over control of the army when there was a quarrel between Goering and the SS, and the army leadership. By October 1938 Hitler had entire control over the most powerful nation in Europe. During the mid to late 1930s, Germany sharply increased their military power and carried out policies of expansion at the expense of its neighbours, and the other major powers of the time failed to act together and decisively against this growing threat. The United States being so far away maintained a isolationist policy, while Britain and France could not make up their mind whether to be accommodating or resistant. Russia on the other hand remained largely reserved, in a climate of mutual suspicion. This period is mainly one of indecision and appeasement of the accelerating demands of Germany. The first act of aggression was on 7 March 1936 when Hitler sent 22,000 troops to re-occupy Rhineland, which according to the Versailles Settlement was to be a demilitarised zone. Neither France nor Britain seemed to eager to do any constructive about this, even though in Britain public opinion was shocked by this neglect of the Versailles Settlement and the freely negotiated Treaty of Locarno. The next aggressive act came 12 March when German troops marched in and occupied Austria, and started threatening Czechoslovakia. France and the Soviet Union was obliged to help the Czechs if they were attacked, and Britain was saying that if France was going to war over this matter they would also go to war. But then Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier made a agreement that gave Germany the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia, and Hitler assured them that he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe. But then 15 March 1939 Germany yet again committed a aggressive act, it invaded Czechoslovakia, until this date British people had tried to believe that 'Peace for our time' meant that there would be no more changes in Europe. Now they realised that Hitler's word could never be trusted again, but yet again they backed off. Finally the last aggressive act, the act that Britain and France could not tolerate and which actually lead to the outbreak of a second major conflict only twenty years after 'the war to end wars' took place, the invasion of Poland on three separate fronts 1 September. On 3 September war was declared by Britain, and a few hours later by France. The explanation that the sole responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War lies on Hitler is way to simplistic, because as I have tried to show the Versailles Settlement must take much of the blame for the events that took place after 1919. The reason I am saying this is because of the very hard way Germany was treated after the First World War, which left the German people feeling very mistreated, and the big bill they were given sent Germany into economic chaos. This again meant that a very large number of the German people ended up without work, and it is understandable that a population like that would welcome a man, a good speaker, that promised them work and to straighten out the unfair way they felt they had been treated. The other major powers of the time do also deserve a bit of the blame because if they had paid more attention and not acted so weak towards Hitler in the start, maybe everything would have developed differently. 1. Donald Watt Cameron. How War Came. (London: William Heinemann Limited, 2. William R. Keylor. The Twentieth-Century World: An International History. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 3. Robert J. Lieber. No Common Power: Understanding International Relations. (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995) 4. Alan Sharp. Versailles 1919: 'A Tragedy of Disappointment'. Printed in Peter: Catterall & Richard Vinen. Europe 1914-1945. (Heinemann, 1994) 5. A. J. P. Taylor. Origins of the Second World War. (London: Hamish Hamilton 6. John Whittam. The Origins of the Second World War. Printed in: Peter Catterall & Richard Vinen. Europe 1914-1945. (Heinemann, 1994) '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 Disappointment' he states that: 'It was because the great powers had started a war in 1914 that over 30 Allied and associated powers gathered to make peace in 1919. Four years of industrialised warfare on an unprecedented scale had solved few problems, made many worse and created new ones.' The main man behind the settlement was the American president Woodrow Wilson who also tried to identify the causes of the First World War. The Versailles Treaty was quite long, consisting of several hundred clauses, but I am only going mention the four most important features: 1. New borders for Germany. The new borders did not favour the Germans at all, in fact they were rather hard for the Germans to accept. In the west, Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, this removed one of the grievances that had made France eager for war in 1914. But the French did not stop with that, they also detached the coal and steel producing are of Saar from Germany and put it under the administration of the new League of Nations. In the east, new borders between Germany and Poland were drawn, but the 1919 border was no fairer than any other. It differed from the pre-war border only by including more Germans under Polish jurisdiction. 2. New states. A number of new states were created in central and eastern Europe on the principle of self-determination. The state of Austria consisting mainly of German-speaking members of the old Austrian Empire was forbidden to unite with Germany, and the new state of Czechoslovakia included about 2 million German-speaking people. 3. German disarmament. The Versailles Settlement imposed severe restrictions on German armaments, the army was limited to 100,000 men, the navy was limited to 15,000 men and a few ships and an air force was forbidden altogether. Areas of Germany, like the Rhine area bordering to France, were turned into a demilitarised zone. This meant that no soldiers could be stationed or any fortifications built in these areas. 4. Reparations. The Germans had imposed reparations on the French after 1871, to make them pay for the war, in 1919 a lot of British and French politicians were determined to make Germany pay for the great war that was just finished. In the end the demands were far beyond any reasonable ability the Germans had to pay. No figure was actually set and the treaty merely stated that the Germans would pay. The section on reparations also specified that Germany could be occupied by foreign troops if it failed to meet its payments. Germany never thought the Versailles Settlement was fair, as it based its judgements on three premises: that Germany had lost; that it fought a dirty war; and that it started the war, Germany never accepted any of these three premises. Other things the Germans had trouble accepting was: Alsace and Lorraine were taken away on the argument that it is wrong to detach territory from another state, at the same time the Saar was being detached from Germany. While Germans in the Sudetenland, Austria and South Tyrol was denied the right to national self-determination, new states were being set up everywhere on this principle. They also had severe restrictions on their armaments, and they were supposed to pay an unreasonable high reparation bill for the war. Also it was a dictated peace, Germany was not invited to the Versailles conference, they were just handed the completed treaty and told to sign within seven days. Looking at all this it is easy to draw the conclusion that the Versailles Treaty, due to its way to hard treatment of the Germans, was responsible for the rise of Hitler and therefore the World War II. But it could also be said that it was a mistake because of the lack of will to enforce it by the victors, and that if they had enforced it with the same strictness it was drawn up it might actually have worked. Another, in the view a lot of people, significant reason for the outbreak of World War II, was the international community's (especially Britain and France) ineffectiveness in dealing with the actions of Hitler. In 1932, at the time Hitler was made Chancellor it was not that many years left before the war broke out, but the European powers were very little prepared for it. In Britain in 1933 the Chiefs of Staff warned that the level of Britain's armed forces was not adequate to defend it self or its overseas dominion and possessions against attack by a foreign state. In France the conditions were not much better, they were lacking both war material and ammunition. This is off course could at least partly explain Britain and France's unwillingness to confront Hitler when he started to make aggressive moves. In Germany it took Hitler four years to destroy any chance for an opposition to him, in 1933 he used the burning of the Reichstag as an opportunity to destroy the parties on the left. In the summer of 1934 he and the German army broke the power of the Nazi left, and all the trade unions, professional organisations and so on were abolished. The same summer the old President Hindenburg died, and by a coup Hitler established himself as head of state. In 1938 he took over control of the army when there was a quarrel between Goering and the SS, and the army leadership. By October 1938 Hitler had entire control over the most powerful nation in Europe. During the mid to late 1930s, Germany sharply increased their military power and carried out policies of expansion at the expense of its neighbours, and the other major powers of the time failed to act together and decisively against this growing threat. The United States being so far away maintained a isolationist policy, while Britain and France could not make up their mind whether to be accommodating or resistant. Russia on the other hand remained largely reserved, in a climate of mutual suspicion. This period is mainly one of indecision and appeasement of the accelerating demands of Germany. The first act of aggression was on 7 March 1936 when Hitler sent 22,000 troops to re-occupy Rhineland, which according to the Versailles Settlement was to be a demilitarised zone. Neither France nor Britain seemed to eager to do any constructive about this, even though in Britain public opinion was shocked by this neglect of the Versailles Settlement and the freely negotiated Treaty of Locarno. The next aggressive act came 12 March when German troops marched in and occupied Austria, and started threatening Czechoslovakia. France and the Soviet Union was obliged to help the Czechs if they were attacked, and Britain was saying that if France was going to war over this matter they would also go to war. But then Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier made a agreement that gave Germany the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia, and Hitler assured them that he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe. But then 15 March 1939 Germany yet again committed a aggressive act, it invaded Czechoslovakia, until this date British people had tried to believe that 'Peace for our time' meant that there would be no more changes in Europe. Now they realised that Hitler's word could never be trusted again, but yet again they backed off. Finally the last aggressive act, the act that Britain and France could not tolerate and which actually lead to the outbreak of a second major conflict only twenty years after 'the war to end wars' took place, the invasion of Poland on three separate fronts 1 September. On 3 September war was declared by Britain, and a few hours later by France. The explanation that the sole responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War lies on Hitler is way to simplistic, because as I have tried to show the Versailles Settlement must take much of the blame for the events that took place after 1919. The reason I am saying this is because of the very hard way Germany was treated after the First World War, which left the German people feeling very mistreated, and the big bill they were given sent Germany into economic chaos. This again meant that a very large number of the German people ended up without work, and it is understandable that a population like that would welcome a man, a good speaker, that promised them work and to straighten out the unfair way they felt they had been treated. The other major powers of the time do also deserve a bit of the blame because if they had paid more attention and not acted so weak towards Hitler in the start, maybe everything would have developed differently. 1. Donald Watt Cameron. How War Came. (London: William Heinemann Limited, 2. William R. Keylor. The Twentieth-Century World: An International History. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 3. Robert J. Lieber. No Common Power: Understanding International Relations. (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995) 4. Alan Sharp. Versailles 1919: 'A Tragedy of Disappointment'. Printed in Peter: Catterall & Richard Vinen. Europe 1914-1945. (Heinemann, 1994) 5. A. J. P. Taylor. Origins of the Second World War. (London: Hamish Hamilton 6. John Whittam. The Origins of the Second World War. Printed in: Peter Catterall & Richard Vinen. Europe 1914-1945. (Heinemann, 1994) Bibliography: Word Count: 3803
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