DID WORLD WAR II HAVE TO HAPPEN?

Versailles: The Treaty That Ended One War and Lit the Fuse for Another

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The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, was the grand finale of a cataclysmic war that was, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” Instead, it became the prologue to an even more horrifying conflict twenty years later.

The question that lingers over the pages of history is whether this treaty was the primary cause of World War II or merely one of many unfortunate factors contributing to Hitler's rise and global conflict. Many Germans believe that its draconian conditions triggered the avalanche that National Socialism was able to surf in on.

So was the treaty a lesson in excessive punishment and political myopia, or would Hitler and the Nazis have emerged regardless of what the Allies decided in 1919?

The historical determinism fallacy warns against obsessing about single or selective variables and saying, “If this didn’t happen, or did, then this wouldn’t have happened.” We don’t have a parallel planet to test our theories.

We are never sure, but neither do we let the fact we can’t have absolute certainty defer us from some speculation.

Was World War II just a result of a perfect storm, with the Versailles Treaty just one factor, the metaphorical equivalent of clashing air masses?

1. Did the Versailles Treaty’s effects on Germany help lead the world into World War II?

YES.

Reparations: The Debt That Could Never Be Paid

If Versailles was designed to humiliate and cripple Germany, then it succeeded. Stripped of its industrial heartlands, Germany had to pay 132 billion gold marks in reparations—an amount so absurd that even the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Paris negotiations, declared it an act of economic suicide.

This amount would be CAD 727 billion today, 135% of the Canadian Federal budget and almost $23,000 per Canadian taxpayer.

Heilige Scheiße! (Holy shit!)

In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes warned that impoverishing Germany would lead to “political upheavals.” Although he oddly became more famous for his views on fiscal policy, history has misrepresented him.

In Germany, following WWI, hyperinflation soon took over Germany. By 1923, workers were famously paid in wheelbarrows of money, and a loaf of bread could cost billions of marks by nightfall.

It is difficult to preach the virtues of democracy (or climate change mitigation, for that matter) to people who can’t afford food, and it is even harder to maintain a stable society when economic despair fuels extremism.

Hitler understood this perfectly.

He used Germany’s economic collapse to push his narrative of betrayal and vengeance, turning Versailles into his most effective recruiting tool. The support for this narrative was not utterly unreasonable; many World War I soldiers felt betrayed by the capitulation that brought the Great War to an unexpected conclusion and a humiliating defeat.

We all were taught the origins of WWI in high school, and hopefully, students still are—unless the boards have replaced history class with weekly updates on new gender permutations.