Is the Versailles treaty the main cause of ww2 and if not what else?

by Redshadow86
DuxBelisarius

^ these answers I've given before should be pertinent

It goes without saying that without a World War One there would be no World War Two (chronologically that makes sense!). However, it would certainly be an exaggeration to suggest that Versailles was simply "An Armistice for 20 years" as Ferdinand Foch put it. By 1924, the Young-Dawes Plan had been instituted to help Germany pay it's reparations and recover economically, and by 1926 Gustav Stresemann's efforts at rapproachment had laid fairly stable foundations for peace in Europe. Had events continued on the trajectory that they did, it's possible a Second World War could have been avoided.

Of course they didn't; the Great Depression hit in 1929, and by 1931 Germany's economy was in a worse position than in 1923. Hitler and the Nazis were able to use this uncertain climate to get votes and form alliances with other righwing parties, while currying favour with some of Germany's military and industrial elites. Hitler became Chancellor by appointment in 1933, and afterwards events unfolded that allowed him to attain dictatorial power and thus implement his 'program' for rearmament and ultimately a new war. Thus, while it's difficult to imagine WWII without a Treaty of Versailles or the events that surrounded it, to simply state that it caused WWII, or that WWII was inevitable from that point on is to take an extremely deterministic view of the history of the 1920s, to say nothing of history in general.