Part 1

So, as a general word of caution, I would advise that when a man who has quoted Nazi propaganda, refused to denounce Adolf Hitler and screamed "hail victory" after a speech only to be promptly replied to with Nazi salutes by some of his listeners, doles out historical tid-bits, they are best taken not with a grain as much as a pound of salt.

This man, a man who tries to peddle hatred and bigotry, is in the most unsurprising turn of the events wrong. He is twisting history and misrepresenting it in order to advance an agenda based on racism. The two fundamental things he tries to assert in this little soundbite are not correct and a misrepresentation of history: 1.) The Paris Peace Conference and subsequent Paris suburb treaties (Versailles with Germany, Saint-Germain with Austria, Neuilly-sur-Seine with Bulgaria, Trianon with Hungary, and Sèvres – later to be repalced by Lausanne – with the Ottoman Empire) were highly concerned with preventing ethnic cleansing or discrimination of minorities. So much so, in fact, that they took international law in uncharted waters and gave the League of Nations the power to intervene in a state's internal politics on behalf of minorities there. And 2.) where these treaties failed to prevent discrimination and ethnic cleansing or the pacification of minorities to occur, these processes were inevitably accompanied by violence, state-driven discrimination and the use of force.

The Paris Peace conference and the subsequent Paris suburb treaties with the losing powers of WWI, the best known being Versailles, are in popular culture mostly referred to when it comes to pointing out their alleged faults vis-á-vis Germany and things like the demilitarization of the Rhineland, the occupation of the Ruhr, the prohibition of the Anschluss of Austria, and the war reparations. While this is a perfect example of why "winners write the victory" does not hold up – after all this narrative of Versailles is pretty much exactly what the German propaganda against it always pushed – it is often forgotten what these treaties also helped create: Reacting to the policy of local nationalistic elites and their supporters, they cemented or created a situation that resulted in bloody ethnic civil war, violence, and political projects of national purification that would endure until 1945 and beyond. But it also needs to be emphasized here that the victorious Entente powers were highly aware of this problem and did what they could in these treaties to exactly prevent ethnic cleansing from happening – a task in which they failed.

"The First World War and the collapse of Europe's old continental empires", writes Mark Mazower in Dark Continent. Europe's Twentieth Century,

signalled the triumph of not only democracy but also – and far more enduringly – of nationalism. With the extension of the princile of national self-determination from western to central and eastern Europe, the Paris peace treaties created a pattern of borders and territories which has lasted more or less up to the present. Yet the triumph of nationalism brought bloodshed, war, and civil war in its train, since the spread of the nation-state to the ethnic patchwork of eastern Europe also meant the rise of the minority as a contemporary political problem. (...) [T]he pure nation had to be made, for it was still a dream not a reality. Neither Greece, nor Germany nor any other so-called nation-states of central and eastern Europe were really ethnically homogeneous. Versailles had given sixty million people a state of their own, but it turned another 25 million into minorities. They included not only Jews, gypsies, Ukrainians and Macedonians but also former ruling groups such as the Germans, Hungarians, and Muslims. Because the latter category in particular regarded themselves as a more civilized than the than the peasant upstarts who now lorded it it over them, they did not take easily to the idea that they should assimilate into the new national culture, as liberal political theory proposed. In fact, in inter-war Europe, neither minority not majority believed in assimilation; the new democracies tended to be exclusionary and antagonistic in their ethnic relations.

The tension created by the dream of national purification lay at the heart of inter-war European politics. Exterminating minorities – as the Turks tried with the Armenians – was not generally acceptable to international opinion; expelling of swapping minorities, as the Greeks and Turks did in 1922-3, did not seem much of an improvement. The victor powers of Versailles tried a different approach – keeping minorities where they were, and giving them protection in international law to make sure they were properly treated so that in time they would acquire a sense of national belonging. But the minority-rights treaties did not work very well, and failed to prevent ill-feeling, discrimination, and violence.

This is where we get to the first wrongful factor in Spencer's claim: The Paris peace conference and subsequent treaties in fact tried to prevent any sort of ethnic cleansing from happening and to prevent the violence that would ensue.

Fearful that the appetite for territory of the newly asserted Polish Republic would destabilize the the whole area, the victorious Powers obliged the reluctant Poland to sign a treaty granting the country's very sizeable minority population certain rights. The Polish treaty formed the basis for a series of similar treaties imposed in 1919 and 1920 upon most of the states of central and eastern Europe. The result was that for the first time an international organization – the League of Nations – assumed the right to intervene in a member state's internal affairs on behalf of the minority population. In the so-called "Little Treaty of Versailles" Poland accepted the "total and complete protection of life and freedom of all people regardless of their birth, nationality, language, race or religion" as well as in Article 7 of the Treaty that

All Polish nationals shall be equal before the law and shall enjoy the same civil and political rights without distinction as to race, language or religion. Differences of religion, creed or confession shall not prejudice any Polish national in matters relating to the enjoyment of civil or political rights, as for instance admission to public employments, functions and honours, or the exercise of professions and industries.

This was very much a reaction to the violence and fighting that had occurred in Poland before this treaty and very much continued after. Robert Gerwarth in his book The Vanquished on the subject of the violence in Europe from 1917 to 1923 wrote that the First World War gave way to an interconnected series of conflicts whose logic and purpose was much more dangerous than that of WWI itself. The war was fought with the purpose of forcing the enemy to accept certain conditions of peace. The violence after 1917-18 was infinitely more ungovernable. As per Gerwarth: "These were existential conflicts fought to annihilate the enemy, be they ethnic or class enemies – a genocidal logic that would subsequently become dominant in much of Europe between 1939 and 1945." These years brought about a new logic of violence that permeated domestic as well as international conflicts. It was the logic of the Balkan Wars, the Armenian genocide, and of the treatment of allegedly inferior colonial subjects: Opponents were portrayed and perceived as criminalized and dehumanized enemies undeserving of mercy or military restraint. The distinction between civilians and combatants, already blurred during the First World War, completely vanished in these types of conflict.

And Poland was – unveiling the lies Spencer tells as what they are – no exception to this: In order to understand why so many Germans left the Danzig area up to year before it was even incorporated into Poland was because of the massive amount of violence between Germans and Poles in the waning days and aftermath of WWI. Poland remained in a constant state of open or undeclared war between 1918 and 1921, fighting against Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians to the east, Lithuanians to the north, Germans to the west, Czechs to the south and Jews and others (as "internal enemies") on territory it already controlled.

In the Baltic states to the north, Poland was involved in one of the most brutal post-war conflicts of WWI: The fight between retreating German forces, German Freikorps, Baltic Nationalists, Baltic communists, and the Soviet Red Army and Russian White Army over the territory of the Baltic states. This conflict during which all sides (though White and Red Russians and German Freikorps much more heavily than others) engaged in massive violence against civilians and combatants alike, burned whole villages, and used rape as a systematic weapon of war, is not for naught considered one of the formative experiences for the violence that would later occur in WWII. And it involved Poles and Germans already clashing, souring the relationship and infusing it with violence from the start.