According to some /badhistory posts, the treaty of Versailles wasn't that harsh at all in comparison to other treaties. The general idea is that Germany's "crisis" was not a factor for WWII, and in fact this crisis was sort of a lie by Hitler and nazis to go to war. How right is this angle?

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The answer linked below does a great job of explaining the economic consequences (or lack thereof) of the Treaty of Versailles, and its exploitation by the Nazis and other parties. However, I'd like to deal more generally with the question of how 'harsh' the Treaty was. The word harsh is a bit difficult to properly define, and we could really say that any punitive measures were 'harsh'. In this sense, it might be better to use a word like proportionate.

Before we get started on the Treaty of Versailles, I'd first like to draw comparison to three previous treaties, to help us understand the background of Versailles. The first of these is the Congress of Vienna, which was held between the major European powers following the fall of Napoleon almost a century before the outbreak of the First World War. The Napoleonic wars, while not involving a comparable scale in terms of either casualties nor devastation, nonetheless involved most of the countries of Europe and saw fighting across the continent and beyond. The Congress was perhaps even more radical than the Treaty of Versailles in changing borders, most notably in Central and Eastern Europe where German and Italian states were consolidated and Russia made territorial gains. As the Napoleonic Wars were the largest recent european conflict until the First World War, it might be expected that the Treaty of Versailles would follow similar tactics. In some ways this was true, as the Treaty sought both to take reparations for the victors, and to establish a lasting peace in Europe. In one declaration the Allies announced that the treaty "provides the basis upon which the peoples of Europe can live together in friendship and equality." However, there were some crucial differences between Vienna and Versailles. The first of these was the estabishment of war guilt, which we'll get on to later. The second of these was that France, as the defeated party, was allowed access to the conference. While she had undergone a regime change, and already agreed to restore her borders to their pre-war state (this also meant that Britain had to return several captured colonies), she was nonetheless treated as an equal and allowed at the negotiating table.

The second treaty is the Treaty of Frankfurt, which ended the Franco-Prussian war. As the Treaty is from 1871, and was also between two of the war's major powers, we can get a better idea of what a proportionate peace treaty might look like. France had been thoroughly defeated, as Germany was in 1918, so Germany/Prussia would have been able to inflict severe terms upon them. However, Germany/Prussia confined herself to a war indemnity of 5 billion francs and the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, the population of whom were probably best described as German speaking Frenchmen. In any case, the territorial losses were broadly historically justifiable. While there are similarities between Versailles and Frankfurt (territorial loss, reparations), there are also differences. Germany didn't intend to cripple France, and the reparation figure was much smaller for a war which didn't significantly damage the economies of either participant as the First World War did.

The third treaty is that of Brest-Litovsk, the treaty between the Axis Powers and Russia in 1918. In the treaty, Russia lost a quarter of her pre-war population and a significant amount of Russian heavy industry and raw material production, which was heavily concentrated in the west. While there was some justification for the territorial losses in that they contained large numbers of ethnic Germans, the losses were far more significant for Russia than for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Russia was also forced to pay 6 billion marks in reparations. Against German cries of unfairness both in the past and present, commentators pointed to this much harsher treaty as evidence that the Germans should stop complaining.

Now, moving on to an evaluation of the Treaty of Versailles, we first have to understand the positions of the negotiating powers. The First World War was unlike any other war that had previously been fought. Other major wars of recent times fought between modern states such as the Russo-Japanese war had been mostly localised affairs between a few states. The First World War was massive in both its destruction and disruption. War in 1918 looked very different from 1914. The British Empire had lost a million soldiers, France 1.3, Germany 2. By all accounts, anywhere up to thirty million people had died. Significant amounts of France and Belgium had been under military occupation for several years, and the destruction in Eastern Europe was immense. Clearly, someone had to pay.

I've copied the following summary of the various demands of the allied powers from a previous answer of mine:

The French had suffered the most during the war. Significant portions of their territory had been occupied for four years, they had lost more than a million soldiers and had suffered upwards of a million and a half fatalities in total. This was also the second time that they had been invaded by Germany in fourty years. As such, it was in the interests of France to cripple Germany and ensure that it could never wage such a war on French soil again. Their aims included regaining the Alsace-Lorraine region, which had been lost in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, the demilitarisation of Germany and reparations, which would help to pay off their war debts and go towards rebuilding the infrastructure in the north and east of the country. On the more extreme end of suggested demands was the annexation of the resource rich Rhineland and Saar regions. I do recall reading at some point that Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, did actually suggest breaking Germany back into its constituent states but I'm unable to easily find an academic source for this, although some less reliable websites do mention it. In any case, this was never seriously an option.

The United Kingdom had not suffered any occupation of its mainland territory during the war, and was relatively undamaged although multiple bombings and naval bombardments did occur during the war. The United Kingdom also took relatively fewer, but still severe military casualties. Of priority interest for Britain was German colonial possessions and the German Navy, both of which had been significant points of tension between the two countries leading up to 1914. The British wanted to strip Germany of her overseas possessions and restrict the size of her Navy to ensure British monopoly on commercial trade and British domination navally. Reparations were naturally also desirable.

The United State's late entry into the war and their position across an ocean ensured that they suffered neither significant territorial damage or military casualties. The USA also did not have the history of rivalry with Germany that the two European great powers did. As we have no doubt all been taught in school, President Woodrow Wilson had prepared his 14 points, which very helpfully set out American aims . However, many of his points ran counter to the aims of the other two Great Powers, and Clemenceau famously remarked "Mr. Wilson bores me with his fourteen points. Why, God Almighty has only ten!" In the end, the Americans concluded their own separate peace treaties with the Triple Alliance powers and never joined the League of Nations, Wilson's brainchild. We can see that the Allies didn't go into the negotiations with clearly defined objectives, and were often at odds with each other. Indeed, without the moderating influence of the British, it's possible the treaty could have been even harsher.