Being a person who loves world military history I always like to study various parts. But every now and again things come up that I don’t understand. Like for instance why was Germany the one punished so severely following the end of the first world war? Nowhere in any of my history books have I be able to figure out why this is the case. Some people make it sound like Germany was the one who started the war. But in every documentary I’ve seen, every book I’ve read and all the other areas where I am checked unless I am misinterpreting something the Austro Hungarian‘s were the ones who basically started the conflict. Now yes the whole snowball effect started when a Serbian nationalist shot Archduke Frans Ferdinand but I still don’t understand why in the end Germany seemed to get the rawest of the raw end.
To that I post these two questions. Firstly why was Germany the one the seemingly became the poster child for the end of the first world war? If that even is the right way to describe it. And secondly is there a possibility be at either theory or night that if the Germans had not been so harshly treated could that have potentially prevented the second world war?
I recently answered a similar question here. Germany wasn't particularly singled out for blame at the peace although the victors correctly noted its encouragement of Austria-Hungary's hard-line stance in July 1914.. But it did subsequently bear by far the greater share of the reparations burden owing to the Habsburg Empire's fragmentation and subsequent Austrian and Hungarian financial collapse.
Later propagandists were to make much of Germany's territorial losses which involved a tenth of the 1913 imperial population. But Germany fared better territorially than Russia had done under the German-imposed Treaty of Brest-Litovsk barely fifteen months before Versailles, and the Reich's boundaries were adjusted mostly on national lines as proclaimed in Wilson's fourteen points. Austria-Hungary in contrast no longer existed.
The nominal 132 billion-mark indemnity was itself mostly fictitious, a sop to vengeful spirits among a section of Allied payment rather than a realistic measure of the amount expected to be paid. And while annual payments by the late 1920s reached 2.1 billion marks annually or 2½% of GDP, Hantke & Spoerer find that military limitations meanwhile brought a 1½bn-mark annual saving, 70% of reparations outlays (The imposed gift of Versailles, Economic History Review 63:4, 2010).
There's an argument that Germany's change of regime at the war's end should have occasioned more lenient treatment: the government that signed the peace treaty certainly wasn't the one that had gone to war. But the forces that had supported war in 1914 remained powerful behind the scenes, and it was among them that anti-Versailles feeling remained strongest.
Perceptions of the treaty are heavily conditioned by what happened later. Its provisions were exploited by extremists and militarists alike to destroy the interwar Republic. But its vindictiveness is overstated. It was a victors' peace, but there's no reason to believe Germany would have been any more charitable if the roles had been reversed.