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In 1970 I found a history book written in 1919. The last chapter was on the Great War. I remember this for one reason. The author stated that if the Treaty arrangements didn't solve all the problems after the war, a new war was certain.
Neville Chamberlain, Nagy-Britannia miniszterelnöke 1938-ban kijelentette, hogy: „A Trianoni Szerződés eredménye Európában nem a béke, hanem egy új háború félelme”.
While true that statement is also meaningless. Europe is the most blood soaked ground on the Earth. The Europeans nations barely needed a reason to start a war.
Yiutunes algorithms and terms of service have a hard time deciphering when something is being used for educational purposes and sometimes finds that videos containing "controversial material" (which remains as yet undefined to a large degree) are targetable for demonetization. Basically the Algorithm finds things that can be perceived as controversial, regardless of what manner they are being discussed, and demonetizes the channels that sponsor them. There is more on this from some smaller History channels such as the Armchair Historian and if you go back a few months here on the Great War, they discuss this in greater depth. I believe you can find it under something like "+100 videos demonetized" or something to that effect
History is a strong message. The whole quote "History is written by the victor" applies more now then it ever did in society and politics because they dont want you too think that they do anything wrong. You say something people dont quite understand and next thing you know your being called a racist lol
I find it rather funny how Ferdinand Foch's comments about how the Versailles Treaty was just a 20 year armistice is often seen as a comment on how harsh the Versailles Treaty was, when Foch though that it was too lenient on the germans.
@@darthplagueis13 But he wanted a further dismantling of the german army et cetera. So using it as an argument that the Versailles treaty was too harsh is taking the quote out of context.
It was too lenient to stop Germany from rising as great power and too harsh to calm people's minds. Failure because it was a compromise between two extremes.
@@vksasdgaming9472no the treaty had nothing to do with Germany rearming the allies were not willing to fight when Germany was breaking the treaty had they gotten involved when Germany was still weak they would of lost so much the allies disunity and inability to fight when at the start is what lead to another war
@@criscabrera9098 The humiliation was a breeding ground for national socialists to spread their ideology and hate Especially the behavior of the French Rhineland occupation and the causing Hyper inflation pushed people into the arms of Hitler
Foch thought the treaty was too lenient on Germany and likely would have agreed with teh French president Poincaré that Germany should have been re-divided into smaller nations.
The only country that paid its debt without discounts or offsets in full from WWI was Australia. The debt was huge at 50% of GDP and took until 1936 to be paid. Interestingly, at the London Conference in 1953 the allied nations singled out Australia to receive nothing in German reparations, so it didn’t sign, which means that technically, Australia still has a claim on Germany from Versailles.
In the past, wars had to be funded from the king's limited coffers, but advanced financing (up to borrowing from unborn generations through inflation) meant that bankruptcy was no longer the immediate limitation it used to be.
What a great episode, brilliantly researched! I’ve been watching this channel since 1914-2014 and enjoyed every bit of it. The more I learn the more I understand just how catastrophic this war was. It irreparably broke the back of European-Western culture. It destroyed these great and cultured nations not just in terms of blood and treasure but it also destroyed the moral credibility of the West. What a shame!
Their moral credibility? What are you talking about? The western powers were self-serving, war-mongering bigots (not to mention colossal asshats and idiots), even those who called themselves democracies. If anything, it showed their moral decay and how much of their so-called civilization was just a facade. I'm not sad they vanished. Not a 100% psyched about what replaced them, but I would not want to live in a world with a pre-WWI mindset.
I don't agree. Most of them were uncaring colonial nations and quite undemocratic. Belgiums treatment of the Congo. Man-made famine in ireland caused by Britain killing millions.
@Harry Paul France? Austria-Hungary? The USA? Italy? Not related to queen Victoria (pretty much every minor power was though, except Serbia and Montenegro)
I would like to express my gratitude to the supporters of the channel who make it all financially possible. Living on SSDI leaves me no disposable income and thus it is only through their patronage I enjoy TGW videos. A very sincere thank you to you all. Because of you I now realize WW1 didn't end in 1918 but only the Western front ceased fighting. Central and Eastern Europe would continue fighting for years to come. What a mess the Allies inherited! I'm no fan of Wilson but his role in the League of Nations was vital in giving the principle of self-determination to a continent in crisis. As bad as it was things could have turned out worse.
Great episode as always! I recommend taking a look at Kissinger's book "Diplomacy", he explains very well why Versailles was too lenient to give France safety and too severe to prevent resentment. Versailles is a difficult mix of classic European balance of power ideas and American idealism, which in the end pleased nobody.
The entire reparations issue was an add-on to the treaty in the first place, Britain was prepared to waive the debts she was owed from the war (having ended it a net creditor) but was herself in debt to the US, who was not prepared to waive the debts owed to her, so that meant someone had to pay, and the defeated nations that had also started the war were the inevitable choice for who to make pay.
@Teddles Peddles - No, Germany declared war on France and Russia. Britain was the only nation to declare war on Germany and did so because Germany refused to halt her sion of Belgium.
You guys should make an episode about the "sister work" to this, "The political consequences of the peace" by historian Jacques Bainville. It was published in 1920, and fights Keynes on many groups. It wisely foresaw the dismantling of new eastern European states that succumbed to German or Soviet influence, etc... Bainville was mostly anti-German but it doesn't make his insight any less valid.
@@TheGreatWar Would be great if you did! It doesn't receive as much attention as Keynes' work but it foresaw the annexation of Austria by a resurgent Germany, the Sudetenland crisis and a German-Soviet pact against Poland. Absolutely visionary since he was writing this in 1920. Bainville's outlook on the Versailles treaty was this: "it is too soft for what it has harsh, and too harsh for what it has soft".
@@TheGreatWar If you decide to continue this into the recovery of the Weimar Republic, 1924-28 "the Golden Age" as it's commonly referred to through the initial 1924 Dawes Plan, see "The Myths of Reparations" by Sally Marks and "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919-1933" by Stephen A. Schuker (the most comprehensive on this topic). Keynes is largely responsible for all the misconceptions of the treaty's outcome into their reparations.
@@randomcommenter100 As stated by German historian Peter Fritzsche, the alleged "harshness" narrative is a "false memory" that the Germans only came to believe in after 1933, it being one of their most lasting achievements in propaganda.
90% of government expenditures towards war debt? Considering how devastated the other major European economies were as well, Germany would have had to discover and capture ElDorado to come out even.
@@GlidusFlowers - Given they paid pretty much nothing from 1919 - 1990 the debt is not as bad as imagined. They only restarted payments after Germany reunified, and had tried to default on the debt from the outset.
@@GlidusFlowers The smaller West Germany payed till 2010, while also paying WW I reparations. And all that while quite quickly recovering its own economy. And did El Dorado have coal and telephone poles? Cause France wanted a lot of those as reparations, so that they can actually repair the war damage.
@Fabian Kirchgessner - How about the deliberate desolation left behind the German armies as they retreated? Pure malice. If the terms did not suit, Germany had the option of continuing the war to a conclusion.
@Fabian Kirchgessner - Yes, and at Brest-Litovsk the Germans insisted Russia pay them, as well as stripping away about 33% of industrial Russia to form German puppet states. Versailles was no different. People are still fighting, we probably always will be for one reason or another, we are imperfect creatures.
10:04 Keynes nailed it.... That and the fact that article 231 was victors justice and simply a means to hang their debt on someone else to make up for their part in starting and prolonging the war.
Count Albert Apponyi said when the great powers pronounced the death sentence of Hungary in 1920: "You dug the grave of Hungary but Hungary will be there at the funeral of all the countries who dug this grave to my country." Here we are ...
Sad that so few people know "The Political Consequences of Peace" of Jacques Bainville. He predicted at the time the rise of a Germany relatively spared from the war and full of revenge against an exhausted France which with 40 million inhabitants is not in a position to make up against the 60 million inhabitants besides the Rhine. The Anschluss, the Sudetenland crisis, the German-Soviet pact against Poland, he had already said everything in 1920.
Another great in-depth video. You cover a lot of ground in a short time, but I don't think you skirt over anything. I learned a bit about John Maynard Keynes. Now I am slightly wiser. Hat's off!
I read Keynes book...what floored me at the time as a uni student studying economics was the ending....”...Our Sons will pay the price of this mistake”...or to that affect, I read it some 20 years ago (I couldn’t tell you the edition though)
"The real aggressor is not he who first employs force, but he who renders the employment of force necessary". -- Birinyi, Trianon, p. 9, from Greacy, p. 150, quoted in W. E. Hall's "A Treatise on International Law", p. 110.
@CommandoDude One needs to look no further than Jacques Bainville to see that it's possible to foresee the events of the next decade with just as much insight (and arguably, an even more accute one) while still having a completely different take on WHY it would happen. "A treaty too harsh in its mild features, too mild in its harsh aspects" indeed.
Thank you. I just discovered this channel. So much information in such a compact style. So much 'fascist' criticism and other slams are being thrown around, by people of all persuasions, that we have forgotten what The Great War was all about. Lots of parallels and so many differences. Your channel is a gift that deserves to be supported by many.
Read the book 1927 by Bill Bryson. By 1927 the US had to deflate the interest rate we were loaning money to Germany so they could pay their debts. This started a run on money which did not end until the crash in 1929.
It’s France more than any other country that made the Great Depression very much worse, they hoarded gold and refused to service their debts to Britain and America. Those loans are now in the trillions thanks to not having had a penny payed on them since 1931.
Of course he did. Who better to predict the results than the author of the sanctions. John Maynard Keynes wrote the section of the Versailles treaty containing the sanctions on Germany. He designed the sanctions to cripple the German economy indefinitely.
As I recall, Niall Ferguson said that Keynes doesn't just predict or analyze the results of Versailles, (in The Pity of War..?), but helped cause the German response. Evidently, Germans read his book, and when paying reparations became difficult, took the easy way out of missing payments and inflating their economy so as to pay as little as possible in real terms. As Ferguson also points out, the Great Inflation of the early '20s was over before the Great Depression made all the economic repayments by one country to another impossible.
Studying the Treaty of Versailles, I would argue that it was pretty standard for the time. It was actually generous to Germany in some ways. It didn't split them into multiple states like Austria-Hungary, or deprive them of millions of people and massive amounts of land like Brest-Litovsk.
Alexis Escudero . But keep in mind there was quite a while in between when Germany didn’t pay its reparations. They weren’t non-stop paying out the nose ever since 1919.
@@rebecca4680 Probably the main reason why they are now done with it. Had they kept up payments throughout the century, who knows if they ever could've gotten their economy back on track.
I wish I could support you on Patreon, I really do. But I'm strapped for cash at the moment, sorry. Please keep pumping out this great content though! It's important to preserve history.
it wasnt that bad. it was made that bad by right wing parties, for their own uprising. Do you know which peace was really bad? Than google for "the peace of brest-litowsk"....
I think the treaty of Versailles was overreaching and was a guaranteed path towards another conflict as you pointed out many foresaw a future conflict. It was a perfect backbone for a new party to build on and use as a just cause for new war on every nation that pushed the treaty on them. If you put yourself in a German shoes the idea of payback for such unfair demands was a perfect rallying call for war. Hitler took advantage of that and the strong history that Germany had that the allies very much wanted to erase like frederick the great.
Honestly Keynes is one of the best economists to ever exist so his fears coming true not only proved him right for the first time in the public it also wouldn't be his last time, even after death. Even today, in my social sciences class we talk about Keynes and how his ideas helped save Europe from a deep crisis in 1967.
@@turkishbigdaddy3334 sometimes people's ideas and knowledge about how the situation really is dont go unheard even though it is heard 50 years later and finally appreciated. It's like Edison and Tesla history paints a very different picture of what really happened to Tesla because of Edison.
The Germans were perfectly happy to inflict punative treaties on enemy nations, Frankfurt 1878, Bucharest 1917, Brest-Litovsk 1918 etc, so why should they have been exempt? A future was was pretty much inevitable anyhow, it is a long term European tradition to attempt a rematch as soon as you recovered from a lost war. The mistake was not enforcing the terms from the outset, if that had been done there would have been no German army to start another war.
On the other hand, much of the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles for German politics were not the fault of the Allies. The German reaction to the defeat was based on illusions about the military situation at the end of the War that had very little to do with reality. Large parts of the old political and military establishment in Germany, together with dissatisfied citizens and political extremists, were all too happy to blame the defeat and the economic catastrophe on the new Republic - when in reality, it was these imperial military and political leaders who had been responsible for the War in the first place. And therefore, opposition to the Treaty was intentionally fueled and radicalised by esp. right-wing media hoping to abolish the new democracy, and never allowed to die down, because it was too useful in Germany's internal conflicts. As the "Golden Twenties" and Stresemann's efforts at starting a process of reconciliation show, the cause was not totally lost, and Germany may have come to terms with the Treaty at some point, and move on - like they did after the much more devastating losses after 1945. But that was very much torpedoed, with great effort, by the political right to damage the Republic. The role of the Treaty of Versailles in the lead-up to The Sequel was not just a result of its content but also very much a result of German domestic politics.
J.M. Keynes wrote a lot about the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. His writing about it are recommended to everyone who is interested in the history of WWI.
Ha! That intro: "Hi. I'm Jesse Alexander, welcome to the great war." Would the captain have received the new batch of cannon fodder in the trenches with similar words?
What would happen if the Treaty of Versailles was not agreed and signed? How would the countries who were at war that time responded and took action? If you were to rewrite the Treaty, how would you consider things? Any thoughts?
I think the allies decreed that if the German delegates didn't sign the treaty, they threatened another war. Germany had no choice but to accept the treaty
I feel like it should be pointed out that the Prussians had imposed the The Treaty of Versailles (1871) with crippling indemnities intended to remove France as a military power and threat to German ascension. But since France's economy expanded rapidly, the indemnities no longer matter that much to France's military strength and thus was able to win the next great war: WWI.
@@Edax_Royeaux the USA sold food and ammunition to the Eu and lent money to them too... And got payed with that money for more supplies.. USA got an hugh economic boost and could establish them as superpower.. Yeah you suffered heavily, poor guys :D
@@Edax_Royeaux but you now how much European died yes? And how less American soldiers died? The hole continent was traumatized.. I don't care about 400k us soldiers
Attach a Lame Guilt clause to that reparations demand. Force them to acknowledge their algorithms and other shenanigans have caused RU-vid to become exponentially lamer than it was five years ago.
After all the Great War didn’t give any nation a sustaining success, none of the empires survived. At last only France was able to hold on to Alsace and Lorraine. But all successors of 1918 lost their colonial empires during the next 60 years and the UK even lost Ireland. To my opinion even the USA and Russia didn’t become relatively powerful by succeeding in WW II. The Treaty of Versailles was just an Illusion and it’s not the question if it was too harsh, but if it reached the aims of the Successors. I fear it didn’t.
The Treaty, like the war, was a complete mess. It helped no one and only did harm to a plethora of countries and empires. The Great War is a fitting name for WWI, as it was the greatest mistake in modern history.
Clemenceau and the economist Alfred Sauvy had a diiferent vision. It was simply to put in place an occupation of Germany, as it happened in .. 1945. This solution in 1920 would have certainly prevented Hitler to get to power, and would help other European economies to restart. Germany suffered no damage in its territory during the war. At the same time, Germany occupied about 10% of France, and most of the WWI fight occured in France. According to Alfred Sauvy France accounted for 620 villages and cities totally destroyed (Reims for example had only 12 buildings left standing !), 1,334 destroyed above 50%, 2,349 partially destroyed, 293,043 buildings had been totally destroyed, 148,948 severely damaged. During the war, Germany set up a administrative service called Schutzverwaltung to seize all machines, plants and services that could be transferred in Germany. When Germany troops evacuated the areas they occupied they simply damaged everything they could not take; mines were flooded, plants were destroyed. During the war Germany set a special tax for occupied cities (about 184 million gold francs), and restricted food and organized a funding through the US Embassy in Belgium in to collect money from US (386,000,000 USD), France (205,000,000 USD) and UK (109,000,000 USD) in order to feed the population in occupied territories. In these territories all men above 9 years old and women were forced to work for the German war effort. 100,000 people were brought by force from France into Germany to support the German economy in camps like Holzminden. The ones who refused were shot. 8,000 civilians have been thus killed just because they did not accept to support war effort. Another 30,000 died in labor camps. In 1919 Germany was not even an occupied country, and in 3 years it organized its bankrupcy in order to ease the the pain of the repayment. As a reminder, when Germany won against France in 1870/1871 (called the Great War in Germany !), its troops stayed in France until 1873 when the last payment of the 5 billon gold francs was made by France to Germany as a war compensation. Definitely, in 1919-1923 Germany played a role of victim, and Keynes helped the country to take that role.
Why have described Keynes as an economist in the description and then said he was a mathematician in the script? Yes, Keynes started out as a mathematician but his most famous work is in economics, i.e. Keynesian economics.
The Treaty of Versailles was a failure from the victors. But if the Central Powers would have won the war, they would have done a similar failure towards the defeated. It was just in the thinking of the nations of that time.
France was invaded and completely devastated and economically ruined, Germany would seek revenge no matter what, should Germany suffer no penalties while France suffered?
For as hard a the treaty was for Germany, at least their would be a Germany. Austria-Hungery was shattered to bits and those bits were absorbed by its nieghbors. Turkey lost a 1/3 of its territory but won no payment in reparations through war. Finally Bulgaria, they lost critical access to the sea and had to pay reparations too. All in all Germany didnt have it too bad compared to the others.