Was the Treaty of Versailles really to blame for the rise of the Nazis?

Spectator

15 hours ago

The 1919 Versailles peace conference that followed the end of the first world war became the most famous, or notorious, diplomatic negotiation in history. Much influenced by John Maynard Keynes, an impassioned sympathiser for the German predicament, it was branded for the rest of the twentieth century as a failure, the injustice of which bore heavy responsibility for the rise of Hitler.
Then, in 2001, along came Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, comparatively unknown outside the academic world, and her book Peacemakers. This was not only a commanding narrative of what took place in Paris during the six months when the world's mightiest leaders rubbed shoulders with suppliants drawn from scores of peoples, it also challenged the received Keynes thesis. It remained obvious that the eventual five 1919 treaties and supporting agreements did not all reflect the wisdom of Solomon. But it seemed to MacMillan wildly extravagant to suggest that the terms imposed by the victors on the vanquished were so oppressive – even had they been fulfilled, as they were not – that they became responsible for the evolution of Nazism in the decade that followed. Her book was garlanded with laurels and prizes by reviewers and literary juries around the world, and became a huge bestseller. It proved the author's breakthrough title, paving the way for subsequent triumphs as author, broadcaster, BBC Reith Lecturer and principal of prestigious colleges in Toronto and Oxford.
Moreover, scholarly historical opinion about Versailles has moved MacMillan's way – rather, perhaps, been moved by her way. Adam Tooze's 2014 work The Deluge is among those which have focused attention on the follies of Germany's own Weimar government in the 1920s to explain how the Nazis were empowered by the country's economic collapse. Tooze also argues that the United States was the only nation with the moral authority and financial clout to stabilise Europe after the first world war, had it been willing to exercise those powers, as it was not.
My own admiration for Peacemakers starts with its recognition that treaties to end wars, especially those with multiple belligerents, are enormously difficult to contrive. The challenges increased when, as in 1919, three great European ruling dynasties had fallen, and a host of their former subject peoples – Poles, Finns, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and many more – were clamouring for statehood. Then add the consequences of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the ambitions of Arab peoples and shameless cupidity of the European Allies. While the popular view of the British Empire holds that it climaxed under Queen Victoria, it attained its widest geographical limits in the wake of the first world war, with the acquisition of new territories in Africa and the Middle East.
Among the gravest mistakes made by the victorious Great Powers was that they chose to assume responsibility for defeated Germany, without giving themselves local authority to impose a viable new order there. The Allies placed occupation forces only in the Rhineland. Compare and contrast the devastated Reich after the second world war: its people may not have been suffused with guilt, but they had a stunned, assured understanding of their own subjection, following unconditional surrender, which was enforced by the armies of the victorious Occupiers, until in 1949 they decreed new forms of democratic self-government for their respective Zones.
In 1918, however, the fabric of Germany was almost untouched. Eastern France and Belgium were ravaged, but Kaiser Wilhelm's homeland had escaped battlefield destruction, save in East Prussia. In November, US president Woodrow Wilson insisted – against the strong views of Britain and France – that the fighting should terminate with an armistice rather than with Germany's surrender, which would have been an explicit admission that it was vanquished. In the name of the United States, Wilson opposed the notion of avowing German and Austrian war guilt, central to British and French thinking. Therein lay the basis of the Nazis' subsequent myth of the 'stab in the back' of the German army by politicians at home; the lie that it had not, in truth, suffered battlefield defeat.
It was politically inevitable that the French should demand reparations in cash and kind for the destruction which their country had suffered at German hands, and it was always overwhelmingly probable that Berlin would prove unable to pay. Nonetheless, so much was made of this issue by Germany's sympathisers, of whom there were astonishingly many in Britain from the 1920s onwards, that it bears emphasis that the Germans eventually paid less cash than they themselves had extracted from France following their victory in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War.
Margaret MacMillan brought to her analysis of Versailles a brilliant gift for portraiture, in depicting the giants – Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, the 'Tiger of France'. Moreover, her account combines scholarship with common sense in a fashion that is rarely manifested by an academic. So many distinguished historians, both of the past and of our own times, approach their chosen themes with a baggage of personal prejudices and scores to pay against rivals and colleagues. I would compare Peacemakers with Barbara Tuchman's August 1914, another huge bestseller published forty years earlier, equally gripping in its narrative drive and forceful in its impact upon readers, prominent among them president John F. Kennedy, whom that book influenced in his management of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Few politicians of any nation nowadays know any history, but if they understood a little about Versailles, they would acknowledge the importance of humility in diplomacy. They would recognise the difficulties of achieving just outcomes with embittered or triumphalist electorates behind the chair of each democratic politician at the conference table. When a negotiation follows a conflict in which millions have perished, how could not their compatriots demand rewards, booty, tangible compensation for the blood sacrifice?
As MacMillan makes plain, it was impossible for the whole Versailles story, embracing the destinies of so many nations, to have ended happily. The Allied leaders did their best for Eastern Europe's minorities in the grants of statehood – but only after the second world war, with the expulsions of German minorities from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, were some of those issues brutally resolved. If we deplore the national leaders who, in 1919, sought at the peace table to assuage their own countries' wounds suffered in the most terrible war in human history, we should notice that the appetite of many autocrats for territorial expansion, for empire, for acknowledgement that might is right, is as strong in 2025 as it was in the early twentieth century, and extends even to the United States.
Too many of the lessons of Peacemakers are today more honoured in the breach than in the observance. But that should not diminish our gratitude to Margaret MacMillan, for teaching us so much about how the highest level of summitry, as Winston Churchill later christened such encounters between national leaders, has been done and should be done.