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  1. There is no serious case left standing that Versailles caused the Second World War; it is a zombie historical idea that refuses to die despite being comprehensively refuted by modern specialists.
  2. There was a resurgence of pro-German sentiment in postwar England, which was related to the popular reaction against the extraordinary casualties and seeming pointlessness of the trench struggle. John Maynard Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace was tremendously influential, and the Weimar government skillfully manipulated international public opinion. This has led to the widespread acceptance of any number of myths about Versailles.
  3. Supposedly unpayable reparations totals are derived by ignoring the fact that these "totals" were largely notional amounts that did not require payment until so far into the future that they were sure to be renegotiated anyway; the Allies did things this way in order to obtain impressive figures to satisfy the very real public hunger in 1918-19 for harsh terms. They also ignore that the treaty terms were in effect repeatedly renegotiated downwards throughout the 1920s, both directly and through measures such as ensuring German access to American loans. You also hear canards like "the French demanded more gold marks than all the gold in the world!", which ignores the fact that gold is a circulating medium of exchange and the world's total gold reserves aren't very large in comparison to world economic product (I believe today's total gold reserves have the same value as something like 2 or 3 years' worth of German GDP.)
  4. The infamous German hyperinflation, far from being caused by Versailles, was the solution Germany arrived at to undermine Versailles. (Although it's a myth that Germany sought to inflate away the Versailles debts, which were denominated in gold marks.)
  5. Essentially, hyperinflation was the Social Democrats' way out of a dilemma. They could have paid the claimed reparations by ruthlessly cutting domestic spending and raising taxes, but this would have meant abandoning Social Democracy and betraying the masses. They could have paid by ruthlessly expropriating the German owning classes, but this would have meant starting a civil war that they probably would have lost quickly as the Reichswehr deserted them. Inflation allowed the government to avoid directly confronting powerful domestic constituencies and avoid directly stiffing the Allies.
  6. There are a number of other Versailles clauses that are sometimes trotted out; the "war guilt clause" supposedly represented a heavy-handed Allied attempt to enforce its version of history, but this is total nonsense. Besides the fact that Germany was largely responsible for the outbreak of a general war, the clause had little to do with politics and nothing to do with writing history, but simply established the legal justification for Allied demands of reparations.
  7. German propagandists also got tremendous mileage out of the "brutal" occupation of the Rhineland and later the Ruhr, complete with absurd racist stories about French Senegalese troops raping every German woman in sight. Almost none of it was true – the Anglo-Americans took the rape story seriously and pushed France to investigate, but only a single case of rape by a Senegalese trooper was substantiated. Nonetheless, this kind of "bloody shirt" propaganda promoted a revanchist, righteous-victim mentality in Germany.
  8. The real question ought to be not "was it Hitler or Versailles," but "would a more determined and confident enforcement of the treaty of Versailles have forestalled Hitler."
  9. sources:
  10. Sally Marks. "Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918-1921." The Journal of Modern History 85 (September 2013): 632-659.
  11. Boemeke, M. F., Feldman, G. D., and Gläser, E. The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years. Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2006.
  12. Schuker, S. A. (1985). "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919-1933."
  13. Schuker, S. A. (1978). "Finance and Foreign Policy in the Era of the German Inflation."
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