I am currently reading André Tardieu's "The Truth About the Treaty", which has some interesting nuggets in it as to how the Entente were actually thinking during the process of negotiating the Versailles treaty. While there was general agreement as to the general shape of the treaty (such as: Germany should be made to pay, Germany should be removed as a threat to international peace and an independent Poland should be created) there was disagreement as to how to achieve the goals. The path followed in OTL was to minimize the amount of territory taken from Germany in the interests of avoiding any encouragement of German Bolshevism, keep Germany as a single economic unit with which the Entente could trade and to minimize the risks Germany wouldn't sign the treaty (a particular anxiety of Lloyd George), instead Germany would be saddled with obligations to be fulfilled over time - a large reparations bill that would be payed out over the course of 30 years or more, the permanent demiliterization of the Rhineland, the removal of Germany to possess certain weapons, to build a large fleet and to maintain a large army. However, early on the Entente powers also considered demanding more territory from Germany, but leaving Germany free to build an army of whatever size she wished and build whatever weapons she wanted.
So what-if Versailles inflicted maximal territorial losses on Germany and reparations up to the limit Germany could pay up-front (estimated by the German delegation as being something like 23 billion gold marks) and had no clauses that required long-term enforcement.
So the Danes would get all of Schleswig-Holstein, the Dutch would gain Frisia (while giving up certain lands south of the Rhine to Belgium to make Belgium more defensible and a more functional economic unit), the Poles would gain all of their claims against Germany without plebiscites, the Czechs would gain all of Silesia and France would gain the Saar outright while the Rhineland became an independent state.
Germany would remain a powerful state with a larger population than France and a larger coal production than Britain. So still a great power.
So... I am curious which Versailles, OTL's or ATL's would lead to the least dangerous Germany during WW2 (let's assume for a moment that Hitler rises to power and is absurdly lucky in the ATL, just as OTL). While the ATL Germany would be smaller, economically weaker and would face a much more challenging invasion of France, it would also have been able to openly develop all types of weapons during the interwar period and would have been able to have a much larger army - which could be very important since the interwar Wehrmacht was severely limited by the lack of trained manpower that resulted from the anaemic Weimar army.
fasquardon