Causes of WWII

You can do that. You can also make the same kind of link with all kind of different wars up to the fall of the Roman Empire and possibly even further. Every war, every revolution, every diplomatic action, everything is connected. That is how the butterfly theory works, change one thing and everything changes. You can blame WWII on Bismarck, but that means you have to blame it on Charlemagne too.
wietze is not the only one who believes that both World Wars are one single conflict. I believe that Churchill called them the Second Thirty Years' War. Many believed that the solution (the Treaty of Versailles is one a part of this) of the Great War made World War II inevitable. World War II itself was unnecessary.
 
The Nazis killed of most everyone fit to govern.
No, that's utter nonsense!
One of the reason was the Treaty of Versailles.
Another one was, that a peace treaty would bring forth the question of reparations.
The 2-Plus-4 Agreement in 1990(!) was signed instaed of a peace treaty. Thus all automatism of a peace treaty were avoided.
 
@Der Greif:
Do you know why there wasn't a peace treaty after World War II?
I believe that there were several reasons:

1. The Allies wanted to thoroughly restructure Germany: territoraly, politically and socially. This was based on the horrific experience of the Holocaust, the terrifying regime and the atrocities of ww2. To reach this goal they occupied Germany. A peace treaty before these goals would be accomplished would be counterproductive.

2. Very quickly the Cold War set in and led to the de facto partition of Germany which rendered a peace treaty with the whole of Germany impossible, given the diverging interest of the victors.

3. The Cold War cemented the partition of Germany and made a peace treaty acceptable for all parties impossible.

4. Finally with 2+4 treaty this situation - although only a technicality at this point - was rectified.

I hope I could clear that up for you. But I do not understand what this question has to do with the topic? Maybe you should have made a seperate topic on this question.

Kind regards,
G.
 
The main reason is the Treaty of Versailles.
I would like some sources for this assumption.

By the way, the question of reparations was brought forth without a peace treaty. You do not need a peace treaty for that. There was the Parisian Agreement on Reparation from Germany in 1946 and the London Agreement on German External Debts from 1953. The IARA (Inter-Allied Reparation Agency) was working since 1945.

Kind regards,
G.
 
Stalin was always extremely cautious in foreign policy.

Oh yes, he conquer place only when he know he can get away with the other powers or he think it will be a military cakewalk (see Winter War for some example of miscaculation). But this doesn't mean that he will not search this opportunities or use it when he found one, and as a bastard as he will always think that the other nation will be out for him whatever they will done.
 
I wouldnt understimate the terror that the soviets had to be forced to fight another european coalition or even germany alone. Stalin's move against poland was the consequence of the clear hostility of western powers towards soviet union.

Honestly, it had more to do with Stalin being a Magnificent Bastard who was negotiating with both Germany and the Allies simultaneously, and reflected that his Purges and irreconcilable concepts of an anti-Nazi alliance meant that his attempts to form a military alliance fell through. And due to the Purges Soviet offers of aid were not exactly creditable, if a regime had traitors in such high places to such a degree as it claimed to do, why trust its aid if it couldn't even control its own employees?

Stalin was always extremely cautious in foreign policy.

Yes, he was. At the same time WWII did not begin solely with German action, it also began with Soviet action, and most versions of this question and answers obscure that Stalin was no passive pawn of events beyond his control in 1939.
 
I wouldnt understimate the terror that the soviets had to be forced to fight another european coalition or even germany alone. Stalin's move against poland was the consequence of the clear hostility of western powers towards soviet union.

These are the same Western powers that provided the capital for the USSR's industrial boom, mind you.
 

Cook

Banned
Honestly, it had more to do with Stalin being a Magnificent Bastard who was negotiating with both Germany and the Allies simultaneously...
Stalin didn’t enter into serious negotiations with the Nazi’s until Litvinov was replaced with Molotov in May 1939, and following Molotov’s assumption of the foreign affairs portfolio the negotiations did continue with the western allies, but with no expectation of a positive result.

Stalin concluded that the western allies weren’t seriously willing to take action to stop Hitler, just at the time the allies found the resolve to actually take action. It is unfortunate (to say the least), but an unsurprising consequence of Britain’s Appeasement Policy; a policy that is, in conjunction with the rise of the aggressive autocratic regimes, one of the most significant causes of the Second World War. Indeed, without appeasement, the collective defence that underpinned the League of Nations might not have collapsed.
 
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The main reason is the Treaty of Versailles.

No. Why? Because remove the ToV, WWII as it inevitably played out as it did is still entirely possible. It is a minor contributor at best.

I believe that if you want to answer this question, you need to try and find a factor that is essential for thigns to play out. WWI isn't so easy, but for WWII, it is.

You want to butterfly away WWII as per OTL, remove one man.

Hitler.

The math is simple, you remove him, the primary cause of the Second World War as per OTL is gone. He is essential to Nazism and without him, Germany would have taken a very different road, but you can't say that war on a scale that OTL WWII took place was the only inevitability.

Yes the ToV was a selling point for the Nazi's but, it was one among many. If we removed the ToV, we don't don't butterfly away the war, because the other compounding economic hardships are still there and it is still entirely possible for Hitler and his cronies to take control.

If you are going to blame the ToV, you may as well blame Otto Von Bismark for unifying Germany in the first place.
 
Stalin didn’t enter into serious negotiations with the Nazi’s until Litvinov was replaced with Molotov in May 1939, and following Molotov’s assumption of the foreign affairs portfolio the negotiations did continue with the western allies, but with no expectation of a positive result.

Stalin concluded that the western allies weren’t seriously willing to take action to stop Hitler, just at the time the allies found the resolve to actually take action. It is unfortunate (to say the least), but an unsurprising consequence of Britain’s Appeasement Policy; a policy that is, in conjunction with the rise of the aggressive autocratic regimes, one of the most significant causes of the Second World War. Indeed, without appeasement, the collective defence that underpinned the League of Nations might not have collapsed.

Well, if we consider this from the POV of the 1930s, the Purges were a major obstacle to any anti-Nazi military alliance. Why, if you're planning a joint war against the Nazis, would you want to ally with a society which seemed ridden with a violent conspiratorial opposition if its actions are serious and are suicidally stupid without a sense of timing if not?

And the same ones which tried to strangle the ussr in its craddle.

And yet it was Winston Churchill alone of the Big 3 who negotiated a formal treaty with the Soviets pledging the UK and USSR against separate peaces.
 
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