What if The Treaty of Versailles wasn't as harsh?

Perkeo

Banned
There is a problem with defining ethnic German majority. Are Alsaciens ethnic Germans? Integration in the French way would suggest they aren't.
Besides, Alsace and Moselle were core French territory when they were taken too.
Now Eupen-Malmédy, Danzig and Memel are more open to discussion. But Alsace-Lorraine's ethnicity depends very clearly on the definition and could be argued not to be ethnically German.

One good indication of ethnic borders is language - but this indication fails in that case:
Linguistically, Alsace didn't become French until well after 1918, and still has a large German-speaking minority today. There are also some cultural continuity, a lot of sauerkraut is eaten west of the Rhine, lots of snails in the east. But due to the French revolution, there is a unique divergence between language and affiliation to a nation.
 

Perkeo

Banned
Well, they need to be convinced that that doing that forever is all that stands between them and a repeat of the last war, even during the midst of the Great Depression. It's kind of a hard sell, and the longer they keep periodically invading Germany, the more resentful they become.

And the less convinced world opinion becomes that Germany is the bad guy in the first place.
 
The reason the Baltics became independent in the first place is Brest-Litowsk. Thank God the Entente did not overturn Brest-Litowsk on that issue. Can you imagine independent Baltics if Germany had agreed to status quo ante bellum and/or outright lost on the eastern front??

How? Brest-Litovsk didn't create Estonia and Latvia, it destroyed them (temporarily). The Baltic nations managed to establish their independence only because the Entente victory forced Germany to abandon the Duchy and retreat from the region.
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I thought we were talking WWI, not WWII. It does not seem very reasonable to claim that Nazi atrocities are supposed to be forseeable when the Sowjets' aren't. After all, the Sowjet regime was already installed while Hitler little more than a street bum.
This may be a misunderstanding - we are talking about WWI. The Estonian historian in question is talking about German occupation during the First World War. This occupation was not a Nazi-style one, but it was still worse than Tsarist rule and the few months of Bolshevik rule that the Baltics had experienced before Brest-Litovsk. In short, highly oppressive.
And being conquered by the Sowjets - in that case, not many years later - was BETTER ???

No, I imagine being conquered by the Soviets was much worse (though again, we can't really say what methods the Hetmanate and its backers would have used to stay in power).

But that brings us back - which had better chances of survival: the popular and legitimate Ukrainian republic or the Hetmanate which was hated by like 90% of the population?
I didn't say they should preserve the Baltic governments, let alone by force. I said that they should preserve the borders - which they did.

So if I understood this correctly, Germany should have been allowed to intervene in the east, not to prop up its spheres of influence but to help the new states preserve their independence?

Sounds fine in theory, but it raises some questions:
-Why should the new states trust Germany and let its troops in? After the German Empire's activities in 1917-1918 there, they would have every right not to.
-Why would Berlin agree to it?
-And whose army? The German public and soldiers would have every right to ask why they are still being made to fight, for something that has no clear benefit to themselves or Germany, when the war is over and they're supposed to be coming back home? At this point Germany was experiencing some revolutionary turbulence itself.
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Look at the borders of Brest-Litowsk and compare it to today's self determined borders.

To avoid misunderstandings: I'm not defending Brest-Litowsk as a desirable outcome, I'm just objecting against declaring it a devil-incarnate which it simply wasn't. My guess is that Brest-Litowsk would start at the level of independenceof the Warsaw pact, and improve when Germany liberalises internally.
Self-determination is more than lines on a map; the content of those lines is just as important. And who was given self-determination by Brest-Litovsk?
Estonia and Lithuania don't exist.
There's something that calls itself Ukraine but has basically just killed Ukraine and is wearing its skin.
Lithuania? I guess that's better than nothing. (although even the Lithuanians didn't get a normal-shaped country, but a mega-Lithuania lording over millions of Poles and Belarusians)
And there is the ever-present question of Poland's borders.

We can talk about a scenario where none of this happens and Germany really cooperates with the eastern nations, but that would mean we are no longer talking about Brest-Litovsk; but some other, hypothetical solution.

The Devil incarnate? Maybe not, but still pretty awful. I believe Brest-Litovsk should be judged on its own merits - on what it was, not on what it might have looked like under a radically different German leadership.

As for the liberalization of the German Empire, and its consequences - not sure what to think of that. It's not inevitable, and the relatively high levels of internal liberty enjoyed by, say, Britain or Belgium didn't stop them from having colonial empires.
 
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Since of all the three, Germany had the least history of stealing other nations' territories they had to pay reparations instead. One can only speculate what the indemnities would have been if Russia had less non-Russian territory to be taken away.

Russia did have to pay an indemnity to Germany - 6 Billion marks, under the terms of the Supplementary Treaty of August 1918. Also, it had to undertake on obligation to attack the Entente troops in the north, allow passage to German and Finnish troops, and make several economic concessions. In exchange for all this, Germany promised not to carve off any more territory than was already taken.
 
Equal but not nicer. Germany lost all territories that can reasonably disputed, Russia lost all territories that can reasonably disputed, Austria lost all territories that can reasonably disputed.

Russia still had non-Russian territory left to strip off. There was a fair slice of Eastern Karelia, say, that had a non-Russian majority that could have been added to Finland, to give an example. Many Finns themselves saw the OTL post-1917/1920 borders as something of a "minimum Finland" and were disappointed for the outcome.


Russia did have to pay an indemnity to Germany - 6 Billion marks, under the terms of the Supplementary Treaty of August 1918. Also, it had to undertake on obligation to attack the Entente troops in the north, allow passage to German and Finnish troops, and make several economic concessions. In exchange for all this, Germany promised not to carve off any more territory than was already taken.

Where was it specifically said that passage was to be allowed to Finnish troops? I went through the texts of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the supplement but could not find a direct reference to Finnish troops, maybe I'm missing something? I also ask because I can't remember any actual event in 1918 that (Soviet) Russia would have allowed Finnish troops unimpeded passage through their territory.
 
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I mean, Brest-Litovsk at least has the excuse that it was the result of the Soviets refusing an initial settlement and then losing even more ground before caving. Negotiations can get messy under those circumstances. If Germany had done the same, you have to wonder if the amended settlement would leave an intact country at all.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
A great enoughchange to make any difference?
IMHO : yes :
  • less harsh conditions might make it easier to 'fulfill' enough of the conditions to avoid the Ruhr-occupation (if you don#t render the french doing it for ... other reasons anyway).
  • would likely cause as well better 'conditions' of the (then somewhat changed) Dawes-plan (something alike would IMO come anyway)
  • would lead to a better economical development of germany
Why would minor changes in the ToV stop the bank crises happening?
and the above would lead to more 'reserves' in 1930/31 to avoid or at least make the bank crisis less hard.

It was a damn close draw for France to get the austrians to accept their offer of founds. There were several schemes thought up between Germany and Austria to deal with the 'Credit-Anstalt' by themself, but due to lack of enough funding the french 'won' the race.
 
I mean, Brest-Litovsk at least has the excuse that it was the result of the Soviets refusing an initial settlement and then losing even more ground before caving. Negotiations can get messy under those circumstances. If Germany had done the same, you have to wonder if the amended settlement would leave an intact country at all.
If Germany had refused, there is a chance big chunks would be bitten off of it. For example, restoring the independence of Bavaria and Hannover. Or giving the Rhineland and Ruhr either to France or an independent Rhenish Republic.
But that means they are going not for a settled peace but for destroying Germany.
 
Where was it specifically said that passage was to be allowed to Finnish troops? I went through the texts of the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the supplement but could not find a direct reference to Finnish troops, maybe I'm missing something? I also ask because I can't remember any actual event in 1918 that (Soviet) Russia would have allowed Finnish troops unimpeded passage through their territory.

It's in the supplement's secret protocol:
"...should the Russian action provided for in article 5, paragraph I, against the forces of the Entente in north Russia not be immediately successful, Germany would itself be obliged to undertake such action, if necessary with the help of Finnish troops..."
 
It's in the supplement's secret protocol:
"...should the Russian action provided for in article 5, paragraph I, against the forces of the Entente in north Russia not be immediately successful, Germany would itself be obliged to undertake such action, if necessary with the help of Finnish troops..."

Thank you. I see why that provision did not seem to have much effect on the Finnish troops: it was only agreed upon in late August 1918, mere two months before the Finno-German cooperation de facto collapsed. There was no joint Finnish-German advance towards the Murmansk railway in this time, so there was little chance to try if the Bolsheviks would adhere to it. I think the smaller Finnish expedition into Viena Karelia (led by Toivo Kuisma) in July - October 1918 faced armed opposition from pretty much every Red group in the area, though, whether ones working for the Allied intervention forces or the Bolsheviks themselves.
 
If Germany had refused, there is a chance big chunks would be bitten off of it. For example, restoring the independence of Bavaria and Hannover. Or giving the Rhineland and Ruhr either to France or an independent Rhenish Republic.
But that means they are going not for a settled peace but for destroying Germany.


Such territorial changes would last just as long as French troops stayed on the ground to enforce them

Given that OTL they even left the Rhineland five years before the ToV requited them to (and later looked the other way when the DMZ was reoccupied) how long is that likely to be?
 
Such territorial changes would last just as long as French troops stayed on the ground to enforce them

Given that OTL they even left the Rhineland five years before the ToV requited them to (and later looked the other way when the DMZ was reoccupied) how long is that likely to be?

Maybe not that long. Still, the point I was getting at was that there were different circumstances behind B-L as opposed to Versailles, and had the Germans behaved similarly to Trotsky in response to the latter, they probably would have wound up facing a settlement much, much harsher than even Brest-Litovsk.
 
I can't remember if this was discussed earlier on...

How would Germany and Poland be affected if Germany had been awarded all of Upper Silesia? IIRC the part Poland got produced 25% of Germany's coal in addition to having important zinc deposits. What could Nazi Germany have done with a third more coal between 1933 and 1939? What could Poland have done without its most important supply of coal? Were there any alternative sources that could have been developed?
 
The figures I have for German production, are:

1929 - 342 million tons
1937 - 369 million tons
1938 - 360 million tons

The corresponding figures for Poland are:

1929 - 46 million tons
1937 - 35 million tons
1938 - 33 million tons

The source I got them from does not say if they are short tons, long tons or metric tons.

If Upper Silesia really did produce 25% of Germany's coal in 1914 then the above figures for Poland should have been in the region of 110 to 120 million tons. Therefore I'm guessing that the Polish mines had the capacity to produce more, but that there was not the demand. Or it mean that the Germans had developed other sources of coal within their own territory to make up for the loss of the Silesian mines.
 
Or it mean that the Germans had developed other sources of coal within their own territory to make up for the loss of the Silesian mines.

The Ruhr mines were where most of German coal came from. in 1922 it produced 80% of German coal (numbering some 97 million tons compared to 120 million tons total for Germany). In 1920 the Ruhr produced 88 million tons while Upper Silesia produced 32 million.

Your estimate for German coal production seem way too high, especially for the 1929 mark. I can't find any numbers for that year myself but compared to previous years I don't see such a dramatic increase like that.
 
If opinion b happened then the Second Mexican-American war is a possibility and also a more rapid decline of British,French,Belgien,and dutch Empires. But with a less rapid decline in the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. We would also a German empire be rising very quickly. Also I think the central power would make the allies pay war reparations. That means nazi Italy,France, and britian is likely but would not be as successful as hitler. The Japanese empire would grow more slowly with a lot of lands in German hands and with some war reputations. Bulgaria would probably gain the most land in the balkans. Switzerland would be a more German state. We would also probably see the German empire out shine the British empire. Finally France would lose all courage to prevail against the Germans having lost 2 wars to them.
 
The Ruhr mines were where most of German coal came from. in 1922 it produced 80% of German coal (numbering some 97 million tons compared to 120 million tons total for Germany). In 1920 the Ruhr produced 88 million tons while Upper Silesia produced 32 million.

Your estimate for German coal production seem way too high, especially for the 1929 mark. I can't find any numbers for that year myself but compared to previous years I don't see such a dramatic increase like that.
The source were the articles on world coal production from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Books of the Year.

For 1937 it breaks the German total of 369 million tons down into 184.50 tons of coal and 184.67 tons of lignite. For the same year Poland's total of 35.3 million tons broke down into 35 million tons of coal and 0.3 million tons of lignite. Unfortunately the other years just give the totals for all types of coal. Do your figures include lignite?

The spreadsheet I made at least several months ago from my local reference library had a gap for between 1939 and 1942. But for 1943 it said that Germany produced 456.5 million tons of coal, while Poland produced 100.7 million tons. I didn't include that before because I thought that as it came from a book printed after 1945 it would have the production within both countries post 1945 borders.
 
Do your figures include lignite?
No, they do not. Just the "black coal".
That makes far more sense then, as per month the amount of tons of lignite is nearly the same as coal (least for the charts of 1920 that I have). I would assume that your numbers also include coke production as well, however that's rather marginal on the numbers (another 10-20 million).

I didn't include that before because I thought that as it came from a book printed after 1945 it would have the production within both countries post 1945 borders.

I would assume so, Outside of Upper Silesia, Poland didn't have much coal production in her eastern provinces. With the shift it got a large amount more coal mines from the previously German mines in the area.
 
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