To be honest though,the Treaty of Frankfurt isn't too harsh considering the scale of defeat France had in the Franco-Prussian War.
WI: Milder Versailles?
- Thread starter Empress_Janina_I.
- Start date
Why not? A landlocked Czechoslovakia was; also a landlocked Hungary and (despite some claims to the contrary) a landlocked Austria.
Which just shows that some people didn't think too clearly.
The ToV failed because when the chips were down its framers weren't willing to make the effort needed to enforce it - and a harsher treaty would have required even more effort to enforce, so would have stood even less chance.
Last edited:
It would be hard for Versailles to be even milder for Germany in relation to its eastern borders. Pomerelia was absolutely crucial for polish economy (and had a clear polish-kashubian majority btw) and even UK finally acknowledged it.
Last edited:
Suppose Germany were to win a complete and total victory and annex the coastline of the United Kingdom, and then proceed to heavily tax all traffic passing through that territory. How would such a landlocked UK do?
That's an idiotic comparison, Poland would have gotten the same deal as Czechoslovakia. They didn't have to pay tariffs and even today operate under the same agreement as in 1919.
By the way, Germany wasn't even allowed to raise tariffs on their waterways because they were internationalized under the ToV.
And if Germany were to break the deal? Judging by its OTL behaviour with tarriffs Germany would have certainly loved to do so. The agreement with Czechoslovakia might exist in modern times, but in the meantime it was broken rather dramatically.
Last edited:
BlondieBC
Banned
Hello everyone!
Would it be possible for Germany to get a way milder Versailles after WW 1?
Let's say, the Brits are somewhat more Germany-friendly and "tout" for a plebiscite in all northern West Prussia (Gouvernment district of Danzig), Germany will keep one colony (for example (a smaller) Cameroon or OTL French Togoland or even Namibia) and there are by far not that heavy repressions on Germany.
How possible would it be and what would be the consequences?
Maybe no Nazi overtake?
Thank you and sorry for my bad English.
Empress Janina I.
Welcome to the board.
Sure the treaty could be milder, it depends on the POD. The range possible outcomes depends on what went different.
Nambia was desired by South Africa, so this would be a difficult colony to keep, but I guess Cameroon or Togo are not too difficult.
Keep land in the east is more seeable, especially if the Soviets do something to scare the UK.
Lower reparations are harder since the UK and France were broke, but there were people who understood they were basically unpayable at the levels listed, so you might get the official number closer to what IOTL were actually paid.
The Nazi were a long shot IOTL. Almost any major change before 1925 involving Germany has a good shot of keeping Hitler out of power.
And France managed to pay the reparations which IIRC were more onerous than those under the Treaty of Versailles.
Poland invades, and Germany with its reduced army can't fight back. Doesn't seem too complicated, and who's gonna complain? The French?
Remember that the Weimar governments prioritized irredentism against Poland over irredentism against Czechoslovakia.
France didn't have the USSR to watch out for, and soon started distancing itself from its allies anyway.
So the Polish are in danger if both Germany and the USSR commit to vassalizing them, and France stands aloof. If that does happen, then what good is the corridor anyways?
Then again,the French hardly broke anything in Germany.Most of the stuff that was broken was in French soil during the Franco-Prussian War.Same deal in WWI.
Last edited:
Or, if Berlin and Moscow really want an end to Poland and France will let them, we simply see 1939.
Deleted member 1487
That's nonsense the harshness was brought hard in 1919-1924 after which things were backed off due to the Dawes and Young Plan. By 1929-32 things were very rough again due to the Great Depression and the US calling in loans, but Lausanne effectively killed Versailles. Much of the rhetoric about how lenient Versailles was in the end comes from a generation of historians trying to play the revisionist game to sell books, or were influenced by the opening of French archives in the 1970s, which gave them a highly biased look at the situation that they took as gospel.
Gerald Feldman did a whole study on the post-war inflation problem and got into the issue of how French archives wrecked a generation of scholarship on the issue because they were only publishing the biased French opinion of what was going on.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Disorder-Economics-Inflation/dp/0195101146
http://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-Austria-Hungary-1914-1918/dp/0340573481/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
The final section of this book gets into the heavy looting of Germany in 1919 by the occupying Allied armies that worsened the starvation problem (besides the blockade from 1918-19) and had to be called off because it was collapsing the German economy that was badly off anyway; so they took the payments of Germany's last gold reserves in 1919 instead and when Germany couldn't pay they started looting again, pushing Germany to the brink of collapse in the early 1920s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr
LordKalvert
Banned
What is nonsense is that Versailles was harsh and that somehow led to WWII
As you point out- this "harsh" period ends with the Dawes and Young plan in 1924. Hitler's rise is in 1932, so making the treaty more "lenient" doesn't change a thing. The German inflation was a deliberate policy of the Weimar Republic to extinguish their internal debts
As for the Germans couldn't pay the reparations and that was what was driving the Germans to bankruptcy during the Great Depression, that too is nonsense. The Germans immediately took the money and spent it on weapons. The whole point of the reparations was to keep the Germans from doing this- if the Germans had taken the money they spent on Hitler's war machine, they probably could have made a very serious dent in the reparations
The myth that the "harshness of Versailles" is the cause of WWII is that no one in the WWII allies thought that was the solution. Instead, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin all agreed that this time, the Germans are really going to pay.
LordKalvert
Banned
Which is a way of saying, that some people don't follow a thread and therefore take comments out of context. I noted pretty earlier on, like my first response, that the biggest problem with Versailles wasn't that it was harsh- it wasn't- but that the coalition that created it broke down (the Americans went home, the Russians were beaten, the Italians had few complaints with the Germans and the British didn't trust the French) which left only France and Belgium really interested in enforcing the treaty