Deleted member 1487
That's the thing the trade situation pre-WW2 was vastly different than it was post-WW2. West Germany got far richer than Germany had ever been able to pre-WW1 even because the US forced a free trade system on the capitalist world and the imperial system broke down opening up trade that Germany never previously had access to. That wouldn't exist without WW2 having broken down the old world order. They could do okay in the pre-WW2 system relatively, but even without Versailles debts they had very serious economic issues being that they were a middle sized workshop nation that depended on foreign trade that was highly limited by imperialism, tariffs, foreign competition, and wars (China occupied by Japan). Ironically losing WW2 actually won Germany what it always wanted before WW1: an equal chance at international trade that the colonial and tariff systems shut them out of at the turn of the century. Sure they had access to trade, but nothing like what they got after WW2 thanks to the US free trade system it was able to impose on Europe because of how broke they were from the war. I mean if you look at the growth of GDP per capita in German from 1870-2015 there is a major leap in growth post-1950, as it did for all of Europe really.Pretty much this. Sooner or later pragmatic Germans will realise they can join the international system through trade and win the peace...they had been doing so both times when they threw it away for war in the first and then preparing for war in the second instance.
The question is how much they can really expect to prosper in peace without WW2 due to their debts to the US they couldn't afford to pay and had defaulted on or the big debt they took on in the 1930s for rearmament. And that's assuming Versailles isn't made an issue again once the Depression ends (Lausanne was only supposed to be a moratorium, not an end to the debt). It wasn't just Hitler that decided war or at least an aggressive foreign policy combined with autarky was the better option than the fragile trade system that had damaged Germany so badly after WW1. So long as high tariffs remain and the imperial systems limited trade opportunities (plus whatever happens with China and Japan) the German trade opportunities were limited in the 1930s and who knows what would have happened going into the 1940s. So there is no reason to assume German leadership even non-Nazi would assume peace and trade in post-Versailles Europe was in their interest.
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