Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy
Banned
No, it was not inevitable at all. Let's look at those elements of the peace settlement which Germany would not live with:
1) The reparations: These had already been greatly reduced by the time Hitler came to power and he repudiated them without this leading to war.
2) The military clauses, including demilitarization: Hitler walked all over them and the Brits and French accommodated him.
3) Anschluss: It happened and there was no war over it.
4) The Saar: Germany got it back.
5) Danzig and the Corridor: Had Hitler decided to demand these first and delay the Sudeten Crisis, appeasement would have allowed him to receive satisfaction from Poland.
Basically, a German leader (or succession of leaders) sharing Hitler's ability to exploit Western weakness but not his determination to eventually go to war could have overturned all those elements of Versailles that Germans were willing to fight for - without fighting for them. The only way war would have started under such a scenario would have been if Germany started demanding territory in the West (Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy, South Tyrol; there was too little appetite for this and Locarno signaled German abandonment of such ambitions in exchange for Western acquiescence in its Eastern ambitions), or if they went too far in the East (thus indirectly becoming an unstoppable threat to the West).
Alternatively, had the intent of Versailles been respected and Germany not been allowed to evade its economic and military restrictions, then it would not have started a war because it could not have started a war. Even in OTL it took some outstanding Western incompetence not to defeat Germany while most of the Wehrmacht was in Poland. A more prudent German leading a less powerful country would never have risked it.
It is nowhere written that international tensions lead to war. They may simply continue until they subside or new developments change the rules of the game. Many people expected the outcome of WWI to lead to WWII, but many people also expected the outcome of WWII to lead to WWIII. We remember the war hysteria that proved right and ignore the (arguably greater) one that proved wrong. Things are rarely inevitable, and after 20 years they pretty much cannot be inevitable; too much has happened for us to be able to say that any alternate sequence of events would have led to the same result.
Nonsense. Hitler had made up his mind on lebensraum and was pretty intent on getting revenge on France. As long as he's in power and unrestrained, war in the East is inevitable (this is one situation where the word is warranted) and war in the West is likely.
You're raising speculation to the rank of factual truth.
Keynes was wrong.
The question was whether or not a world war is inevitable even without Hitler. Not just without Hitler.
1) The reparations: These had already been greatly reduced by the time Hitler came to power and he repudiated them without this leading to war.
2) The military clauses, including demilitarization: Hitler walked all over them and the Brits and French accommodated him.
3) Anschluss: It happened and there was no war over it.
4) The Saar: Germany got it back.
5) Danzig and the Corridor: Had Hitler decided to demand these first and delay the Sudeten Crisis, appeasement would have allowed him to receive satisfaction from Poland.
Basically, a German leader (or succession of leaders) sharing Hitler's ability to exploit Western weakness but not his determination to eventually go to war could have overturned all those elements of Versailles that Germans were willing to fight for - without fighting for them. The only way war would have started under such a scenario would have been if Germany started demanding territory in the West (Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy, South Tyrol; there was too little appetite for this and Locarno signaled German abandonment of such ambitions in exchange for Western acquiescence in its Eastern ambitions), or if they went too far in the East (thus indirectly becoming an unstoppable threat to the West).
Alternatively, had the intent of Versailles been respected and Germany not been allowed to evade its economic and military restrictions, then it would not have started a war because it could not have started a war. Even in OTL it took some outstanding Western incompetence not to defeat Germany while most of the Wehrmacht was in Poland. A more prudent German leading a less powerful country would never have risked it.
It is nowhere written that international tensions lead to war. They may simply continue until they subside or new developments change the rules of the game. Many people expected the outcome of WWI to lead to WWII, but many people also expected the outcome of WWII to lead to WWIII. We remember the war hysteria that proved right and ignore the (arguably greater) one that proved wrong. Things are rarely inevitable, and after 20 years they pretty much cannot be inevitable; too much has happened for us to be able to say that any alternate sequence of events would have led to the same result.
Thus unless the Allies did not back up Poland, a war was immanent. Of course, there would have been no Holocaust and no Barbarossa as well.
Nonsense. Hitler had made up his mind on lebensraum and was pretty intent on getting revenge on France. As long as he's in power and unrestrained, war in the East is inevitable (this is one situation where the word is warranted) and war in the West is likely.
If it isn't Indochina--and without Germany conquering France, Japan probably won't mess around in French colonies--then something else, sooner or later, triggers an oil embargo.
Maybe another Nanking Massacre. Maybe another American gunboat gets hit by accident, or on purpose. Maybe Hollywood makes a really good anti-fascist movie about Japan (something like Casablanca, only set in Shanghai or Hong Kong or something) and the public gets riled up.
In any event, the long-term trend in US-Japanese relations was clearly downwards, regardless of what happened in Europe.
You're raising speculation to the rank of factual truth.
Keynes, who was the UK economic leader at the ToV, clearly stated the reparations could not be paid.
Keynes was wrong.
It had nothing to do with Germany. So removing Hitler doesn't necessarily change it. Unlike German foreign policy, which obviously changes quite a bit.
(I mean, yeah, there's always butterflies. Maybe Hitler not sneezing one day in 1932 ends up creating a terrible hurricane over Manchukuo in 1935 which wipes out all the generals of the Kwantung Army or something. But there's no direct reason that war, and the US sanctions in response, wouldn't happen the same way in No Hitler World.)
The question was whether or not a world war is inevitable even without Hitler. Not just without Hitler.