raharris1973
Well-known member
The Germans really hated signing that treaty. Chancellor Scheidemann (SDP) resigned, rather than sign it, leaving Gustav Bauer (SDP), holding the bag. The Germans put forth counterproposals and amendments, that the Allies slapped aside, saying sign it, unmodified, or we are at war again, or we march in, invading you, in 24 hours.
What if the Germans at this point "pulled an Ataturk" by reacting like the Turks did, refusing to sign, or resisting Treaty implementation? [the Turks actually did the former, not the latter, but we can make it the former for the Germans if we want] and ended up fighting forces trying to enforce the implementation of the Treaty of Sevres in their case, and since they succeeded and the Allies were tired and impersistent, they succeeded in getting agreement to signature of a new, revived, more Turkish-favorable treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne.
Now, the simplest answer to my query is, the Germans get invaded by the Allied forces, already occupying the Rhineland, get beaten rather swiftly, and the Allies dictate Versailles terms, indeed harsher ones, from Berlin and German soil, and extract the reparations they want, either gold from vaults, or reparations in kind, before leaving. This may indeed be the correct answer, in short form.
But I still think it is worth asking, and worth estimating at a more detailed level *how* this would play out, how long it would last, what challenges each side would face, and where all the various individual Allied and German players are left at the end of any fighting in 1919, and what this does to the politics of Germany and Europe and the USA in the 20s and beyond.
So from the German point of view, the objective in resisting the treaty is the finding above all some of the territorial clauses, those pertaining to the east, mandating territorial cessions of Danzig and a Reich-splitting corridor to the sea for Poland, and forbidding the self-determined desire of Austrian, Bohemian-Moravian, and
Tyrolese Germans from unifying with Germany from being realized are unacceptable. There is a German political consensus that the loss of Alsace-Lorraine is an acceptable price of peace, a plebiscite on adjusting the border in Schleswig is endurable, and while regrettable, territorial adjustments in favor of Belgium ---but not these territorial strictures designed to placate the Poles, Czechs, and Italians. The Germans also have objections to some of the war criminal aspects' one-sidedness, disarmament provisions, reparations, and alleged 'war-guilt'/responsibility clause.
German resistance to treaty terms/implementation is broadly supported by everyone from the far right in Germany to the moderate left in the SDP, with get-along-to-go-along pro-signature folks only isolated, sporadic voices shamed into mostly staying silent.
The remaining political faction, Spartakists/Communists, do not specifically support the national resistance effort, nor oppose it, they are "orthogonal" to it. It is 'sidewise' of their objective of national and global workers' revolution.
Militarily, the German Army had abandoned its western front fixed defenses and heavy arms, allowed the Allies to occupy the Rhineland and three strategic cities over the river, and done a substantial demobilization. It leaves forces under their command structure in the neighborhood of 400-500,000 men with miscellaneous arms, I do not know if any men, or how many had been furloughed back from Allied POW camps.
Germany was still under blockade and at Allied mercy in a maritime sense, crippling its foreign trade and limiting its food supplies and causing cases of starvation. But, food imports had restarted in March 1919 when an agreement was reached sending remaining German merchant ships from German to Allied ports. This provided some caloric relief to Germans through June, but made those ships vulnerable to quick seizure in the event of resumed hostilities.
So the Allies possessed key terrain further east into Germany in June 1919 than they had at the moment of armistice in Nov 11, 1918. They had been undergoing their own demobilization as well, but certainly had much more mechanized, motorized and heavily armed forces than the Germans, even if less numerous by June 1919 than in November 1918. In November 1918, the Allies also had Italian forces poised at the German (Bavarian) border at Innsbruck/Austrian Tyrol, and a French lead-multinational force strung across the Balkans from Slovenia and Croatia to southern Hungary and northern Transylvania, all poised to advance further north and west toward Germany. By June 1919, the French and British elements of this force were probably demobilized and gone, except for possibly some small advisory detachments, and mainly local forces of new countries like "Poland", "Czecho-Slovakia" and "The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" were mainly collected on their own newly defined national territories.
So I imagine, the campaign scheme of maneuver of a German vs. Allied and Associated Powers resumed fight after a nearly seven months hiatus would appear
somewhat different from a mere continuation of fighting straight from November 1918 onward. [This continuation scenario, and its schemes of maneuver, are being discussed in detail, here: Cool-Headed Ludy - let's mess with Germany's WWI endgame]
But we had a a forum member in the past, [that forum member is @History Learner] arguing on the authority largely of two books, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, and Elizabeth Greenhalgh's The French Army and the First World War that the demobilization process was actually, relatively *worse on Allied prospects than German* in a renewed fight in the summer of 1919, and militarily and politically, with the burden of the offensive, the Allies might not have found it possible to conduct an offensive, or sustain one, against German resistance! And thus, the Allies might soon have been forced to revise their terms in some manner, perhaps on objectives they did not physically hold, like eastern borders, or disarmament matters.
I will quote that poster's arguments at length, and you can respond on why his arguments and sources support his optimistic-for-German resistance conclusions, or why they fail to support those conclusions:
What if the Germans at this point "pulled an Ataturk" by reacting like the Turks did, refusing to sign, or resisting Treaty implementation? [the Turks actually did the former, not the latter, but we can make it the former for the Germans if we want] and ended up fighting forces trying to enforce the implementation of the Treaty of Sevres in their case, and since they succeeded and the Allies were tired and impersistent, they succeeded in getting agreement to signature of a new, revived, more Turkish-favorable treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne.
Now, the simplest answer to my query is, the Germans get invaded by the Allied forces, already occupying the Rhineland, get beaten rather swiftly, and the Allies dictate Versailles terms, indeed harsher ones, from Berlin and German soil, and extract the reparations they want, either gold from vaults, or reparations in kind, before leaving. This may indeed be the correct answer, in short form.
But I still think it is worth asking, and worth estimating at a more detailed level *how* this would play out, how long it would last, what challenges each side would face, and where all the various individual Allied and German players are left at the end of any fighting in 1919, and what this does to the politics of Germany and Europe and the USA in the 20s and beyond.
So from the German point of view, the objective in resisting the treaty is the finding above all some of the territorial clauses, those pertaining to the east, mandating territorial cessions of Danzig and a Reich-splitting corridor to the sea for Poland, and forbidding the self-determined desire of Austrian, Bohemian-Moravian, and
Tyrolese Germans from unifying with Germany from being realized are unacceptable. There is a German political consensus that the loss of Alsace-Lorraine is an acceptable price of peace, a plebiscite on adjusting the border in Schleswig is endurable, and while regrettable, territorial adjustments in favor of Belgium ---but not these territorial strictures designed to placate the Poles, Czechs, and Italians. The Germans also have objections to some of the war criminal aspects' one-sidedness, disarmament provisions, reparations, and alleged 'war-guilt'/responsibility clause.
German resistance to treaty terms/implementation is broadly supported by everyone from the far right in Germany to the moderate left in the SDP, with get-along-to-go-along pro-signature folks only isolated, sporadic voices shamed into mostly staying silent.
The remaining political faction, Spartakists/Communists, do not specifically support the national resistance effort, nor oppose it, they are "orthogonal" to it. It is 'sidewise' of their objective of national and global workers' revolution.
Militarily, the German Army had abandoned its western front fixed defenses and heavy arms, allowed the Allies to occupy the Rhineland and three strategic cities over the river, and done a substantial demobilization. It leaves forces under their command structure in the neighborhood of 400-500,000 men with miscellaneous arms, I do not know if any men, or how many had been furloughed back from Allied POW camps.
Germany was still under blockade and at Allied mercy in a maritime sense, crippling its foreign trade and limiting its food supplies and causing cases of starvation. But, food imports had restarted in March 1919 when an agreement was reached sending remaining German merchant ships from German to Allied ports. This provided some caloric relief to Germans through June, but made those ships vulnerable to quick seizure in the event of resumed hostilities.
So the Allies possessed key terrain further east into Germany in June 1919 than they had at the moment of armistice in Nov 11, 1918. They had been undergoing their own demobilization as well, but certainly had much more mechanized, motorized and heavily armed forces than the Germans, even if less numerous by June 1919 than in November 1918. In November 1918, the Allies also had Italian forces poised at the German (Bavarian) border at Innsbruck/Austrian Tyrol, and a French lead-multinational force strung across the Balkans from Slovenia and Croatia to southern Hungary and northern Transylvania, all poised to advance further north and west toward Germany. By June 1919, the French and British elements of this force were probably demobilized and gone, except for possibly some small advisory detachments, and mainly local forces of new countries like "Poland", "Czecho-Slovakia" and "The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" were mainly collected on their own newly defined national territories.
So I imagine, the campaign scheme of maneuver of a German vs. Allied and Associated Powers resumed fight after a nearly seven months hiatus would appear
somewhat different from a mere continuation of fighting straight from November 1918 onward. [This continuation scenario, and its schemes of maneuver, are being discussed in detail, here: Cool-Headed Ludy - let's mess with Germany's WWI endgame]
But we had a a forum member in the past, [that forum member is @History Learner] arguing on the authority largely of two books, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, and Elizabeth Greenhalgh's The French Army and the First World War that the demobilization process was actually, relatively *worse on Allied prospects than German* in a renewed fight in the summer of 1919, and militarily and politically, with the burden of the offensive, the Allies might not have found it possible to conduct an offensive, or sustain one, against German resistance! And thus, the Allies might soon have been forced to revise their terms in some manner, perhaps on objectives they did not physically hold, like eastern borders, or disarmament matters.
I will quote that poster's arguments at length, and you can respond on why his arguments and sources support his optimistic-for-German resistance conclusions, or why they fail to support those conclusions:
What if David Lloyd George was killed by the Spanish Flu shortly before the Versailles Conference?History Learner said:
It really wasn't by the Summer of 1919, the demobilization had been that intensive at that point; Foch was absolutely terrified the Germans would refuse and there was no desire left among the Entente public to fight to enforce the Treaty. Historical case in point of this was the Turks not only rejecting the Treaty but successfully fighting off the War weary Entente powers from their territories.
Poly said:
OK, so it's possible that Poland gets more land. So what ?
WWII still happens over German invasion of what country ?
The Germans reject the treaty and actually end up retaining more land than historically. From Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, Pg 158:
History Learner said:
Among the Allied leaders only General Pershing, the top American military commander, thought the Allies should press on, beyond the Rhine if necessary. The French did not want anymore of their men to die. Their chief general, Marshal Foch, who was also the supreme Allied commander, warned that they ran the risk of stiff resistance and heavy losses. The British wanted to make peace before the Americans became too strong. And Smuts spoke for many in Europe when he warned gloomily that "the grim spectre of Bolshevist anarchy was stalking the front."
On Page 159:
And the Allied forces were shrinking were shrinking. In November 1918, there were 198 Allied Divisions; by June 1919, only 39 remained. And could they be relied upon? There was little enthusiasm for renewed fighting. Allied demobilization had been hastened by protests, occasionally outright mutiny. On the home fronts, there was a longing for peace, and lower taxes. The French were particularly insistent on the need to make peace while the Allies could still dictate terms.
Further:
While his pessimism was premature, it is true by the spring of 1919 Allied commanders were increasingly doubtful about their ability to successfully wage war on Germany. The German Army had been defeated on the battlefield, but its command structure, along with hundreds of thousands of trained men, had survived. There were 75 Million Germans and only 40 million French, as Foch kept repeating. And the German people, Allied observers noticed, were opposed to signing a harsh peace.
Poly said: Had the Germans refused the Versailles treaty, there would've been other Germans who could have been produced to sign. You say the allied armies, in the Summer of 1919, were a shadow of those that existed in November 1918, maybe so, but the German army was basically non-existent.
History Learner said:..... As noted by the sources, the Germany Army in 1919 was still about 500,000 men under Arms with their command staff still functioning and paramilitaries constituting another 500,000 or so; a million man force, should the need arise. ......We're talking about the situation in the Summer of 1919 and territories the Germans had yet to surrender as per the Treaty, such as their 1914 territories in the East or unification with Austria.
Poly said:
Where does it say he was "terrified" ?
History Learner said: While his pessimism was premature, it is true by the spring of 1919 Allied commanders were increasingly doubtful about their ability to successfully wage war on Germany. The German Army had been defeated on the battlefield, but its command structure, along with hundreds of thousands of trained men, had survived. There were 75 Million Germans and only 40 million French, as Foch kept repeating. And the German people, Allied observers noticed, were opposed to signing a harsh peace.
For further evidence, The French Army and the First World War by Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Page 375
Key difference being that Allied Armies were in Berlin in 1945 but halted at the Rhine in 1919. They could impose their will on the former because they had eliminated all German means of resistance after six years of warfare that concluded in Germany itself, something they failed to achieve in 1919.What gave the post WWII Nuremburg war crimes trials "legal authority"? They were legal because the allies said they were.
They signed it because they misunderstood the military balance of power; there are several examples of this in history where sheer bluff or failures of intelligence have led to bad diplomatic deals being accepted because of a perceived choice. Again, we can turn this around and ask why Foch agreed to a Treaty that, in his own words, meant another war in 20 years instead of fighting on to forever remove Germany as a power?The fact is that the Versailles treaty was heavily punitive, if the allies were so impotent to impose the terms of the peace, why would the Germans sign it at all ?
They signed it, because just like the Japanese aboard the USS Missouri, in 1945, they had no other option.