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World War II was directly and solely attributable to the Treaty of Versailles. Discuss.

While the treaty of Versailles is a major factor for the cause of the Second World War, I believe it was an initiator to the buildup to the outbreak of the war but definitely was not directly and solely attributable to it. There are several major factors such as the economic crisis, Hitler’s foreign policy and the justification of appeasement followed by Britain and France, then the failure of the league of nation to function which led to international peace breakdown and finally the ideological differences between the European countries.

The argument which suggests that Versailles treaty led to the Second World War would have to say that the treaty was harsh for Germany to accept, and resulting in east-central Europe composed of mutually hostile small states (Purdue 1999, p.13). Perhaps the first impact it had on Germany was psychological as it was hard for the German public to accept that their military lost when ‘no foreign armies had appeared on German soil’ (Purdue 1999, p.28). The main terms of the treaty were paying a huge amount of reparation for the war which is estimated around £6,600 million pounds; the demilitarization of the German military to a limited defenseless state; territories which had to be separated from Germany, such as the Sudetenland or demands relating to Poland, was unacceptable; most importantly the article 231, which was accepting the war guilt. Any treaty which implied defeat would have been hard to accept (Lamb and Tarling 2001, p. 28) According to Hobsbawm, every party in Germany from the communists on the extreme left to Hitler’s national socialists on the extreme right concurred in condemning the Versailles treaty as unjust and unacceptable (1994, p.36).  The treaty of Versailles thus led to a vengeful Germany and the instability to the east provided the path to revenge (Purdue 1999, p.13). However a serious consequence of the settlement was that the signing of the peace treaty was a political albatross around the neck of the moderate left-wing parties in the new republic making it seem that the Weimar regime who signed the armistice had betrayed Germany. Those opponents were the right wingers who wanted the Weimar regime gone.

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With the Economic crisis caused by the Wall Street crash in America 1929, it affected the world. Germany was severely injured from this incident. Private savings disappeared totally, thus creating an almost complete vacuum of working capital for business, which does too much to explain the massive reliance of the German economy on foreign loans in the following years. This made it unusually vulnerable when the slump came (Hobsbawm 1994, p.90). The unemployment that was caused by the depression threatened political stability while the decrease in trade led to a search for economic self sufficient and protectionism, a kind of ...

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