Critical war lessons still not learned

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At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent. The Great War — the "war to end all wars" — was over. But peace, it turned out, was not secured by the armistice signed in a railway carriage at Compiègne. It awaited the far more contentious negotiations that would culminate in the Treaty of Versailles.

That treaty, which was negotiated by the victorious allies — Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States — was signed on June 28, 1919. Under its terms, Germany was required to demilitarize, to surrender territory to Belgium, France, and the newly constituted Czechoslovakia and Poland, to give up its overseas colonies, and to pay the equivalent of $63 billion in reparations. It was also compelled to accept full blame for having caused the war: Article 231 of the treaty affirmed "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the [Allies] and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." (The allies also signed separate treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey.)

In the years after World War II, it became conventional wisdom that the economic harshness imposed by the Treaty of Versailles — and especially the humiliation of its "war guilt" clause — helped fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler. That interpretation owes much to John Maynard Keynes's 1919 bestseller, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," which denounced the treaty as a "Carthaginian peace" that was intended to crush Germany and ended by ruining Europe.

But later scholarship has been far less sympathetic to Keynes's view.

"Most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany," the British historian Ruth Henig wrote in 1995. In reality, "Germany was among the luckier belligerents, in the sense that she emerged with her economy intact, and was spared invasion, devastation, and denudation."

Another scholar, Sally Marks of Rhode Island College, likewise emphasized not just that the popular view of the terms imposed on Germany is incorrect, but that historians have been saying so for decades.

"For nearly 40 years, historians of 20th-century diplomacy have argued that the Versailles treaty was more reasonable than its reputation suggests and that it did not of itself cause the Depression, the rise of Hitler, or World War II," Marks wrote in 2013. Unfortunately, "their efforts have had little effect." Though Keynes's book is regarded by experts as a "warped polemic" and there is even evidence that he came to regret writing it, its influence on public opinion has proved remarkably durable.

As a college student taking courses in European history in the late 1970s, that was the interpretation I was taught — that the Allies' vindictiveness at Versailles had laid the groundwork for right-wingers in Germany to blame the war's outcome on a "stab in the back" by domestic traitors, whom Hitler and his followers identified as Jews, Marxists, and politicians of the Weimar Republic.

That view persists to this day. In its entry on the treaty of Versailles, for instance, the History Channel website asserts: "The Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany while failing to resolve the underlying issues that had led to war in the first place. Economic distress and seething resentment of the treaty within Germany helped fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, as well as World War II."

Yet the case that Versailles was uniquely punitive collapses on inspection.

For one thing, Germany was never actually required to pay the full reparations bill it accepted at Versailles, let alone to do so on a crippling schedule. While the 1921 schedule set Germany's obligation at about 132 billion gold marks, it had paid less than 21 billion marks by 1932 — a small fraction of the original claim. (The debt — subsequently reduced multiple times, largely through American initiatives — was not finally paid off until 2010.)

The terms Germany accepted in the Versailles treaty were more than reasonable compared to what Germany had demanded at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. France had been forced to surrender the traditionally French lands of Alsace and Lorraine and to remain under German military occupation until it paid reparations of five billion gold francs.

And that was nothing next to what Germany had intended to do to the Allies. At the start of the Great War, expecting to be victorious, Germany had drawn up plans for a remarkably harsh postwar settlement: Berlin would not only annex Belgium and still more French territory, it would demand financial penalties so steep that France would be too impoverished to rebuild its military for the next two decades.

Since Germany ultimately lost the war, those plans were never carried out. But there was nothing theoretical about the terms Germany imposed on Russia when the newly installed Bolshevik government dropped out of the war in 1917 and sued for peace with Berlin. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Moscow was forced to cede vast amounts of territory, including the Baltic states. All told, Russia surrendered 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its agricultural land, 54 percent of its industry, and 89 percent of its coal mines.

Germany, by contrast, got off far more lightly at Versailles. Its reparations weren't cheap, but they didn't destroy the German economy. They amounted to less than Hitler spent on rearmament after coming to power in 1933 — a rearmament prohibited by the treaty's terms, but never enforced by the Allies. Rather than staying to maintain the peace, the Americans went home and largely disarmed, while France and Britain announced that they never wished to go to war again. Instead of absorbing the lesson that it had lost, instead of being made to accept its defeat, Germany smoldered with resentment, waiting, as Hitler understood, for a chance to rise up and take revenge.

As historians across the spectrum have argued, the treaty's chief flaw was not excessive punishment but inadequate enforcement. The classicist Victor Davis Hanson, for example, maintains that the American, British, and French forces should have pushed on into Germany, rather than ending the war with an armistice that left Germany's territory largely unscathed and enabled its returning troops to be greeted as "unconquered."

"Had the Allies continued their offensives in the fall of 1918 and invaded Germany," Hanson wrote in 2018, "the peace that followed might have more closely resembled the unconditional surrender and agreements that ended World War II, leading to far more than just 20 years of subsequent European calm."

In 1945, the victorious Allies took no chances. Berlin was pulverized into rubble and Germany occupied before the guns were silenced. The Allies forcibly remade Germany's political system and permanently stationed troops on German soil. (Unfortunately, the Soviet Union carved off its sector into a separate East German state.) The vanquished Germans were given no choice but to internalize the fact of their defeat and culpability — and they internalized it so thoroughly that they have never since threatened any neighbor. How differently the 20th century might have turned out, how much less bloody and cruel and genocidal, if the Allies of 1918 hadn't been so eager to stop fighting.

The weary Allies can't be blamed for yearning to lay down their arms. Warfare and military occupation go against the grain of civilized democracies. The urge to declare peace and get out when a foe appears beaten (or when a terrible war has grown difficult and unpopular) is only too understandable. Yet, as the peacemakers of 1919 discovered — and as later historians have confirmed — premature leniency can prove as dangerous as excessive severity.

Yielding to that urge can come at a steep price, including an even more terrible war down the road.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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