lovesong wrote:take this into consideration:
germany before WWII was in a depression at the same time as the US (actually germany's was several times worse). hitler and roosevelt (both newly elected leaders within a matter of months from eachother) had to deal with these somehow. however, germany pulled out of their depression years before the US did. (this is of course because of hitler's warmongering). still, you have to admit, evil or not, that the man knew how to run a country.
You should look at my post above. The soup lines, the public works projects, the social welfare agencies--every bit of it was someone else's idea, not Hitler's. In particular, Ernst Rohm and his Brown Shirts instituted these programs while Hitler was sitting in prison writing his fantasy book about Germany's destiny. The economic programs which got Germany back on its feet (and it was never in an economic depression--let alone one worse than the United States) were instituted by the Weimar Republic, and Hitler took credit when the good results began to be felt in the 1930's.
After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the German Empire imposed reparation payments on France to the tune of 700,000,000 million gold francs. Bismark and his nasty buddies thought this would cripple France for a generation or more, and reduce them to insignificant poverty. However, the French, with a new Republic in place, bit the bullet and paid up in under three years. The only reason Germany was in a position to do this was on the basis of "we won, you lost, you have to pay up." That war was simple, naked aggression to establish the Germans as the premier military power on the continent.
By contrast, the Paris Peace conference of 1919 imposed reparations on Germany to repay the costs of a war which, if they did not start it, they did nothing to stop, and which they used as an opportunity to attempt to finish what they started with France in 1870. Germany's reparations were calculalted based on the damage they had done--which was considerable, they destroyed a great many places and things in France and Belgium for purely spiteful reasons, they went so far as to flood mine shafts as they were retreating, and blew up factories and warehouses, and even blew up medieval buildings which had been preserved for centuries. The peace conference very appropriately ordered them to pay for the damage they had done. The seizure of German industrial assets in the Rhineland by France did not come close to making up what France had lost--the portion of her territory occupied by Germany during that war had contained 20 per cent of her farm land, 75% of her industry and 90% of her coal mines. A great deal of what Germany did pay (and they paid f*ck-all, less than ten per cent of the reparations were paid) was paid in kind--i.e., they handed out their merchant ships (their own sailors scuttled the Imperial fleet so the Brits could not have it), their railway equipment and supplies, they replaced most of the books in the library at Louvain, which had been wantonly destroyed in 1914 simply for spite--many priceless and irreplaceable books, manuscripts and other documents were lost forever. The Paris Peace conference calculated the amount to be paid by Germany at sixty billion marks--but the actual figure was pared down from a damage estimate of one hundred thirty-two billion gold marks, or about thrity-three billion U.S. dollars. After in-kind payments, the Gemans paid about four billion marks of that amount.
Two great and pernicious historical myths developed after the Great War in Germany. The first was started by Ludendorf before the ink was dry on the November 11th, 1918 armistice, and it claimed that the German Army had never been beaten in the field. That was a flat out lie. The Germans asked for an armistice, because their army was disintegrating under hammer blows from the French, Belgians, English and Americans, and they wanted to prevent an invasion of Germany--they didn't want Germany torn up the way they had torn up Belgium and northern France. The allied governments, under pressure from their voters, sent their soldiers home in the millions--so when trouble flared in the Baltic region, the French very unwisely recruited a German force, the Freikorps, to police the area. It's commanders set themselves up like robber barons from the middle ages, and Germans looked around and said: "See, our army was never defeated." Hitler exploited this lie to the fullest.
The other was the myth of the "Versailles
Diktat." The Germans claimed that they were innocently drawn into the war (right, tell me another one), and that they were taking the full blame and paying the full cost. This was based on a clause in the Versailles Treaty in which the Germans were required to admit culpability--and this clause was a legal provision used to justify the payment of reparations, and not, as the German rabble-rousers claimed, a demand that Germany admit to having started the war. An identical clause was put into the Neuilly Treaty which Stamboliski signed for Bulgaria, the Treaty of St. Germain signed by the Austrians and the Trianon Treaty signed by the Hungarians. Of the Central Powers, only Turkey was not brought to the table, because the French idiotically brought a Greek army into Turkey, intending to conquer the country. This set Mustafa Kemal up to defeat the Greeks, drive out the French and the Italians, and declare his own republic. Austria was stripped of so much of its territory and so many of its resources that they were eventually excused reparations payments, after successfully getting a provision that the art treasures in their museums would not be sold to make up the loss. Hungary paid its reparations until the depression, which was very real in eastern Europe, in which the war did not end in 1918 (the Serbs, the Roumanians, the Czechs and the Slovaks all continued to invade parts of the old Austro-Hungarian empire well into the 1920's, and a reborn Poland under Marshall Pilsudski was fighting the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw with French support in 1920). Hungary's reparations were finally rescheduled, with payments to begin in 1944--obviously, those payments were never made. Bulgaria paid its reparations.
Only the Germans, whose whopping reparations bill was a direct result of their willful destruction, whined about the payments, and then did not pay up. Part of the Versailles
Diktat myth is that reparations payments caused an economic depression in Germany. Since they didn't pay the reparations, apart from some in-kind transfers and some cash grudgingly handed over late, that's pretty hard to swallow. There was a full-blown economic depression in North America, for very complex reasons beginning with the agricultural boom in Canada and America immediately after the war when Europe could not feed itself, and brought to disasterous climax by unregulated investment sharks on Wall Street. Recession would be a better word for the economic situation in Europe, and Germany was coming out of that long before the little corporal became Chancellor. Austria skated because they had lost almost everything but the core homeland, and you can't get blood from a turnip--as one of the members of the Peace Conference pointed out, its rather much to expect a man to pay debts when he is so poor you are obliged to feed him. Hungary tried to pay up, but failed. Bulgaria paid up. Turkey skated because of idiotic fantasies acted upon by the Italians and the French.
Most of this whole nonsense was the result of a book by John Maynard Keynes published immediately after the Peace Conference, entitled
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, first published in December, 1919, and never out of print since that time. Keynes was a young and brilliant mathmetician who had a minor role in the English delegation. He discussed reparations with Herbert Hoover, and then announced to Lloyd George that he (Keynes) knew exactly how much Germany should pay and how it should be scheduled. When George rightfully ignored the young, vain fool, and thanks to Keynes' ego-centric and adolescent personality, he went to off to sulk and then wrote his book. Had the Germans actually paid the reparations imposed on them, his thesis might have been correct--but they didn't and it wasn't. He also publicly sneered at the reparations clause, ignoring that it was a part of all the treaties at the conference. As Clemenceau justifiably pointed out, Germany had accepted its defeat, its aggression and its responsibility when it sued for an armistice in November, 1918, and: "It is too late to deny them today."
Crying about the hard luck and harsh terms suffered by the Germans ignores both the great destruction they wrought, and the apocalyptic nature of the situation in Europe in 1919--everybody had it rough, and millions of Europeans had it a lot worse than the Germans. Without offering any personal insult or criticism to Lovesong, who i suspect repeats simply what he/she has heard or read, i am heartily sick and tired of the German apologists and the constant refrain that the Versailles Treaty created Hitler and the Nazis--that's a line of crap.
For self-delusional, self-pitying fantasies, you can't beat the "we were never defeated" and the "Versailles
Diktat" myths. If you would like to learn more of this passage in history, i recommend to you
Paris, 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan, Pacemakers, London, 2001. Miss MacMillan is a graduate of Oxford, a provost of Trinity College, and professor of history at the University of Toronto. My grateful thanks to my Sweetiepie for giving me this book at Christmas--it has tied up so many of the loose ends for me.
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