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icantfindaname posted:So what was Japan's endgame re:the war in China? I understand the Japanese military leadership was sort of a trainwreck and many of the escalations were done by rogue elements, but surely someone must have had a long term vision of some sort beyond pouring more troops into a Chinese meatgrinder hellscape forever? As far as I'm aware Japanese wartime ideology didn't really do the Lebensraum thing with China, did they somehow think they could make China a Manchukuo style puppet but with a billion people? Remember that it wasn't the policy of the main Japanese government to invade/occupy China, it was a mutiny by junior IJA officers who decided to invade China without higher approval. The Japanese government just went "eh, let's go with it" instead of reprimanding the mutineers. A White Guy posted:I think that the biggest mistake the Japanese had was not trying to fully invest their puppet regimes as legitimate figures. Some of the biggest pots of manpower that the Japanese could've drawn on where Chinese collaborationists, but because they were such vicious cunts in China, those manpower pools became utterly worthless as useful resources. The Japanese consistently tried to create a functional army for the Reorganized KMT government, mainly for police reasons, but they were so piss-poor in combat (and in policing) that they had to do those tasks themselves, sapping valuable manpower away from the front. This sounds like the arguments for Germany winning the war in the East by not trying to exterminate everyone and enlisting the aid of anti-Soviet partisan in places like Ukraine, ignoring the fact that the only way this would have happened if the Nazis were not in power, in which case you probably don't have a war in the East at all.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:51
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MikeCrotch posted:This sounds like the arguments for Germany winning the war in the East by not trying to exterminate everyone and enlisting the aid of anti-Soviet partisan in places like Ukraine, ignoring the fact that the only way this would have happened if the Nazis were not in power, in which case you probably don't have a war in the East at all. Comparing the war in China to the Great Patriotic War is comparing an apple to an orange. Their causes were fundamentally different, and their prosecution was fundamentally different. There are similarities, sure, but one of the main differences is that the Japanese didn't have 'exterminate millions of people' as part of the list of to-do tasks. Plus, the Germans did try to enlist the help of various anti-Soviet partisans, and even had some marked success in places like the Baltic states, helping to spawn partisan forces like the Forest Brothers and the Ukrainian Nationalist Army, which were tremendous PITAs for the Soviets up into the 1950s. The forces that the Japanese enlisted sucked so hard core in comparison to their own troops that they ended up being more of a drain on their resources than a bonus. And part of the reason for such appalling quality was the way the Japanese prosecuted the war. Policies like the Three Alls do not engender wide-spread civilian rapport, which was something the Japanese desperately needed to establish if they were going to conquer China. The Germans on the other hand, could rely on latent nationalist sentiment in some of the occupied territories to do the work of occupying those territories for them. The Japanese did not have that luxury.
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Aug 25, 2016 12:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:Could you, uh, drown in mud? Like literally? It happened at Passchendaele in WWI, so yes. I don't know whether it happened to anyone in the rasputitsa, but it's not difficult to imagine it could.  e: I should clarify that the above picture is the Eastern Front, not Passchendaele. Passchendaele was more like this:   
vyelkin fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 13:05
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Speaking of WWI, the guys fighting underground in the underminings of the trenches have to be up there on the "worst conditions" list.
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Aug 25, 2016 14:51
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You wanna talk about hellish, try living in a WW1 uboat. Hope you're ready to share a shitter with 50 other people.
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Aug 25, 2016 15:07
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A White Guy posted:Comparing the war in China to the Great Patriotic War is comparing an apple to an orange. Their causes were fundamentally different, and their prosecution was fundamentally different. There are similarities, sure, but one of the main differences is that the Japanese didn't have 'exterminate millions of people' as part of the list of to-do tasks. The first offensive of the war Japanese troops, most of whom had been in Manchuria for some time, were reasonably civilized. Then they ship in indoctrinated 18 year olds from the home islands, they see their comrades die, get scared of partisans behind every tree, and a few months later they're decapitating pregnant women for sport. There was also one city where the Japanese civilian population got pogromed at the outbreak of the war. I can't remember the details off the top of my head, but the incident got blown up by rumor and propaganda and helped drive a lot of Japanese soldiers into a race war mindset that's different from the Eastern Front but still pretty ugly. If they'd been trying to just expand Manchukuo and take another province or two I could see them getting some warlord to play ball and maybe getting away with it. But controlling all of China in any organized way was just impossible to do, especially when they were basically making it up as they went. I don't know how much of a coherent long term plan existed between the guys at the top saying "co prosperity sphere" and the guys at the bottom saying "let's just kill em all."
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Aug 25, 2016 15:43
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If you have some time, read up on Wang Jingwei of the Reorganized Government in China, he was a fascinating and pretty tragic figure.
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Aug 25, 2016 15:54
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steinrokkan posted:If you have some time, read up on Wang Jingwei of the Reorganized Government in China, he was a fascinating and pretty tragic figure. I was recently reading a bunch of stuff about the Revolution and his name kept coming up and it took a little to click that it was that Wang Jingwei.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:00
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Which country was the founder of state sponsored race based killings
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Aug 25, 2016 16:13
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LeoMarr posted:Which country was the founder of state sponsored race based killings Sumeria, probably.
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Aug 25, 2016 16:17
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vyelkin posted:It happened at Passchendaele in WWI, so yes. I don't know whether it happened to anyone in the rasputitsa, but it's not difficult to imagine it could. I was just going to post that exact picture! To add content, my version's got date information, from March-April 1942 so the spring rasputitsa rather than the fall '41 one. As to the Japan-in-China question, I have to think a substantial amount of Japan's problems also came from the organic, barely-planned nature of things, where especially at the beginning Kwangtung Army officers just did whatever the hell they wanted and the government had to play policy catch-up afterward.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:Could you, uh, drown in mud? Like literally? Horses would get up to their heads in it and be shot.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:14
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MikeCrotch posted:Remember that it wasn't the policy of the main Japanese government to invade/occupy China, it was a mutiny by junior IJA officers who decided to invade China without higher approval. The Japanese government just went "eh, let's go with it" instead of reprimanding the mutineers. A war of annihilation was inevitable ideologically, but even if it wasn't, as I said above, terrible German logistics and lack of food and so on just made the Germans destroy the lives of the civilians they encountered to take from them what they needed to continue their offensives.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:16
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Disinterested posted:Horses would get up to their heads in it and be shot. Artax, no
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Aug 25, 2016 20:17
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Disinterested posted:A war of annihilation was inevitable ideologically, but even if it wasn't, as I said above, terrible German logistics and lack of food and so on just made the Germans destroy the lives of the civilians they encountered to take from them what they needed to continue their offensives. Just carrying on the immemorial tradition of foraging.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:18
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I've always thought that the soldiers of Wang Jingwei's government were probably the worst-off soldiers in all of WWII, in terms of their experience of being a soldier. Them or Romanians.
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Aug 25, 2016 20:19
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Why did the NKVD remove dogtags (ebonite capsule yes I know.) from fallen comrades during the GPW
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Aug 26, 2016 00:49
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cheerfullydrab posted:I've always thought that the soldiers of Wang Jingwei's government were probably the worst-off soldiers in all of WWII, in terms of their experience of being a soldier. Them or Romanians. This is true actually, in their initial offensive that ultimately succeeded casualties for Romania were something like 80%.
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Aug 26, 2016 08:21
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doverhog posted:Just carrying on the immemorial tradition of foraging. 'We forgot winter clothes, we'll take yours. Well actually you'll freeze like that, so we'd best just shoot you. Thanks.'
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Aug 26, 2016 08:21
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steinrokkan posted:Artax, no Is your avatar the brave soldier Svejk? 
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Aug 26, 2016 09:50
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Mans posted:Is your avatar the brave soldier Svejk? That avatar looks a lot like the illustrations on a set of Czech stamps "honouring" Svejk that came out about 20 years ago.
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Aug 28, 2016 02:59
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Disinterested posted:This is true actually, in their initial offensive that ultimately succeeded casualties for Romania were something like 80%.  That's getting up to Paraguayan War levels of casualties.
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Aug 29, 2016 09:11
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MikeCrotch posted:
1942 was a shitshow for Romania. When the Soviets launched Little Saturn and Uranus, they effectively destroyed the Romanian army, largely because the initial blows fell exactly on Romanian positions. Not only was the Romanian industrial complex woefully underprepared for war with Russia, the military was rather behind in terms of doctrines and technology. The Romanians managed to rebuild their formations in time to desperately and ineffectively fight the Russians during the invasion of Romania, but by then it was kind of a moot point. Thankfully, Michael I saw the writing on the wall and overthrew the fascists, however much good that did him in the long run.
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Sep 2, 2016 11:59
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Was the Treaty of Versailles actually supremely unfair and thus can be blamed for helping the Nazis come to power and start World War II?
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Sep 7, 2016 09:31
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NikkolasKing posted:Was the Treaty of Versailles actually supremely unfair and thus can be blamed for helping the Nazis come to power and start World War II? It was percieved as unfair enough to be an useful propaganda instrument for German nationalists but not unfair enough to prevent Germany from rebuilding their military on the sly during the Weimar era. Most of the chaos that befell Germany in the interwar period was self-inflicted rather than imposed by Versailles, however.
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Sep 7, 2016 09:39
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NikkolasKing posted:Was the Treaty of Versailles actually supremely unfair and thus can be blamed for helping the Nazis come to power and start World War II? Psychologically it felt punitive because of the perception that Germany had not been decisively defeated in the field. A lot has been written that establishes that, at least for financial reparations, they were not unduly punitive and were talked up mostly in an attempt to try to get out of them.
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Sep 7, 2016 09:49
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NikkolasKing posted:Was the Treaty of Versailles actually supremely unfair and thus can be blamed for helping the Nazis come to power and start World War II? The Treaty itself was not unduly punitive, especially considering that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that the Germans temporarily imposed on the Russians was just as if not more harsh than the final one imposed on Germany. Essentially, so much blood had been shed over this war and so much damage had been done to everyone's economies that everyone involved wanted to recoup as much of their losses as possible by squeezing them out of the defeated nations. The reparations payments themselves however played a huge role in the leadup to WWII, since US refusal to write down either war debts owed by Britain and France to the USA or German reparation payments meant that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off the US, either directly or via the allies. This among other mistakes made by the Weimar government in the 20's and 30's was one of the contributing factors to the economic collapse that allowed the rise of the Nazis to power.
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Sep 7, 2016 13:04
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MikeCrotch posted:The reparations payments themselves however played a huge role in the leadup to WWII, since US refusal to write down either war debts owed by Britain and France to the USA or German reparation payments meant that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off the US, either directly or via the allies. This among other mistakes made by the Weimar government in the 20's and 30's was one of the contributing factors to the economic collapse that allowed the rise of the Nazis to power. This is a bit of a misconception. Reparations were big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to actually severely affect the German economy. The enormous numbers of reparations that the Allies calculated as the cost of the war that Germany should be liable for were for show, the actual numbers Germany was expected to pay were much smaller. In real terms, the actual reparations Germany paid between 1920 and 1931 were 20 billion gold marks (which apparently translates to about $20 billion 2016 US dollars according to an uncited source I saw, so take that with a grain of salt), of which 12.5 billion were cash, and most of that cash came from loans from the United States. In essence the United States was paying back its own loans to the Allies: France and Britain paid back war loans from America by getting reparations from Germany, which were paid using loans from American banks, set up under the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan, both of which reduced the amount Germany was required to pay per year. As for the hyperinflation that gets brought up a lot, that was actually a deliberate attempt by the German government to get out of paying their reparations by devaluing their currency and it didn't work. After they stopped printing money and reparations were stabilized under the Dawes Plan, Weimar actually enjoyed a period of economic stability in the latter half of the 1920s. The big problem with the German economy wasn't the reparations themselves, which weren't especially arduous for an economy the size of Germany's. The problem was that the mechanisms by which the reparations were being paid, i.e. the fact that the German economy was heavily supported by US banking loans, meant they were extremely exposed when the Great Depression hit and US banks withdrew their foreign loans. Germany was one of the worst affected countries in the world by the Great Depression, and traditional economic tools were insufficient to remedy the situation because a) they no longer had access to the US banks that had been supporting the economy before; and b) macroeconomic policy at the time was completely focused on austerity, which only made the Depression worse. It was the resulting economic and political chaos as Germany's political elites discredited themselves one by one, by entering power to try and fix the economic chaos and failing since they were unwilling to break with economic orthodoxy, that led to the rise of the Nazis, but that had very little to do with the size of reparations payments themselves.
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Sep 7, 2016 13:52
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MikeCrotch posted:The Treaty itself was not unduly punitive, especially considering that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that the Germans temporarily imposed on the Russians was just as if not more harsh than the final one imposed on Germany. Essentially, so much blood had been shed over this war and so much damage had been done to everyone's economies that everyone involved wanted to recoup as much of their losses as possible by squeezing them out of the defeated nations. This is probably true, although to play devil's advocate, France was still imposing harsher terms on Germany than had been imposed on France at the Congress of Vienna (a full century before, so not really a strong argument, but still).
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Sep 7, 2016 14:19
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Silver2195 posted:This is probably true, although to play devil's advocate, France was still imposing harsher terms on Germany than had been imposed on France at the Congress of Vienna (a full century before, so not really a strong argument, but still). The territory the French formally lost in Vienna in 1815 wasn't properly French territory. Much of it was land that had been gained in the prior 20 years, land that wasn't seen as being properly French, which is why it never inspired a sense of French revanchism. Taking Alsace-Lorraine away from France (oh, and humiliating it for the second time in a century) inspired some serious Teuton-a-phobia in France. If France had won the war by itself (in some kind of weird alternate universe), the French would've plainly dismantled Germany altogether - many,many French, including those at that top, wanted far more severe peace terms than they got. Foch, that guy who said "This is not a peace treaty, this is an armistice for twenty years", didn't say that because he thought the treaty was too harsh, he said that because he thought it was far too lenient.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:47
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Austerity policies were so terrible at dealing with the Great Depression that countries that were fully committed true believers such as the Netherlands did not recover from the Great Depression until *after* World War 2.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:52
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Orange Devil posted:Austerity policies were so terrible at dealing with the Great Depression that countries that were fully committed true believers such as the Netherlands did not recover from the Great Depression until *after* World War 2. It's a little bit more nuanced than that - the war was rough for the Netherlands, especially in late '45. The Germans fiercely contested the low countries into 1945, and it showed in the destruction that was wrought on the Netherlands. Probably the biggest thing that lifted the Dutch economy out of the hole was generous aid and tremendous borrowing. Don't forget that as a final gently caress you to the Allies, the Japanese had most of their puppet states declare themselves independent of their colonial overlords, which, in the Dutch case, turned out to be a canker sore on the Dutch economy for years.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:59
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All true, but my point was more that by the time of the invasion in 1940 the country was arguably still in the Great Depression and surely hadn't yet made a recovery. Whereas other countries had already gotten out by then, including through ways that weren't unsustainable military spending. Also, speaking of that fierce contesting: Monty's decision to put the Battle of the Scheldt on hold and transfer divisions away to support Market Garden, resulting in the orderly retreat of the Germans accross the rivers (which then showed up again around Arnhem during Market Garden iirc) whereas otherwise they were likely to be destroyed and also resulting in the Antwerp harbour coming online much later. His biggest error? Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 15:17
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Sep 7, 2016 18:38
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vyelkin posted:This is a bit of a misconception. Reparations were big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to actually severely affect the German economy. The enormous numbers of reparations that the Allies calculated as the cost of the war that Germany should be liable for were for show, the actual numbers Germany was expected to pay were much smaller. In real terms, the actual reparations Germany paid between 1920 and 1931 were 20 billion gold marks (which apparently translates to about $20 billion 2016 US dollars according to an uncited source I saw, so take that with a grain of salt), of which 12.5 billion were cash, and most of that cash came from loans from the United States. In essence the United States was paying back its own loans to the Allies: France and Britain paid back war loans from America by getting reparations from Germany, which were paid using loans from American banks, set up under the 1924 Dawes Plan and the 1929 Young Plan, both of which reduced the amount Germany was required to pay per year. As for the hyperinflation that gets brought up a lot, that was actually a deliberate attempt by the German government to get out of paying their reparations by devaluing their currency and it didn't work. After they stopped printing money and reparations were stabilized under the Dawes Plan, Weimar actually enjoyed a period of economic stability in the latter half of the 1920s. I think a 1:1 exchange rate between 2016 dollars and Goldmarks is throwing off your analysis. A mark was 5 grams of Silver and comparable US dollar was 25.7 grams which means an effective exchange rate of 5.5 . There has been 1200% worth of inflation since 1920, which means 12:1 inflation ratio between 1920:2016 dollars. 1 / 5.5 x 12 = 2.18. The equivalent was 43.6 billion dollars,, the German economy was about 392 billion dollars (2016) in 1925 which means the reparations were a little over 10% of GDP. That isn't insignificant, it would be roughly 1.8-1.9 trillion for the current US economy. Also, a key part your missing here was that France and Britain were occurring the Rhur-Rhine industrial area in Germany ie its industrial heart, which was seriously effecting output and which pushed the Germans to print in the first place. It is also why re-militarizing the Rhineland was such a big deal for the Nazis. The reparations were theoretically payable if Germany was functional, but it wasn't during during 1923-1924. quote:The big problem with the German economy wasn't the reparations themselves, which weren't especially arduous for an economy the size of Germany's. The problem was that the mechanisms by which the reparations were being paid, i.e. the fact that the German economy was heavily supported by US banking loans, meant they were extremely exposed when the Great Depression hit and US banks withdrew their foreign loans. Germany was one of the worst affected countries in the world by the Great Depression, and traditional economic tools were insufficient to remedy the situation because a) they no longer had access to the US banks that had been supporting the economy before; and b) macroeconomic policy at the time was completely focused on austerity, which only made the Depression worse. It was the resulting economic and political chaos as Germany's political elites discredited themselves one by one, by entering power to try and fix the economic chaos and failing since they were unwilling to break with economic orthodoxy, that led to the rise of the Nazis, but that had very little to do with the size of reparations payments themselves. The Great Depression was in the big nail in the coffin for the Weimar Republic but ultimately it was built on anger and distrust that had building across the 1920s and deep political divisions in German society which were readily apparent by 1918-1920. While the Versailles Treaty wasn't wholly the issue, it put additional pressure on a society that was already bitter and disunited and the few years of stability in the mid-1920s didn't really didn't fix this. I think there is way too much of a desire to wipe away the issue under the rug, but the combination of the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine, the reparations and eventually hyperinflation which cause long-lasting bitterness in German society that helped set the stage. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 20:18
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Ardennes posted:I think a 1:1 exchange rate between 2016 dollars and Goldmarks is throwing off your analysis. A mark was 5 grams of Silver and comparable US dollar was 25.7 grams which means an effective exchange rate of 5.5 . There has been 1200% worth of inflation since 1920, which means 12:1 inflation ratio between 1920:2016 dollars. 1 / 5.5 x 12 = 2.18. The equivalent was 43.6 billion dollars,, the German economy was about 392 billion dollars (2016) in 1925 which means the reparations were a little over 10% of GDP. That isn't insignificant, it would be roughly 1.8-1.9 trillion for the current US economy. Also, a key part your missing here was that France and Britain were occurring the Rhur-Rhine industrial area in Germany ie its industrial heart, which was seriously effecting output and which pushed the Germans to print in the first place. It is also why re-militarizing the Rhineland was such a big deal for the Nazis. Well I'm happy to see someone actually do the math on the exchange rate, as I said that came from a random uncited source so I'm unsurprised it was wrong. That being said, even based on your own math I would dispute the centrality of reparations. The total reparations paid from 1920-1931 was 20 billion goldmarks or 43.6 billion dollars according to your calculations, but that's total reparations, not annual. Reparations changed from year to year based on which plan Germany was currently following (under the terms of the Dawes plan annual payments were supposed to annually increase from one billion marks to 2.5 billion over five years, while under the Young Plan they were set at two billion marks per year), but if we average out the total over 11 years it's roughly 4 billion 2016 dollars per year from an economy of 392 billion 2016 dollars (your figure), which is around 1% of GDP. Again, big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to mean "that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off" as the poster I was responding to said. Ardennes posted:The Great Depression was in the big nail in the coffin for the Weimar Republic but ultimately it was built on anger and distrust that had building across the 1920s and deep political divisions in German society which were readily apparent by 1918-1920. While the Versailles Treaty wasn't wholly the issue, it put additional pressure on a society that was already bitter and disunited and the few years of stability in the mid-1920s didn't really didn't fix this. I don't disagree at all with your analysis of the social and cultural factors stemming from Versailles or the lingering societal trauma from the war itself or from the postwar years of civil war, occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine, hyperinflation, and so on. It would take a lot more than five years of relative economic stability to mend those wounds. But I absolutely don't think you can really point to reparations as a major economic cause of Weimar's collapse, Hitler's rise, and the leadup to WWII except insofar as they contributed to the German economy's reliance on foreign capital and therefore exposure to the Depression. As a social-cultural cause, absolutely, the humiliation of paying reparations was significantly greater than the actual economic burden of the reparations themselves.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:36
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vyelkin posted:Well I'm happy to see someone actually do the math on the exchange rate, as I said that came from a random uncited source so I'm unsurprised it was wrong. That being said, even based on your own math I would dispute the centrality of reparations. The total reparations paid from 1920-1931 was 20 billion goldmarks or 43.6 billion dollars according to your calculations, but that's total reparations, not annual. Reparations changed from year to year based on which plan Germany was currently following (under the terms of the Dawes plan annual payments were supposed to annually increase from one billion marks to 2.5 billion over five years, while under the Young Plan they were set at two billion marks per year), but if we average out the total over 11 years it's roughly 4 billion 2016 dollars per year from an economy of 392 billion 2016 dollars (your figure), which is around 1% of GDP. Again, big enough to be noteworthy but not big enough to mean "that huge amounts of the German economy were being siphoned off" as the poster I was responding to said. You have to remember though that the allies were demanding additional resources on top of simply monetary reparations, at one point 26% of German exports. Furthermore, the economic damage from the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine region is certainly more than 1% of German GDP. The baseline reparations weren't enough to cause a meltdown, especially after 1925, but the much of the additional demands surrounding them were. I would say this is very much a part of the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. quote:I don't disagree at all with your analysis of the social and cultural factors stemming from Versailles or the lingering societal trauma from the war itself or from the postwar years of civil war, occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine, hyperinflation, and so on. It would take a lot more than five years of relative economic stability to mend those wounds. But I absolutely don't think you can really point to reparations as a major economic cause of Weimar's collapse, Hitler's rise, and the leadup to WWII except insofar as they contributed to the German economy's reliance on foreign capital and therefore exposure to the Depression. As a social-cultural cause, absolutely, the humiliation of paying reparations was significantly greater than the actual economic burden of the reparations themselves. I would say it is a major indirect cause, the direct economic cause being the Great Depression itself. However, societies usually meltdown in stages and the events of 1921-1925 was one of those stages in German society. I think it is an important different in understanding history, and ultimately also why events like the modern-day Eurocrisis shouldn't be swept under the rug. According to most statistics the Eurozone has improved in the first few years, but the scars of the 2009-2014 period are clearly evident and has put new pressures on European political culture which very well may erupt again if the right bank isn't able to pay its creditors.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:59
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While the demanded payments were still plenty high by the beginning of the 30s, they had continuously gotten negotiated downward, and the horizon to finally pay them off kept getting pushed back. If I remember the terms right, the original time the last payment by Germany was to happen was sometime in the 1950s, while by the time Hitler got to power it'd already been pushed up past 1986. Given more time for all this stuff to be negotiated, it probably would have kept shrinking and being pushed back. fishmech fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 22:21
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Ardennes posted:You have to remember though that the allies were demanding additional resources on top of simply monetary reparations, at one point 26% of German exports. Furthermore, the economic damage from the occupation of the Rhur-Rhine region is certainly more than 1% of German GDP. The baseline reparations weren't enough to cause a meltdown, especially after 1925, but the much of the additional demands surrounding them were. I would say this is very much a part of the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. Non-monetary reparations are included in the 20 billion marks figure. It was 20 billion total of which 12.5 billion were cash and the other 7.5 were other resources. It was well within Germany's ability to pay had they had the political and social will to do so, but they didn't. Ardennes posted:I would say it is a major indirect cause, the direct economic cause being the Great Depression itself. However, societies usually meltdown in stages and the events of 1921-1925 was one of those stages in German society. I think it is an important different in understanding history, and ultimately also why events like the modern-day Eurocrisis shouldn't be swept under the rug. According to most statistics the Eurozone has improved in the first few years, but the scars of the 2009-2014 period are clearly evident and has put new pressures on European political culture which very well may erupt again if the right bank isn't able to pay its creditors. I agree completely, I would just point out once again that I see that as a socio-cultural influence rather than a direct economic one. If economically the Eurozone has recovered enough to be past the effects of the crisis, or if economically Weimar Germany had recovered enough to be able to pay the relatively modest reparations with ease, that doesn't mean that previous economic crises haven't left a mark on society--and, importantly, a mark that can also play out in economic terms, for example in risk-averseness or an excess of caution when it comes to regulating bank lending. That doesn't necessarily mean that the direct economic impact is any greater, even if it leads to larger indirect economic results down the line. Put another way, I think the social and cultural impacts of Versailles were much greater than the economic impacts in leading to the fall of Weimar, rise of Hitler, and start of WWII, especially because the economic impacts pale in comparison to the impact of the Depression. Reparations are one part of the treaty but I think they show the larger effects in microcosm, because even though on the whole they weren't actually devastating or incredibly onerous in the long run, the socio-cultural perception of them as devastating (and the Weimar government's unwillingness to actually commit to their payment rather than trying to find any possible way to get out of paying) was very different from the economic reality, the same way the socio-cultural perception of Versailles as a national humiliation was much greater than the actual territorial losses and future limitations placed upon Germany (accounting for the Allies' unwillingness to enforce the treaty when it was violated, temporary occupation of the Ruhr-Rhine notwithstanding).
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Sep 7, 2016 22:48
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I'm with the French on Versailles, they weren't hard enough on Germany. If it had been politically possible they should have rejected the ceasefire or atleast insisted on unconditional surrender, with a following occupation of Germany and complete dismantling of the German military. A very significant reason for the stab in the back legend was that German military leadership, chiefly Ludendorff, had, at the critical moment, shifted responsibility over to the civilian government when the German forces in the west were on the brink of complete collapse due to the 100-days offensive and ever more American troops arriving in Europe. Of course they expected that the civilian government would essentially surrender as the situation was completely untenable with mutinies, shortages of food, medicine and pretty much everything much from disruption from the British blockade. Then those snakes went around and said that they had been stabbed in the back by socialists and democrats in the civilian government whilst the German army remained intact and undefeated in occupied enemy territory. Just shove it in their face that they had lost and they had lost bad, and it was because their army was defeated, the best way for this is for the army to be forcibly dismantled and the country occupied, at that point they really can't deny reality anymore. World War 2 and the partition of Germany really showed them what defeat was like and they had to own up to it.
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Sep 7, 2016 23:08
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