How WW II, Holocaust Could Have Been Avoided

World War One was to be “the war to end all wars” and “the war to make the world safe for democracy” as moral crusader President Woodrow Wilson stated. Instead, the victory that the Allies had won at the cost of millions of soldiers’ lives was largely lost at the Treaty of Versailles. This is due in large part to the fact that the provisions of the Treaty divided Germany in two with the so-called Polish Corridor, sowing the seeds of a future war. At the time the Treaty was signed in June 1919, British Prime Minister Lloyd George despaired that the treaty would lead to a future war worse than the last within twenty-five years due to its harshness and injustices towards the defeated Germans. While the treaty was rightly considered very punitive in certain respects, it was not a Carthaginian peace such as the Allies imposed on Germany in 1945 when they dismembered and largely destroyed Germany.
There is no other instance in modern recorded history where a nation surrendered conditionally where the victors tried to keep the defeated nation permanently disarmed and defenseless to foreign invasion and occupation while at the same time attempting to keep it economically prostrate as well with financial, trade, economic, industrial restrictions and reparations so crushing that it took Germany ninety-one years to pay them in full. Not surprisingly, the Treaty of Versailles had the effect of transforming Imperial Germany, which had been a satisfied power supportive of the global order with no territorial ambitions, into a revanchist state seething at the humiliation of defeat followed by an unjust peace hoping that one day it would be justly revised to reunite Germany and restore many of its lost territories, most importantly the Polish Corridor which divided Germany in two.
Read Full Article »


Comment
Show comments Hide Comments


Related Articles