Hello, watching “apocalypse la paix impossible” made me wonder why versailles being too harsh is so much in documentaries, it’s one aspect of this apocalypse I’m not really into.
Thanks for your answers, waiting for the hitler rise show, I have ian kershaw biography of him.
It’s part of many oversimplified presentations of events used in TV documentaries, which have been repeated over and over again for decades even though historical data disproving them has been widely available for some time now.
It’s a bit like the “impassable Ardennes” for the Panzers, Pétain being bestowed “full powers” on 10th July or the Front Populaire being responsible for the French defeat of 1940.
There are still many people who believe that the Versailles Treaty was directly responsible for the rise of Nazism. The problem lies with the passing of information from the academic world to the general public.
Although it is true that Hitler used the Versailles Treaty in his discourse to trigger resentment and nationalistic emotions among the German people, Versailles wasn’t as harsh as portrayed. For example, fewer than 20% of War Reparations were ever paid, and until 1930, the Nazis got ridiculous scores in elections (as you will see in Ep01 of the Rise of Hitler series), which shows that their discourse about “humiliation” and the Versailles Treaty wasn’t convincing anyone, even after years of repeating the same things.
What changed everything was the Great Depression.