09/10/07

Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World

Paris 1919:  Six Months that Changed the World
Margaret MacMillan
2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

The ties between World Wars I and II, between World War I and the Cold War, and between World War I and the current situation are, to say the least, interesting.  I have thought before that World War I never actually ended, that these neat categories - WWI, WWII, Cold War, War on Terror - belie the continuation of the Great War.

MacMillan doesn't write this, but she does lay the groundwork for this sort of thinking with descriptions of the people and causes represented at the Paris Peace Conference.  There are fascinating insights into the characters and movements - the major players like the Big Four (Britain, France, Italy, and United States), but also the lesser and wannabe players like Ho Chi Min, Chaim Weizmann, and the myriad others who came to Paris with hopes of making good on claims they believed were rooted in President Wilson's Fourteen Points.  And also the growing shadow of Bolshevism.

The following are excerpts from near the end of the book - chapter 30, Finishing Up.

Paris itself became a giant party, as the streets filled with people singing and dancing.  Along the Grands Boulevards the buildings blazed with lights and cars towed the captured German cannon about.  (It took the authorities days to collect them all again.)

While Paris rejoiced, Germany mourned.  In its cities and towns the flags flew at half-mast.  Even good socialists now talked of "a peace of shame."  Nationalists blamed the traitors at home who had stabbed Germany in the back, and the governing coalition which had signed the treaty.

While the Treaty of Versailles provided for sanctions - specifically, prolonging the occupation of the Rhineland - the Allies had to want to use them.  By the 1930s neither the British nor the French government was prepared to do so over reparations or anything else.

In 1924, a British member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, which was established by the Treaty of Versailles to monitor Germany's compliance with the military terms, published an article in which he complained that the German military had systematically obstructed its work and that there were widespread violations of the disarmament clauses of the treaty.  There was a storm of protest in Germany at this calumny.  (Years later, after Hitler had come to power, German generals admitted that the article had been quite right.)

The extent of the violations was not completely known at the time, even to the French.  Flying clubs were suddenly very popular and were so effective that when Hitler became chancellor he was able to produce a German air force almost at once.  The Prussian police force, the largest in Germany, became more and more military in its organization and training.  Its officers could easily have moved into the German army, and some did.  The self-appointed Freikorps, which had sprung up in 1918, dissolved and its members reformed with dazzling ingenuity as labor gangs, bicycle agencies, traveling circuses and detective bureaus.  Some moved wholesale into the army.  The Treaty of Versailles limited the number of officers in the army itself to 4,000 but it said nothing about noncommissioned officers.  So the German army had 40,000 sergeants and corporals.

Factories that had once produced tanks now turned out inordinately heavy tractors; the research was useful for the future.  In the Berlin cabarets, they told jokes about the worker who smuggled parts out of a baby carriage factory for his new child only to find when he tried to put them all together he kept getting a machine gun.  All over Europe, in safe neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, companies whose ultimate ownership was in German hands worked on tanks or submarines.  The safest place of all, farthest from the prying eyes of the Control Commission, was the Soviet Union.  In 1921 the two pariah nations of Europe realized they had something to offer each other.  In return for space and secrecy for experiments with tanks, aircraft and poison gas, Germany provided technical assistance and training.

With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Wiemar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently.  And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first.  The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame.  It was never consistently enforced, or only enough to irritate German nationalists without limiting German power to disrupt the peace of Europe.  With the triumph of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, Germany had a government that was bent on destroying the Treaty of Versailles.  In 1939, von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, told the victorious Germans in Danzig:  "The Fuhrer has done nothing but remedy the most serious consequences which this most unreasonable of all dictates in history imposed upon a nation and, in fact, upon the whole of Europe, in other words repair the worst mistakes committed by none other than the statesmen of the western democracies."

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