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| If you had a time machine, and had the chance to kill baby Hitler, would you do it? |
| Yes |
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33% |
[ 3 ] |
| No |
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66% |
[ 6 ] |
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| Total Votes : 9 |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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 very good.
| Jezza wrote: | It's going slightly off-topic from the question that David has posed but I always wonder had the events of Versailles in 1919 been different this may have actually prevented Hitler from attaining so much power and influence in Germany in the first place.
Much of the problems that Germany experienced during the hyperinflation period in Weimar Germany and later the depression period which began to coincide with the rise of fascism was allegedly traced back to this treaty according to Hitler which he used as a platform to garner support from the general populace in Germany.
That's not to say that Hitler didn't have radical views as it was but the meeting certainly gave him the perfect platform to espouse his beliefs and later enforce them throughout Germany where many citizens were disillusioned especially after the Great Depression that impacted Germany severely. |
I don't think there's any doubt that the Versailles Treaty played a substantial role in the rise of Naziism. A better use for our time machine, I would have thought.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | very good.
| Jezza wrote: | It's going slightly off-topic from the question that David has posed but I always wonder had the events of Versailles in 1919 been different this may have actually prevented Hitler from attaining so much power and influence in Germany in the first place.
Much of the problems that Germany experienced during the hyperinflation period in Weimar Germany and later the depression period which began to coincide with the rise of fascism was allegedly traced back to this treaty according to Hitler which he used as a platform to garner support from the general populace in Germany.
That's not to say that Hitler didn't have radical views as it was but the meeting certainly gave him the perfect platform to espouse his beliefs and later enforce them throughout Germany where many citizens were disillusioned especially after the Great Depression that impacted Germany severely. |
I don't think there's any doubt that the Versailles Treaty played a substantial role in the rise of Naziism. A better use for our time machine, I would have thought. |
I loved Tannin’s post, but I am sceptical about the Marxist proposition that history is simply the expression of impersonal economic and technological forces. There were many ways Germany might have gone in 1932 – Communist, Reactionary-Conservative in the Hindenburg mould, or National Socialist. Hitler’s ability to tap into the resentments of the middle and working classes, which had been impoverished by hyperinflation and depression respectively, was a vital factor in the Nazis rise to power.
As Tannin rightly says, Hitler was apparently a man of extraordinary charisma. We find it hard to comprehend, but his rigid sense of certainty, the energy of his hatreds, and his story of victimisation was a powerful elixir against the uncertainties of a people who had endured a series of bitter losses. So, without Hitler, I think it is far from certain that Germany would have evolved into the genocidal war machine that it became. And without Hitler it is doubtful that large parts of Europe would have had to endure the deadly stagnation and oppression of Russian colonisation from 1945-1989. So yep, I’d have strangled the bastard in his crib. It might have been worse, but the odds favoured a better result without Adolf.
On Versailles, I think the conventional history (“it was all the fault of Versailles”) is a little too pat, and I'd certainly challenge your lack of "any doubt", David. Firstly, Versailles exacted penalties that were no more than France had suffered as a result of German aggression. It should be remembered that Northern France had been invaded in 1870 in a war engineered by Bismarck, and then devastated completely between 1914-18. The French had a right to feel that Germany should pay for the appalling damage its aggression had brought about in France's northern industrial heartland, since Germany itself – its factories and its fields - was almost unaffected. In 1918, German cities were not left serrated silhouettes as they were in 1945.
Secondly, the terms of Versailles were not, for the most part, enforced. If they had been, then Hitler could never have re-armed Germany. The disaster that arose from Versailles was that the German government of 1922-23 chose to finance it via the printing press. It was a largely self-inflicted wound, which had far more to do with the rise of the Nazi Party than Versailles itself did. Hitler blamed Versailles because hatred was his dark energy, and hatred requires the externalisation of all blame and error. The terms of Versailles were probably too harsh in the light of history, but they were not uncommensurate with the actual damage caused by Germany’s second war of choice on French soil in 40 years.
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