Did the Treaty of Versailles provide for a just a peace in Europe?

Question

explain...

Answer 1

No it did not. It punished Germany to the point that it gave rise to a lot of hate that eventually gave rise to the Nazis and World War II. If the terms had not been so harsh on the Germans, it could have been possible for the Germans not to turn to Hitler. He gave the people an empty hope because of how the treaty had treated the country as a whole. They wanted the treaty to go away and that is what Hitler gave them as he violated the treaty time and time again. The Allies were just too greedy and blinded with hate at the end of World War I to realize what they had done. 20/20 hindsight lets us see their mistakes.

Answer 2

No.

In indisputable fact, the treaty demanded that Germany pay out so much gold in reparations that it destroyed the economy and led to inflation of such magnitude that it took a wheelbarrow of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. That might not have been the intended result, but it was predictable.

The historical record shows that the whole thrust, the whole intent, of the treaty was to injure further a people already injured by war and to humiliate a strong and proud people-- a very irresponsible as well as a very unjust thing to do. The rise of Hitler and World War II was the result.

Speculatively, the Versailles Treaty probably led indirectly to the greatest injustice ever perpetrated against a group of human beings: not the Germans, but Europe's Jews, scapegoats of the German rage created by Versailles and adroitly fanned by Hitler to gain power.

Their worst enemies could not lay all the responsibility of the Holocaust on the people who imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany. The Nazis were directly to blame for what took place. But the the imposers of this unjust treaty cannot be wholly exonerated of responsibility for this unspeakable evil either.

The Shoah (the Holocaust) is probably the most unjust thing that ever happened. Without the patent folly of the Versailles treaty, angering even just people, the greater injustices associated with the Second World War and the Holocaust probably never would have occurred.