IMO, the rise of Hitler in Germany was the result of a two pronged problem. The Treaty of Versailles was onerous in many ways...and in some respects, against German dignity as a nation. Then the Great Depression hit and while the rest of the world was trying to recover from that the country of France insisted on Germany continue it's reparations. This allowed the rise of the extremists in German society...this 'us against the world' mentality preached by the likes of Hitler.

The treaty of Versailles is considered to be too harsh because Germany was being punished as if they were the sole instigator and agressor of WW1. In reality there were deeper causes for the outbreak of WW1 which includes many different European countries.

The reparations Germany had to pay as stated in the treaty of Versailles was a infeasible amount of money. This on top of Germany having to surrender (economically important) parts of land and the ‘great depression’ led to Germany going through an incredibly punishing time for the German people.

The standard thinking among academics is actually different - that the Treaty of Versailles was EITHER far too harsh OR far too lenient.

They needed to either choose to not build resentment and not load up punishing reparations, OR they needed to go much much further and make it literally impossible for Germany to have rebuilt at all, probably including standing troop contingents for a a decade or so.

They instead chose the middle ground, which was the worst of both worlds.

One of the big lies that Hitler told was that German leaders stabbed Germany in the back, and the treaty of Versailles was a betrayal of the country. This was a point of view that was very appealing in Munich , but may have had only minority appeal in Berlin or Hamburg or other cities. National Socialists were successful in winning over the nation because they were first successful in Munich. The subsequent march to power of the Nazis is unique and absolutely unpredictable - it was not fated because of the depression or because of the treaty of Versailles. It was accomplished by turning a toe-hold into a foot hold and eventually turning a fire at the Reichstag into a cause for a power grab, then consolidating power by a night of murdering potential threats etc etc etc.

The idea that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany is a myth. I'm more inclined to blame the outbreak of World War II on other factors, such as:

1. The Great Depression, basically unrelated to World War I/the Treaty of Versailles, devastated the world economy and, when economic times are tough, people turn to radical political leadership, like the Nazis (there was even clamoring for dictatorship in the United States during this time period...see the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House, which depicts the President of the United States being possessed by an angel and becoming a "benevolent" dictator to deal with the Depression and rampant gangsterism).
2. The stab-in-the-back myth (also known as the "Big Lie"), which stated that the German military had not been defeated during World War I, only betrayed into surrendering by the Jews, Freemasons, and social democrats, was pervasive in German culture after World War I. Even social democratic German President Friedrich Ebert contributed to the odious lie by welcoming returning troops with "No enemy has vanquished you." The stab-in-the-back myth was especially promoted by Erich Ludendorff (former co-commander of the German military with Paul von Hindenburg and former co-military dictator of Germany with Hindenburg) and Adolf Hitler, who both led the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
3. The United States' rejection of Wilsonianism after World War I meant that the United States would retreat back to the Western Hemisphere and ignore European and Middle Eastern affairs. The U.S. refused to join the League of Nations (and refuse to establish a protectorate over the new country of Armenia, meaning that that new state would be wiped off the map by Turkey) and, with Great Britain tending to its own empire, left France as the only leader of the world. The United States would learn the value of Wilsonianism with the Second World War and become a founding member of the United Nations and NATO.
4. The Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey following the "Turkish War of Independence" essentially legalized genocide. Turkey would get off the hook for its horrific genocides against the Armenians, Assyrians, and Ottoman Greeks during World War I, inspiring Adolf Hitler. Only proper punishment against Turkey could've prevented this unfortunate outcome of the "Turkish War of Independence."
5. The new democratic German government, the Weimar Republic, had somewhat weak democratic institutions and was fraught with political violence between the left and the right.

One reason for the "Treat of Versailles was too harsh" myth has to do with the "there were no bad guys in World War I" myth. In reality, the Central Powers were committing atrocities at almost every turn. Germany had its reprehensible Rape of Belgium and its use of Belgians Poles as slave labor. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and Bulgaria committed genocide against the Serbs. The Ottoman Empire's nightmarish genocides against the Armenians, Assyrians, and Ottoman Greeks have already been touched on. The Allies of World War I had no such record of mass crimes against humanity. Well, Czarist Russia committed some cruel atrocities, but, by mid-1917 (with the democratic February Revolution in Russia, not to be confused with the communist October Revolution in that country), the Allies of World War I were arguably more democratic than the Allies of World War II (who had to rely on vicious dictatorships like the Soviet Union and China to do a lot of the heavy lifting).

Another thing is no one thinks about Versailles logically, nor do the education systems ever encourage this. Compare it to Saint Germain, Trianon, Serves, Brest Litovsk, all of which are never taught in Western history classes but were arguably harsher than Versailles. Your teacher will never reveal to you that Russia LOST World War I. It's all "Germany lost the war, and they got blamed for everything." Versailles was actually quite lenient for its time. What made Versailles so difficult for the Germans to swallow is that it deprived them of their pride.

Maybe, but the west was also too lax on enforcement. In 1936, the Nazis tested the UK and France by re-militarizing the Rhineland. Even Hitler ater admitted that had the west responded forcefully, he would've had to turn tail and retreat. In essence, it was a bluff and when the west didn't react, it emboldened him to go further.

I think the problem was sooner the way the war ended than the peace terms agreed upon. The war didn't penetrate German borders; the German military was not 'thoroughly' defeated (though, really, it was not going to put up much resistance in October 1918 given the state it was in). This meant that whilst ordinary Germans had verifiably endured great hardships during the war, it wasn't clear to them that they had actually lost the war: hence the 'stab in the back'. Contrast this with 1945, when the bitterness of defeat became incredibly clear to Germans.

This didn't make Nazism or WW2 inevitable, but it created the situation in which the Right could tell the tale of a strong, proud Germany, on the verge of victory, being fucked over by socialists hell-bent on ruining the country. Versailles was just part of this myth.

I find it an oversimplification. Fascism and communism were on the rise in Europe anyways, ww2 was inevitable I think, in one way or another. Treaty of Versailles was just a pretext, like the stab in the back myth, trying to move blame away from extremists. Many countries suffered economically after ww2, not just Germans. Nazis would've done the same things regardless.

The treaty was apt and was probably lenient. Germans weren't the primary instigators of the war but they were very much responsible for what happened in Belgium.

http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/memoryofwar/the-rape-of-belgium-revisited/

It’s more like the treaty was too easy on them to realistically weaken them, and too harsh to engender anything other then frustration. A harsher treaty would have destroyed the countries, a less one might have engendered goodwill (notably post WW2 Germany not going the way post WW1)

You either have a treaty that is not punishing at all to avoid vengeance or a treaty that is so punishing to ensure the losers will never be able to go to war again. The problem with Versailles was that Germany was a rising nation with a strong industry and relatively large population. Treaty of Versailles did not significantly affect either. So they can still go to war and kill you except this time they will be extra motivated.

Compare it to the treaty which ended the second Franco Prussian war. It was a normal peace treaty for the era

Yes, it’s a myth as false as the Stabbed In The Back theory. Germany defaulted payment of reparations anyway and received vastly more money under the Dawes plan. Versailles itself was not the issue. Problems stemmed from the fact that Germany lost the war but was not itself invaded and occupied as happened during WW2. The German government pumped its people with propaganda about how well the war was going right to the end, even though after Operation Michael they knew they would lose. As a result, Versailles and The Guilt Clause made no sense and the Nazis were eventually able to exploit this.

It wasn't harsh enough. Germany should have been occupied and de-militarized.

You could say the "Spanish" Flu (it actually started in the U.S.) is also responsible. At the post WWI negotiations American President Woodrow Wilson was taking a somewhat generous position toward Germany, more in the direction of the Marshall Plan after WWII. French Prime Minister George Clemenceau took a much harsher, perhaps even vindictive, approach. The discussions were stalled, but then Wilson got the Spanish Flu and was knocked out of action, and so Clemenceau prevailed. Lots of circumstances combine...

These comments on this post make me think I am reading an article on treaty of Versailles and its effect on germany Which is nice to see

Extreme parties in Germany gained support when the effects of the treaty were at its worst (1923) but then dropped because of the Dawes Plan, then rose drastically after the Great Depression

The TOV played a role in Hitler’s rise to power, he promised to break it and lots of Germans liked that, encouraging them to vote for him

This is usually invoked as an explanation for the ill will many Germans had towards the Allies; feeling that they were being unfairly blamed and forced to pay for a war in which the other Great Powers had all played their own role in making inevitable.

In my understanding the treaty simply did not reflect the actual longterm power balance after the war, aka, the entry of the USA had shifted the situation in favour of the entente to the point where they could temporarily enforce a much harsher treaty that was not really rooted in the actual battlefield strength of France & the UK and when the USA eventually withdrew they were simply not able to reinforce their position accordingly, resulting in the enormous revanchism in Germany being able to flourish.

Basically: the treaty was too harsh but not in terms of its content but because it was fundamentally based on a participant who, for many years, had essentially only wanted to passively profit from the war economically and had practically no serious political goals when it finally entered into it aside from securing its returns which were not a result of targeted funding but the entente dominance at sea limiting the ability of the central powers to engage in trade across the Atlantic.

I know this second part is unpopular but I think that it holds up well when we look the political developments at the time.

TLDR: the central powers were not as weak as the treaty which was enforced with the help of the USA, which resulted in the collapse of the power war system when the latter left the picture again.

PS: a harsher treaty was not possible because the USA understood that if it wanted to dismantle Germany, this would have likely lead to the former being the one who would have to ultimately become involved in an unprofitable longterm commitment to secure half of Europe against Soviet communism, which granted, is quite ironic due to the later developments, not to mention that it’s anti colonial legacy meant that it as not willing to give the remaining European colonial empires all they wanted on the continent.

I would draw a link to what happend to France after the Napoleonic wars - the US-American goal was to establish a balanced Europe, mirroring the actions of great powers roughly a century prior.

Keynes predicted the treaty would destroy Germany's economy and usher in hyper-inflation. He then said that could lead to some sort of destabilization of Germany.

You can read your self in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December, 1919. He didn't predict Nazis. But he did predict it would cause problems.

Treaty of Versailles certainly contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany, it was not the sole cause. Rather, it was a complex interplay of various factors, including the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the failures of the Weimar Republic, and the appeal of Hitler's nationalist and anti-western message.

The Treaty was always just an excuse, given that Germany started to remilitarize in secret almost immediately. That was expected though, which is why France went through such lengths to surround Germany with, if not hostile powers, then at least non-subservient ones.

What really made it happen was that France, Germany, and the USSR were all run by idiots: France sat around until it was stuck with an unwinnable war, Russia helped Germany get into a position where Russia could very well have been stuck fighting a one-front war against an enemy it had lost to while fighting on two, and Hitler kept lying about his objectives, and was somehow surprised when people assumed he just wanted to conquer the entire world and reacted as such.

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the treaty of versailles was exceppent propaganda to use for right wing extremists but I agree its role beyond that is usually overstated. There were plentx of right wing dictatorships at that time but only germany had this treaty so there are other factors at play

Versailles is part (a big part - it fuelled German nationalists during the 20’s and 30’s) of the reason for the rise of Nazism but it should be seen in combination with a number of factors. The Weimar Republic was a weak country with a terrible constitution that had clauses built in that would make autocratic government pretty easy to install regardless of whether it was the Nazis or the Communists that got there first. This was fine during the good years when there was a degree of prosperity but the Wall Street Crash obliterated this and left the country vulnerable to extremists. The Nazis had long rejected the terms of Versailles (to be fair so had many Weimar governments who were covertly training an air force in the Soviet Union that was illegal under the terms of the treaty) and managed to convince the public that the economic crisis was in large part due to Versailles.

Worth noting that ‘rolling back’ elements of the treaty such as the reoccupation of the Rhineland, rearmament and the annexation of the Saarland helped to legitimise Hitlers government and provided it cover from any potential coup from the armed forces and the feeling of revenge against the treaty and Germanys perceived humiliation.

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My opinion is the Allies should have enforced loss of territory but shouldn’t have been as harsh on the economy. Another failure was the unwillingness to uphold the restrictions on rearmament of Germany.
Early on Germany and Hitler would have been unable to resist enforcement of the treaty. France and Germany dithered while the Nazis were becoming a problem.

Today Germany and France are dithering regarding Putin and China

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Forgive me if I’m wrong, haven’t really researched the Treaty of Versailles in a while, but wasn’t it a big factor in starting the German Depression? I mean, didn’t they owe so much money their currency was just basically decimated?

I remembering watching a YouTube video saying something slightly different than what your saying.

It basically said that historians agree, relative to other treaties of the time, the Treaty of Versailles was pretty run of the mill.

That being said, I think it’s hard to argue against the idea that widespread suffering can cause major change. You can credit other things, sure. I still think the Treaty of Versailles deserves recognition in its role though.

Treaty of Versailles might have been a reason for discontent but it was not the reason for Nazis coming to power, nor was Great Depression. Nazis were at first financed by German industrialists who payed for electoral campaigns and later also from abroad by very rich people and companies in the West including Henry Ford.

edit: what I mean that financing was decisive factor

The treaty was harsh and unjust enough that the German people felt wronged and humiliated by it, and simultaneously not harsh enough to permanently cripple Germany.

David Lloyd George (British PM) said after the treaty: “We shall have to fight another war again in 25 years' time.” French general and Supreme allied commander Ferdinand Foch also said: “This is not peace, this is an armistice for 20 years."

Paraphrasing Sun Tzu - Never give your opponent nothing to lose.

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Incorrect. So you are just gonna ignore all the direct references to the treaty and how Hitler used the treaty to harbor resentment to of the other European powers and and galvanise support for his cause? Do you not wonder *why* Germany was hit comparatively so hard by the Great Depression? Also that isn't even true, hyperinflation was a problem long before the Great Depression, it began in 1921!