Dazzleman, I would rather say that the problem with Versailles was that it imposed harsh penalties that angered the Germans but that it wasn't sufficiently backed up. In other words, they weren't ready to uphold the conditions of the treaty, which meant that the negative effect of penalizing was there, but not the actual effect of hindering German revanschism. Had the clause prohibiting Germany from having an air force or an army of more than 100 000 men been upheld WWII couldn't have broken out.
But I think we're probably meaning roughly the same thing?
Pretty much.
I don't happen to think that restrictions against military force are all that harsh. They don't necessarily negatively affect the lives of the average person, especially if nobody is going to attack you.
The reparations were a problem in the early post-war period, but they quickly faded after they were renegotiated, and the German economy boomed in the latter part of the 1920s.
Aside from the psychological humiliation of defeat, which hit the Germans hard, they really were not suffering during that period.
I think it's better not to impose sanctions, than to impose sanctions that you can't uphold. And it was unrealistic to think those sanctions and restrictions could be upheld for very long. A stronger Russia, allied with the western powers rather than hostile to them, would have given the whole Versailles system a better chance of succeeding, but in the end, it turned out to be a compromise that got it wrong on every note.
I think we basically do agree, Gustaf.
Oh, I agree that those restrictions weren't harsh economically or anything like that but psychologically they certainly were, because they completely stripped Germany of any capacity to pursue an aggressive foreign policy (which of course was the point). Today that doesn't sound too bad either, but at the time it felt like they were telling Germany to go sit in an corner and not mess with the big boys. For a country that was already having an inferiority complex this was pretty devastating.
