Remember that time Germany paid reparations after WWI? It experienced hyperinflation to combat it and elected a nationalist leader.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_indemnity
Not sure you're comparing apples with apples here.
The difference was that the French paid promptly, and the Germans did not.
The inability to afford the reparations outright, and the "solution" which led to hyperinfaltion is part of the catalyst that allowed extreme resentment over handling of the treaty, and ultimately the rise of fascism.
Printing money was a domestic political decision, because the government could not agree to raise taxes (or cut social spending). Much of the seed of fascism was laid in the strength of parties who never believed in democracy in the first place (discussed in some detail by Daniel Ziblatt in _Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy_) and unchecked activity of political movements who never accepted the defeat in WW I.
The latter started right at the end of WWI, when Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the German military (and for much of 1916-1918 de facto government) leaders, refused to take responsibility for the armistice and pretended that it was the politicians who had forced it on an "undefeated army". Arguably, the German military command was treated too leniently after WW I. Hanging those two (like their counterparts were after WW II) might have saved millions of lives.
The difference was that France paid in full and in advance (so much in full that the cash influx actually caused a crash in Germany – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_indemnity#Aftermath), whereas Germany tergiversed, delayed, and printed money like their was no tomorrow, sacrificing their econoomy on the altar of spiting their debtor – which eventually turned into their favor, as their reparations were shrinked to virtually nothing.
Sources: Tooze, Wage of Destruction; Memories of a Magician, Schacht.
According to Versailles, Germany had actually to pay a third of the total sum in over a decade, all the while having the only intact industrial basis in Europe. It was absolutely doable, had they not adopted the most inane economical policies of the time, and scuttled their economy to spite the Entente.
I don't know that I'd say that, like I who to blame for WWI is a very contentious subject and ultimately I'd say that the blame does rest on the German leaders, including the Kasier and German General Staff, but to pretend France has no culpability is a little disingenuous. I'd say that WWI was pretty much every European country going on a genocidal rampage on their neighbors, just because the French weren't very effective at keeping it on their neighbors soil doesn't mean they aren't responsible.
it was a chain reaction of treaties.
the only one germany 100% caused unneeded trouble for was belgium.
As for both world wars, france has a habit of pushing germany to fight because they get to arrogant.
Furthermore france actually did go on a genocidal bent right after ww2 in algeria, and even place nazi collaborators in charge of this algerian genocide!
the allies are a lot less clean than we pretend.
We can acknowledge the nazis were evil without simultaneously over-demonizing the german empire and over-praising the allies.
ww1 was a war caused by treaties and hubris
ww2 was a war caused by angry people electing a maniac
> france has a habit of pushing germany to fight because they get to arrogant.
"she was asking for it"
Going to say that about Ukraine, too?
Germany started an invasion of another country. Austria-Hungary only invaded Serbia because of German support.
'Historian Joachim Remak says:
The nation that...can still be held least responsible for the outbreak of the war is France. This is so even if we bear in mind all the revisions of historical judgments, and all the revisions of these revisions, to which we have now been treated....The French, in 1914, entered the war because they had no alternative. The Germans had attacked them. History can be very simple at times.'
Ah yes, France pushing Germany to fight by... getting declared war on in 1914, and flashing that lewd Danzig in 1939. Poor Germany, how could she resist.
In Germany?
The reason for anything big and complicated like a war could probably occupy thousands of pages of discussion. But I'd like to jot down what I see as one major difference here between Germany's experience to close out WWI and France's and most other countries' experience in past wars.
Unlike many large-scale past wars in Europe, the sequence of events in WWI wasn't exactly "Some country's leaders get angry for one stupid reason or another, those countries fight and one side ends up winning, and then both sides come to the negotiating table and come up with a relatively even-handed peace-deal based on the actual events of the war that felt like a fairly won or lost outcome that almost anybody could come to accept".
You had legitimate peace overtures from the Central powers midway through WWI that were blocked because the Allies were behind the scenes agitating to get the Americans involved on their side. And then at the end, because the inclusion of American resources so totally flipped the outcome of the war (what would have likely been a modest Allied victory with reasonable peace negotiations changed into a big win and the Allies having the power to demand whatever they wanted), the Allies could exact revenge and gain incredible wealth + continental power over their biggest economic rivals.
Do your history books go into the German Revolution of 1918–1919? And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic? All of these events and the fallout is arguably tied into this major difference with WWI being flipped by an outsider. And it's easy to see how this difference contributed to some really bad times later on. Hell, I shouldn't even say WWI and WWII, IMO this time period was really one big war with a long intermission.
That's what the Germans wanted everyone to believe.
Now, if you compare Versailles (1918) with Brest-Litovsk, Sèvres, or even Versailles (1871) (or even the Septemberprogramm), it's far from awful for the time. Germany had to pay reparations that were in the norm for the period, and lost territories that were basically ethnically either Polish or Danish. It was still the first powerhouse of Europe, and had an intact land- and industrial base, especially in comparison to France or Belgium, where – on top of battle-caused destruction – they carefully destroyed economical infrastructure (e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44575822?seq=3#metadata_info_ta...).
> And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic?
If that's what you learned in your history books, think about changing them. The only thing that led to the infamous economical failure of the Weimar republic is its aversion to pay reparation (~B150$ today) in a normal manner. Instead, they printed stupid amount of money to buy foreign currency to pay reparation with. Of course, this led to a monetary crash – out of wich Germany promptly got out by simply switching to a better handled new mark[1,2,3,4]. It was a pure product of the hopeless German economic policies, that they went back to being the economic powerhouse of Europe as soon as they got their duck in a row, and the difficulties they met thereafter were the baseline for all the nations after the war[5,6].
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/economic-research/conferences...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R... [3] Wages of Destruction, Tooze [4] Confessions of the old wizard, Schacht [5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [6] https://slidetodoc.com/europe-between-the-wars-the-economics...