LogFAQs > #968531930

Yellow posted...

Basically, my understanding is that a big reason for WWII is that the world punished them for WWI and that paved the way for a strong man

There was no short, straight line between the Treaty of Versailles and the rise of Nazism.

The surge of support at the polls for the Nazis didn't occur after the Weimar economy had experienced its "gold plated" years of 1925-28. (The republic recovered strongly after the hyperinflation of 1923, and the twelve-month growth rate after the rebound from recession over the winter of 1926-27 was higher than anything achieved during the Third Reich.) Even during the Allied occupation of the Rhineland and the Ruhr, Hitler's NSDAP never managed to win more than 6.5% of the votes in federal elections; Ruhr workers themselves mostly stuck with the SPD, the Centre Party and the KPD. Even worse for the Nazis, the party's share of the vote actually fell from 6.5% in May 1924 to 3% in December that year, and crashed to a feeble 2.6% in May 1928.

In other words, even when popular memories of German defeat and Versailles were fresher and more bitter, the NSDAP still did badly at the ballot box. From 1920 to 1929, Germany's biggest party remained the centre-left Social Democratic Party.

In the German referendum of 1929 -- a vote on whether or not Germany should pass a law formally renouncing the Treaty of Versailles and ban the collection of reparations -- fewer than 15% of the electorate even bothered to turn out. Again, despite the conventional wisdom in today's school classrooms that Versailles stoked the German public so badly they rushed to vote Nazi out of spite, voters showed instead a remarkable amount of apathy about the Treaty as a specific issue.