r/politics • u/Effective_Salad_8381 • 21h ago

Soft Paywall JD Vance Mocked for Embarrassing WWII History Mistake

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jd-vance-mocked-for-embarrassing-wwii-history-mistake/
10.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

475 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/OldBridge87 18h ago

The negotiations were not the problem. The fact that we didn't actually humiliate and conquer Germany before we made them surrender allowed them to engage in a collective mass hysteria about how they didn't actually lose and are really the greatest and most powerful nation ever and will now prove their superiority over all others...

At the time though going in and annihilating/conquering Germany when they were already beaten seemed excessive and costly to the troops.

2

u/pathofdumbasses 16h ago

The negotiations were not the problem.

Yes they were. They may not have been the ONLY problem, but they put such financial hardship on Germany that it destroyed their economy and people were burning their worthless money to warm themselves.

That is literally how Hitler got his rise; by blaming everyone else (and especially the Jews) for their problems and saying that he was going to fix it.

This is also why after the end of WW2, where they did much worse things than WW1, they got much more relaxed and realistic reparation payment schedules, which they are still making payment on today.

The fact that we didn't actually humiliate and conquer Germany before we made them surrender

As for this, Germany themselves took the Holocaust very seriously because of how awful the US dealt with the end of the US Civil War, Reconstruction, and how all the "south will rise again" shit was allowed to spread.

1

u/Iustis 10h ago

Over the last decades, the idea that Versailles was exceptionally harsh or that the financial penalties were too much to overcome has become very disfavoured in academia by the way. I don't think many mainstream historians stand by it.

•

u/Troodon25 Canada 7h ago

Right, because that wouldn’t have incensed a desire for revenge in an era of rising nationalist and eventually fascist sentiment.