Reparations. A word not terribly imposing. But it was in 1919. Already beaten, Germany was subsequently rendered impotent and humiliated. Payment for their aggression and the millions of lives lost. The martial power was stripped of its war machinery and the victors pounded their victory upon the country with an iron fist, as the Germans had pounded death upon the world.But world events were conspiring to slowly fill a new keg of dynamite. Broken and poverty-stricken, when the Great Depression of 1929 swept the world into disaster of a new sort, Germany, already on its knees, was flattened. The grains began to mount.
Bitterness over the victory that had been denied them, starving, the Germans were merely a chemical mixture awaiting the final component. The ingredient that would ignite the hatred, the fear, the frustration, and bring back to life the .
militaristic history of the country. The ingredient that would provide the catalyst for a new, explosive episode in world history.
It is well known that when a people is at the lowest, they look for a scapegoat for their troubles. They are easy prey for the mind who seeks to control them. On January 30, 1933, after several years of agitating and spreading his personal brand of vindictive political hate, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and offered the shattered nation just such a scapegoat
And a match was laid to the fuse.
Very well said. People tend to see historical events from a narrow perspective, but of course, it is much more complicated than that. Germans suffered tremendously before, during and after WWII. A number of factors led to Hitler's rise, including wide-spread anti-Semitism, but also more than a decade of economic disaster and political upheaval. Remember too that Germany had no democratic tradition prior to the ineffectual Weimar Republic which followed the defeat of WWI. Germans were ripe to a strong leader who promised prosperity and national pride. Tragically, many who voted him into power didn't foresee the catastrophe to come.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first began studying and reading about WWII, and I realized how entwined the events that caused it were with the First World War, I went back. Only to discover that the European histories of the majority of countries as far back as I would have cared to explore all contributed to events that came after, from the Franco-Prussian war, to the Crimean, the Napoleonic Wars. It is a long line of cause and effect that, sadly, serves particularly to reinforce the foolishness of the men in power, who steadfastly ignored the lessons of their forefathers.
ReplyDeletePart of Hitler's rise to power, of course, had less to do with the people of Germany than it did with the interior machinations at the top of the power structure, and Hindenberg's age and infirmity which led him to be naive when it came to Hitler and he succumbed to arguments both from Hitler and from others in the inner circle and made that fateful step to appoint him Chancellor. The rest, sadly, is history.