Tuesday, January 04, 2005
The rise of Germany in the interwar years
To and from work and chugging around town, I've been listening to a "Portable Professor" series of lectures, Professor Margaret MacMillan teaching "Six Months That Changed The World: The Treaty of Versailles and the Road to World War II." It is a series of 14 lectures on audio CD devoted to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the various treaties that came out of that conference, including the Treaty of Versailles, which, inter alia, required Germany to disarm. At the very end of the course Professor MacMillan (a professor at the University of Toronto and the grandaughter of David Lloyd George) addresses Germany's disregard for the disarmament provisions of that treaty:
Iraq, Iran and North Korea did not discover the evasive magic of "dual use" technology. Tough, expansionist governments have been daring Western democracies to go to war over dual-use rearmament for at least 80 years. The question is, how do the countries that can respond choose to respond?
Germany systematically abrogated the terms of the Versailles settlement and cheated its way to more territory and an illegal military. The Allies failed to contain a recovering Germany after the First World War, always choosing "peace" instead of confrontation, as if war delayed would be war avoided. Even today, we cannot measure the awful cost of that "peace."
In Germany, the terms were evaded as much as possible.... Germany was never meant to have an air force, but in the 1920s it had an awful lot of flying clubs where men with very short hair cuts learned how to fly in formation. Germany was not meant to build heavy equipment, but German factories turned out surprisingly heavy tractors whose engines of course could also be used in tanks... Germany also in the 1920s made [a secret agreement with the Soviet Union] to test heavy equipment and other types of forbidden substances on Russian soil far from prying eyes.
Iraq, Iran and North Korea did not discover the evasive magic of "dual use" technology. Tough, expansionist governments have been daring Western democracies to go to war over dual-use rearmament for at least 80 years. The question is, how do the countries that can respond choose to respond?
Germany systematically abrogated the terms of the Versailles settlement and cheated its way to more territory and an illegal military. The Allies failed to contain a recovering Germany after the First World War, always choosing "peace" instead of confrontation, as if war delayed would be war avoided. Even today, we cannot measure the awful cost of that "peace."
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Jan 04, 07:45:00 AM:
GREAT post! I've gotta get my husband some of those audio CD's. He's in the process of reading everything written by or about Churchill at the moment -- snail-style in the evenings in front of the Franklin-stove fire in our 19th-century-hunting-lodgish living room -- but he'd love being able to listen to fascinating works during the days when he's working on the endless job of restoring our Greek Revival house.
"The water started to go funny"
