what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.
> what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all
Of course we did [1]. The ACC was far more intrusive than the American occupation of Japan; we formally stripped Germany of its sovereignty.
EDIT: the lesson from Versailles was that we had to rebuild Germany. To rebuild required occupation. Occupying Germany after WWII was one of the lessons learned from Versailles.
I think the person you are replying to meant that the allies didn't occupy Germany after WWI (and therefore there could be few lessons from Versailles on nation building), your link posts to WWII.
They were all exhausted. US troops had been sent home. If Germany had said, "Nope, not signing that" results would have been unpredictable. But meekly submitting was unlikely.
your link and comments are about WW II. Versailles was the treaty that ended WW I.
> Germany was in no position to keep fighting.
No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted, but "defending the homeland" is a more powerful motivator than anything the Allies had. Germany asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" which did not include occupation.
> No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted […]
The US had just entered the war after the Zimmerman telegram, and so Allied powers had more man power and more industrial strength. The Central powers were the ones that were exhausted, especially after the Hundred Days Offensive.
You're right that Germany was whipped, but the persistence of the "stab in the back" theory in the 20's and 30's demonstrated that they hadn't quite internalized that. After all, they hadn't been invaded, and "news" back then was so heavily censored that the Germans didn't all know the real situation.
I believe the parsing intended might have been that the UK and France were "equally exhausted" .. not that the US suffered losses comparable to either.
Even so, the UK lost 3/4 million from 45 million whereas France lost 1.1 million from 39 million .. so that's kind of order of magnitude roughly ballpark from a distance, but France got hit harder.
Correct. The UK and France put together were as exhausted as Germany. And "exhaustion" can't be measured just in body counts. Recall that France had some very serious mutinies around the time of the battle of Verdun.
The "lessons of Versailles" is a dumb phrase. Germany only asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" although Wilson didn't manage to pull that off over England and France's objections.
So we have two counterfactuals, neither of which can be settled:
1) Wilson doesn't propound his 14 Points. Perhaps he loses the election of 1912.
2) He does and the Armistice happens as it actually did, but the Paris Peace Conference declares that the Allies are going to occupy Germany and reshape its government, or maybe Germany is to be dismembered.
It's #2 that this phrase seems to imply. I'd claim that if that happens, no peace treaty is signed at all, similar to the way that the Korean War is technically still going on. The Allies would not have invaded Germany. Russia was already out of the war.
It's of course up for debate, but one of the general assessments is that the resentment caused by the Treaty of Versailles gave fertile ground for the rise of the Nazi party. It's hard to see how unconditional surrender would have made the treaty more palatable to Germans rather than less.
I would rather say that the fact that there was a (conditional) surrender by Germany and it took place before the Allies had significantly entered German homeland territory enabled certain agitators to claim that Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated.
You are correct that the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles made for good grist for the mill when those same agitators to point at the "unfair" consequences of the betrayal.
After WWII there was no one who could possibly say that Germany had not been completely and utterly defeated (and the Allies, at least the western ones with respect to western Germany) did invest in rebuilding the country.
The WWI ended with an armistice, and then a peace treaty. It was intended to save Germany from the shame of total defeat. The problem with that was that peace terms were extremely harsh, as you would impose on an inconditional surrender, and France intention was to get revenge, applying the terms of the treaty as hard as they could. Said agitators tried to take advantage of that duality: "we didn't surrender, yet we are being humiliated".
The lesson for WWII was that as shameful it could be for Japan to surrender inconditionally, it was needed to shut those sectors of the society that would think they could had won the war if only...
This was more a problem with Japan than Germany in the WWII: Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace, and specially the soviets didn't want any of that. It's know that Hitler and friends wanted either victory or the complete annihilation of Germany. But Japan actively tried in the last couple of months of the war to achieve a conditional surrender.
> Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace
Hitler knew that he'd be hung when the war was over. He knew what happened to Mussolini. He was never going to allow a negotiated peace.
The idea behind the officers' plot to kill him was that then Germany could sue for peace. Failing to kill Hitler meant the war was going to continue to the bitter end.
what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.