It’s one of those little things that irks me so much. I remember reading something about how the reparations germany had to pay were not at all excessive (especially when compared to other wars at the time).
Someone brought it up, so naturally, I’d like to counter it.
The problem with the Versailles treaty was that it failed to punish the people really responsible – the German bourgeoisie – and tended, instead, to put the cost of the war on Germany’s working class. It did this by exacerbating an already bad situation. Like the modern United States, the German government during World War I decided to fight without significantly raising taxes, and instead funded their war effort by going into heavy debt. The thought was that new land annexed, and reparations imposed on the defeated Entente, would provide more than enough money to repay the debt. In any case, the working class were going to be made to feel the pinch, but the capitalists would make a killing (literally). Just as in America, this strategy backfired when the war was longer and more costly than anticipated, and did not end in victory. This and reparations, passed on like everything else to the German proletariat, led to hyperinflation in the 1920s.
The reparations were not the sole or main cause of hyperinflation. But they were the most visible, and they were what German politicians, seeking an external scapegoat for the country’s problems, could most easily point to as the cause of current misery. The other factor at work was that the working-class revolution of 1918, which could have put a Marxist government in charge of a fully modernized, industrial nation in the heart of Europe, was betrayed by the social democrats, leading to the Weimar Republic. (People fault Ernst Thaelmann for not working more closely with the social democrats to stop the rise of Hitler, but he had already seen they were not trustworthy; and in fact the KPD was in no small measure credible precisely because it opposed the social democrats). To many German workers, the failure of the revolution meant that the left had also failed; this and divisions within the government meant that conditions were ripe for a fascist takeover.
The myth that Versailles alone was to blame for the economic problems of the 1920s was partly perpetuated by the western Allies in the aftermath of World War II. There was a sort of tacit agreement that World War I was a bloody, regrettable mess with no one instigator, and that Germany had legitimate grievances in the wake of her defeat. This was coupled with the Marshal Plan to rebuild Europe. The reason for this about-face was that the United States feared a communist revolution in Germany; and failing that, another far-right demagogue like Hitler, whom they could never fully control. So there was a concerted attempt to appease Germany and build the country up again; a strategy that the United States also used successfully in south Korea.