Question

The treaties of Versailles sowed the seeds of second world war.Justify the statement

Answer 1

 While it contributed somewhat to WW2, I don't think the Treaty of Versailles deserves as much of the rap and blame as it gets. I don’t think the Entente were too harsh with Germany after WW1 - something I wrote about in my answer toWhy did the Treaty of Versailles make Germany pay so much money?

The Germans moaned and got all melodramatic about the Treaty of Versailles, but it was relatively mild far as those things went, and less draconian than what the Germans would have imposed had they won. We don't even need a hypothetical for that - we know because when Russia sued for peace in 1917, the Germans imposed a draconian treaty, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , that was orders of magnitude harsher than what they got when the shoe was on the other foot in the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed, when the Germans complained at Versailles, the Allies threw the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk at them, noting that what was demanded from Germany now was far less onerous than what Germany had demanded from Russia just a year earlier.

And the last time the Germans won a war before that, at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War they imposed upon the defeated French the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871) , which was also harsher than the Treaty of Versailles.

The problem wasn't that the victors demanded too much at Versailles. It was that they failed to enforce the terms of Versailles when Germany started violating them. Hitler basically punked them, especially with the reoccupation of the Rhineland, when the deck was stacked in the Allies' favor to smack him down at little cost to themselves, and the near certainty of bringing the Nazi regime to an early end in 1936.