[UIUC_06]

> They took the lessons from Versailles

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

> Germany would have resumed the war

Germany was in no position to keep fighting.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany

[verbify]

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.

[DoctorOetker]

which is also the point of the comment you are responding to:

in the past no occupation led war again a generation later, so the second time around occupation was opted for.

[dabluecaboose]

The Treaty of Versailles[1] was the treaty that ended World War I, not World War II

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

[JumpCrisscross]

Oh, I see what happened.

OP said we learned from Versailles. That’s why we occupied Germany after WWII: to rebuild it.

[AlbertCory]

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.

[quietbritishjim]

The comment you're replying to is about the Versailles conference after WW1, but your link is about WW2.

[UIUC_06]

so that's three of us who noticed that.

[UIUC_06]

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.

[throw0101d]

> 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.

[Cupertino95014]

The US had lost 116,000 dead. They were hardly raring to go.

The British and French were equally exhausted. Their casualties combined were about the same as Germany's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

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.

[cperciva]

equally exhausted

France lost 4.3% of its population. The USA lost 0.1% of its population. I wouldn't call that equally exhausted.

[defrost]

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.

[Cupertino95014]

certainly not the intended parsing.

[FredPret]

But isn’t that the lesson?

Occupy while you rebuild?

[UIUC_06]

No, the lesson was to demand unconditional surrender. That was just not in the cards for WW I. Russia had already dropped out.

[bumby]

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.

[sib]

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.

[otherme123]

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.

[WalterBright]

> 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.

[jjk166]

The allies did occupy a substantial portion of Germany after WW1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland