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OMightyMartian t1_ja3chx3 wrote

Reply to comment by Blakut in Treaty of Versailles being ‘too harsh’ by -Mothman_

Whether Nazism would have risen or not if Versailles had had easier terms is one history's great "what if" stories. What is clear, however, is that even the Weimar Republic was planning for a potential sequel to the Great War. One of the provisions of Versailles, the abolition of the Germany Army's General Staff, was secretly undermined by the Weimar government. The members of the General Staff were taken out of their uniforms, dressed up as civilian civil servants, put on the government payroll, and then spent the next decade planning the next war. When Hitler rose to power, he had a German Army; the high ranking officers, and all that was needed was the time to put the flesh on the bones.

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Blakut t1_ja3d023 wrote

Having an army is not a crime, unless we're taking Versailles into account, so I'm not sure one should blame Weimar government for pursuing this.

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OMightyMartian t1_ja3dvra wrote

Germany was permitted a civil defense force. It was explicitly forbidden an army offensive capabilities. The abolition of the General Staff was a critical part of that, because the senior officers in any army, the product of generations of training and experience, is something that would be extraordinarily hard to reproduce. The Allies didn't merely want to hamper Germany's ability to wage war, they wanted to actively terminate it. The Weimar government, by very quietly breaching the Treaty as regards to the General Staff, by calling them "civil servants" and then giving them the space and the time to pick up the pieces and begin planning for the next war, ultimately handed Hitler not only the expertise to wage another war, but the actual plans for waging that war.

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