[DerbyX]

EyeBrock EyeBrock:

Most historians agree that the Treaty Of Versailles was unjust by the standards of previous Europaen treaties but the German conduct in the countries they occupied created the need to 'punish' them in the Allies view.

I think you'll find that a majority of learned opinions agree that the Rhineland, Sudetenland and other notable capitulations in the face of the agressor only encouraged him and set the stage for WW2.

This is the whole point. If we would have used force to resist the German take over of the Rhineland, the Germans would have lost and Hitlers posistion would have been greatly weakened.

This use of force could have prevented WW2. The lack of using force most certainly caused it to start in 1939.

"Peace in our time", said the great appeaser. Soft power in action.

Well right off I need to remind you I'm not saying we weren't justified in fighting WW2 as we did. I'm not even saying that we wouldn't have been justified in doing something prior to 1939.

What I am saying is that the time to prevent the hostilities was long before Sudentenland that's all.

If we had not created the conditions in the first place then war could have been avoided. As it was Hitlers radicalism took hold due in large part to the disenfranchised population under the same human conditions that see cults recruiting from the vulnerable and lonely.

[EyeBrock]

It was before Sudetenland. That was 1938.

If we had stayed put in the Rhineland in 1936, Hitler would have been fucked. But the chicken-shit Brits and French let him walk on in.

The rest is history written on the war memorials. Soft power in action.

[Pseudonym]

If I may interject, historical hypotheticals really need to be taken with a big degree of salt. "If we did this", "if they did that" can't possibly deal with all the variables of human interaction. History is history, it happened the way it did, and there is no way to change it. That said, if Hitler had been confronted earlier, if it had been done in force, and if the Germans were unable to defeat that force, then of course it makes sense that Hitler could have been defeated much earlier. It also makes sense to say that if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't left Germany in such a poor situation, and if the Weimar Republic hadn't screwed things up even more, then Hitler would have had much more difficulty in rising to a position of power in the first place.

[martin14]

Pseudonym Pseudonym:

If I may interject, historical hypotheticals really need to be taken with a big degree of salt. "If we did this", "if they did that" can't possibly deal with all the variables of human interaction. History is history, it happened the way it did, and there is no way to change it. That said, if Hitler had been confronted earlier, if it had been done in force, and if the Germans were unable to defeat that force, then of course it makes sense that Hitler could have been defeated much earlier. It also makes sense to say that if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't left Germany in such a poor situation, and if the Weimar Republic hadn't screwed things up even more, then Hitler would have had much more difficulty in rising to a position of power in the first place.

lot of ifs, and none of it would guarantee any different outcome.

That many ifs also require the different parties to behave in
a normal rational peaceful way.

[Regina]

Pseudonym Pseudonym:

If I may interject, historical hypotheticals really need to be taken with a big degree of salt. "If we did this", "if they did that" can't possibly deal with all the variables of human interaction. History is history, it happened the way it did, and there is no way to change it. That said, if Hitler had been confronted earlier, if it had been done in force, and if the Germans were unable to defeat that force, then of course it makes sense that Hitler could have been defeated much earlier. It also makes sense to say that if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't left Germany in such a poor situation, and if the Weimar Republic hadn't screwed things up even more, then Hitler would have had much more difficulty in rising to a position of power in the first place.