Originally Posted by worzil:
“If europe had of help the Germans after WW1 with its reconstruction Hitler would never have happen.
It was the poor and the unemployed and the conditions people where living in that inspired the Nazism .
We learned by that and set about helping the Germans after WW2 and look at them now on top of the hill.
The same could be said of the Japanese after WW2 .
My dad alway said if you met an alien and asked it who won WW2 they would say Germany and Japan.”
These are all old saws...but incorrect.
We fully intended to dynamite Germany back into the Stone Age after victory in WW2, to ensure that it could never again became a threat - but by June 1945 the alliance with the Soviets was already falling apart; British and American servicemen were being kidnapped across into the Soviet Zone in Berlin, and Churchill was soon to make his "Iron Curtain" speech.
What suddenly happened was we needed German to be able to at least PAY for us to defend it....or at best bear some of the cost by raising its own limited armed forces - which in a few years, relatively speaking, it did with the Bundeswehr. The sums just didn't work out for a Germany with all its industry dismantled; in fact, we had already destroyed so much - the British went destruction-happy in THEIR occupation sector...that we HAD to pay for reconstruction!
Something the same happened in japan; there, the Americans fully intended to keep japan back at an industrial level that would ensure it couldn't ever again be a threat...but suddenly
with the outbreak of the Korean War the Americans needed an offshore staging base - not unlike the UK 1942-45 - that could support all the aspects of a "modern" war without every single item having to be shipped from the continental U.S. So vast investment was ploughed into Japan...while the Japanese ALSO creamed off vast profits in supplying/supporting the Western war effort in Korea.
It's also not entirely correct to blame the rise of the Nazis on the economic situation post-WW1., and the reparations we laid upon the Germans at Versailles. In fact, three times the Weimar government said it couldn't pay, and three times payments were deferred - and eventually the reparations were cut to a third...then cut to 10% of THAT!
What really happened was that when the French occupied the Saar basin in reaction to the FIRST reparations crisis, their occupation rapidly became SO painful for them in cost terms...both money and lives...that attitudes changed in Paris to taking any major concrete action towards repayment of reparations. The Germans knew they were onto a good thing after that - no one wanted to bear the burdens of occupation AGAIN. In fact, by the middle of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic was economically buoyant, and it was a short Golden Age for all concerned -
until the Wall Street Crash of 1929...
As opposed to the post-war economy and the reparations crisis depressing Germany - it
depressed US in the UK badly! Our war loans in the States etc. were dependent on the reparations coming in, and when they didn't we ended up still owing millions to the U.S. - so much so still by WW2 that the WW1 debts still outstanding had to eventually be folded into our SECOND World War debts! If Germany had paid their debts as set down at Versailles - we could have paid ours in turn.