> the Allies could exact revenge and gain incredible wealth + continental power over their biggest economic rivals. That's what the Germans wanted everyone to

> the Allies could exact revenge and gain incredible wealth + continental power over their biggest economic rivals. That's what the Germans wanted everyone to believe. Now, if you compare Versailles (1918) with Brest-Litovsk, Sèvres, or even Versailles (1871) (or even the Septemberprogramm), it's far from awful for the time. Germany had to pay reparations that were in the norm for the period, and lost territories that were basically ethnically either Polish or Danish. It was still the first powerhouse of Europe, and had an intact land- and industrial base, especially in comparison to France or Belgium, where – on top of battle-caused destruction – they carefully destroyed economical infrastructure (e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44575822?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/44575822?seq=3#metadata_info_ta...). > And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic? If that's what you learned in your history books, think about changing them. The only thing that led to the infamous economical failure of the Weimar republic is its aversion to pay reparation (~B150$ today) in a normal manner. Instead, they printed stupid amount of money to buy foreign currency to pay reparation with. Of course, this led to a monetary crash – out of wich Germany promptly got out by simply switching to a better handled new mark[1,2,3,4]. It was a pure product of the hopeless German economic policies, that they went back to being the economic powerhouse of Europe as soon as they got their duck in a row, and the difficulties they met thereafter were the baseline for all the nations after the war[5,6]. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/economic-research/conferences/~/media/files/research/events/2000_10-20/Fisher_GermanEconomy.pdf https://www.minneapolisfed.org/economic-research/conferences... https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R... [3] Wages of Destruction, Tooze [4] Confessions of the old wizard, Schacht [5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [6] https://slidetodoc.com/europe-between-the-wars-the-economics-of-the/ https://slidetodoc.com/europe-between-the-wars-the-economics...