The Twenty-Year Crisis

The war to end all wars produced a peace that guaranteed another one. When the Allied powers gathered at Versailles in 1919, they faced an impossible task: punish Germany enough to satisfy vengeful publics, yet leave it stable enough not to collapse into chaos. They failed on both counts.

Article 231 — the "War Guilt Clause" — forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the war. It wasn't just a diplomatic formality. It was the legal foundation for reparations set at 132 billion gold marks (roughly $33 billion in 1921, equivalent to over $500 billion today). Germany lost 13% of its territory, 10% of its population, all overseas colonies, and was stripped to a military of just 100,000 men with no air force, no submarines, and a navy of six battleships.

The economist John Maynard Keynes, who attended the conference as a British Treasury representative, quit in disgust and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace within months. His warning was prophetic: "If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp." Clemenceau wanted security. Wilson wanted idealism. Lloyd George wanted votes. The compromise satisfied no one and enraged an entire nation.

The so-what here is structural: Versailles created a Germany that was humiliated but not destroyed, weakened but not incapacitated, resentful but not incapable of rebuilding. That combination — wounded pride plus latent industrial power — was a detonator waiting for a spark.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about fascism's rise: it was democratic. Hitler didn't seize power in a coup. He was invited into government by the same conservative establishment that thought it could control him. They were catastrophically wrong.

The Weimar Republic was born weak — associated in the public mind with surrender and humiliation. Its proportional representation system produced fragmented coalitions that couldn't govern effectively. Between 1919 and 1933, Germany cycled through 14 chancellors. Meanwhile, the NSDAP grew from a fringe beer-hall movement polling 2.6% in May 1928 to the largest party in the Reichstag at 37.3% by July 1932. That's a 14-fold increase in four years.

Italy had shown the template earlier. Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922 demonstrated that a disciplined minority willing to use both violence and elections could capture a state. In Japan, the military gradually eclipsed civilian government through a series of assassinations and fait accompli foreign adventures. Three industrial nations, three paths to the same destination: authoritarian nationalism fueled by grievance, economic anxiety, and contempt for parliamentary weakness.

The critical lesson: fascism didn't replace democracy. It used democracy — exploiting free speech, free assembly, and free elections — to dismantle the very system that enabled its rise. By the time President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933, the game was already over. The Reichstag fire four weeks later was merely the excuse for a fait already accompli.

If Versailles loaded the gun, the Great Depression pulled the trigger. The Wall Street crash of October 1929 didn't just destroy American portfolios — it detonated a chain reaction that demolished the fragile international economic order. American banks called in foreign loans. Global trade collapsed by 65% between 1929 and 1934. And nowhere was the devastation more politically consequential than in Germany.

By 1932, German unemployment hit 5.6 million — roughly 30% of the workforce. Industrial production fell to 58% of its 1928 level. The Weimar government, trapped between deflation and debt, imposed austerity that deepened the spiral. People who had survived hyperinflation in 1923 (when a wheelbarrow of banknotes wouldn't buy a loaf of bread) now faced mass unemployment. The middle class was annihilated twice in a decade.

The Depression didn't just radicalize Germany. In Japan, the collapse of silk exports (accounting for 40% of Japanese export earnings) devastated the rural economy and strengthened the hand of military expansionists who argued that only imperial conquest could secure economic survival. The Manchurian Incident of September 1931 — Japan's seizure of northeast China — was driven as much by economic desperation as by military ambition.

What makes the Depression so central to WWII's causation isn't just the misery it created — it's the faith it destroyed. Faith in liberal democracy. Faith in free markets. Faith in international cooperation. In its place rose the seductive logic of the strong leader, the closed economy, the martial nation. Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan's military clique all offered the same bargain: surrender your freedom, and we'll restore your dignity. Millions accepted.

Appeasement has become a dirty word — shorthand for cowardice in the face of tyranny. That's too simple. Chamberlain wasn't a fool. He was a rational man making rational calculations based on incomplete information and traumatic memory. The problem was that his opponent wasn't rational at all.

The logic of appeasement was rooted in genuine horror at the prospect of another war. Britain had lost nearly a million men in 1914–18. France lost 1.4 million. When Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland on March 7, 1936 — in flagrant violation of both Versailles and the Locarno Treaties — he sent 22,000 troops with orders to retreat if France resisted. France had 350,000 men nearby. But Paris didn't act, and London backed Paris's inaction. Hitler later admitted: "The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking of my life. If the French had marched, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs."

They didn't march. And with each unchallenged violation — the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, the Munich Agreement surrendering the Sudetenland in September 1938 — the cost of resistance grew while the credibility of the Western democracies shrank. Chamberlain's return from Munich waving a signed paper and declaring "peace for our time" is history's most famous self-deception. Churchill's response in the House of Commons was devastating: "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war."

WWII wasn't the result of a single aggressor. It emerged from three simultaneous expansionist projects on three continents, each feeding the others' ambitions and collectively overwhelming a world order that had no mechanism to stop any of them.

Japan moved first. The invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 established the puppet state of Manchukuo, giving Japan access to coal, iron, and agricultural land. The League of Nations condemned it. Japan quit the League. Nothing happened. The template was set. By July 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, producing atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre that killed an estimated 200,000–300,000 civilians.

Italy attacked next. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 — complete with poison gas against spear-carrying warriors — exposed the League's impotence. Britain and France imposed half-hearted sanctions that excluded oil (the one commodity that mattered) and drove Mussolini into Hitler's arms. The Rome-Berlin Axis was born from Western fecklessness.

Germany was the most systematic. Hitler's Lebensraum doctrine demanded eastward expansion for "living space." Each step — rearmament (1935), Rhineland (1936), Austria (1938), Sudetenland (1938), the rest of Czechoslovakia (March 1939) — tested the limits and found none. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) served as a proving ground, where the Condor Legion perfected the tactics of terror bombing that would define the coming war — including the destruction of Guernica.

The League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's noblest idea and the interwar period's cruelest joke. It was supposed to be the architecture of permanent peace — a forum where disputes would be resolved by dialogue, not artillery. Instead, it became the most expensive debating society in history, toothless precisely when teeth were needed most.

The structural problems were baked in from the start. The United States — whose president had championed the League's creation — never joined, after the Senate rejected the treaty in November 1919. Without American economic and military weight, the League was missing its anchor. It had no standing army, no enforcement mechanism beyond moral suasion and voluntary sanctions, and required unanimous consent for substantive action — giving any aggressor the ability to veto its own punishment.

The League's defining failures came in rapid succession. When Japan seized Manchuria, the League formed the Lytton Commission, which took 18 months to produce a report condemning the invasion. Japan's response was to walk out. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie personally addressed the League Assembly in Geneva in June 1936, pleading: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." The delegates listened politely and did nothing effective.

The historian E.H. Carr named his famous 1939 analysis The Twenty Years' Crisis — arguing that the interwar order was built on utopian assumptions about human nature and state behavior that had no basis in reality. International law without international power was just aspiration. And aspiration, it turns out, doesn't stop tanks.

By the spring of 1939, the pretense of peace was exhausted. When Hitler swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia in March — violating the Munich Agreement that was barely six months old — even Chamberlain finally understood. Britain and France issued an unprecedented guarantee to Poland: attack Poland, and you are at war with us.

Hitler took it as a dare. The problem was Danzig — a historically German city placed under League administration by Versailles, surrounded by the Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Hitler demanded its return. Poland refused. Britain and France scrambled to construct a deterrent alliance, but their critical failure was diplomatic: they couldn't bring the Soviet Union onside. Negotiations with Moscow dragged through the summer of 1939, hampered by mutual distrust and Poland's refusal to allow Soviet troops on its soil.

Then came the thunderbolt. On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union — ideological blood enemies — signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The published terms were a non-aggression agreement. The secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence: Poland would be split between them, the Baltic states assigned to Moscow, and Finland and Bessarabia ceded to the Soviet sphere. Stalin bought time and territory. Hitler bought a one-front war.

At 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte. The Luftwaffe struck Polish airfields. 1.5 million German troops poured across the border. Two days later, on September 3, Britain and France declared war. Twenty years and sixty-five days after the Armistice that was supposed to end all wars, Europe was at war again. It would kill 70–85 million people before it ended.