[moscowexile]

The Germans were hammered at Versailles with reparations so enormous that, had they paid them, they would have still been paying them out in instalments until about 1956, if my memory serves me right.

The German federal bank allowed hyper-inflation to take place so as to make their repayments to the victorious entente powers worthless. Often they just did not pay. After one major default, the French occupied the Ruhr so as to ship out coal and steel: French industrial regions were toast at the time because of the war. The German Ruhr industrial region was unscathed by the hostilities.

All the former belligerent countries suffered a huge post-war economic depression and there were strikes and workers' protests and communist agitation everywhere, even in conservative England; there were even occasional short-lived communist republics in some places.

From a geo-political perspective, however, Germany was in a much stronger position than before the war and its former enemies were much weaker: the UK was almost bankrupt and war weary; the French were even more so; the Russian empire was out of the game, its territories fragmented - though they would re-consolidate as the Soviet Union and undergo forced industrialisation under Stalin - and torn by civil war; its former contender for the control of central Europe, the Austrian Empire was out of the game as well - it no longer existed.

Although allies in WWI, albeit that the Austrians were in 1914-1918 more of a burden than a help to the German Empire, rather as were the Italians to Fascist Germany in WWII, most northern German states under Prussian leadership had fought two wars with the Austrian Empire in the 19th century over the control of the Reich: the question was whether Germany be led by Prussia and the Hohenzollerns from Berlin or the Austrians and the Hapsburgs from Vienna.

For several hundred years the Kaiser had been elected by other German kings, but in the end it had become tradition that a member of the Hapsburg dynasty be Kaiser. This continued until Buonaparte defeated the Hapsburg Kaiser (the Austrian Emperor) and the Russian Czar at Austerlitz in 1806, forcing the defeated Kaiser in that same year to renounce the title and abolish the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation): the Corsican was boss in Europe now.

The struggle over control of Germany then came to a head in the middle of the 19th century when the Austrians got bounced twice by the Prussians in short order - most effectively at Königgrätz in 1866 during the so-called Brüderkrieg (Brothers' War) - all this leading up to the 6 week long thrashing of the French Empire armies in 1870 and the founding of the Second Reich by Bismarck.

After WWI, the new states formed as a result of the fragmentation of the Austrian and Russian Empires and bordering on Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, would have eventually fallen within Germany's sphere of influence without Hitler's aggression: they had the Soviet Union at their backs and a democratic, wealthy Germany would have been their protector. Likewise Hungary and Rumania and Yugoslavia, all former Austro-Hungarian Empire territories. In fact, Hungary and Rumania were to throw in their lot later with fascist Germany and to become her willing allies: it was the Rumanian "weak link" in the German 6th army defensive semi-circle around Stalingrad that the Red Army chose to attack and break.

Germany is centrally placed in Europe and populous: the Germans are hard working, thrifty, God-fearing etc. And war weary though they may have been, they certainly bore a big enough grudge concerning what they saw as the raw deal handed out to them at Versailles as to answer a call to arms again, unlike the British and the French.

All this leaves out the USA, of course, another victor in WWI. But after Woodrow Wilson's peace brokering and highly moralistic lecturing to old Europe concerning its wicked ways of alliances and treaties that had led to the worst war in human memory, the USA retreated into isolationism, determined never to become involved again in European politics, thereby following the advice that George Washington had given them on his retirement from public life.

After the 1929 Wall St. crash, the whole industrialised western world suffered a huge economic depression, but the first to bounce back to full employment and the good times was Germany. And its Chancellor when the "happy days were here again" was Herr Hitler.

Hitler was not an economist. In fact, he was a nothing: he was an idle dreamer that had led a Bohemian "artist's" and wastrel's life, living on his his deceased father's state pension and, when that ran out, as a bum in Vienna. Then he found the only real occupation that he had ever had up to that time: corporal in a Bavarian infantry reserve regiment from 1914 to 1918. He was an exceptionally brave and dutiful corporal.

In 1919 he was unemployed again and became a political agitator, eventually joining the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), of which party he rapidly became the main crowd-puller and , on Hitler's insistence, had its name changed in 1920 to Nationalsozialistische Deautsche Arbeiterpartei the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

I have lost count of the number of times that old Germans (all dead now) who used to tell me about the economic miseries of post-WWI Germany and how that man was responsible for the good times coming.

That was Germany's tragedy, because just before the good times began to roll, the Nazis had been losing popularity. The good times returned and Hitler was chancellor and he received credit for it. He also sorted out the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) in a way that seemed to please most folk, namely with his own army of street fighting tough-guys, hooligans, and thugs: the "Brownshirts" or S.A. (Sturmabteilung - party stormtroopers).

The rest is history.

The 1930s was a time when dynamic, vibrant, industrious Germany was casting the rest of Europe into its shade, but the steel mills were not beating out ploughshares...

It needn't have been so, though...

And the Germans did the same after Jahr Null, Year Zero of 1945, when Germany was flattened: they bounced back again with their Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).

And who owns Rolls-Royce motors now?....

You've got to hand it to old Fritz, you know!