CASE HISTORIES

A Tale of Two Endings - the Two World Wars

The U.S. entered World War I as “the War to End all Wars. Instead, the war ended with the Treaty of Versailles, a flawed agreement imposed on Germany by the victors to ensure that Germany would never again be able to threaten its neighbors. A weak German government accepted the terms to prevent the certain destruction of Germany by the allies. The treaty dictated loss of territories, reparation payments, demilitarized zones and German disarmament. These terms did not sit well with the German people and helped create the climate for the rise of Hitler and World War II.

When World War II ended, the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities in the occupied countries would have justified the harshest terms of surrender on a post-war Germany. However, the Allies did the unexpected – through the U.S. sponsored Marshall Plan, they invested in a massive rebuilding effort that assured that each European nation would prosper equally in a peace and participate equally in a collective security arrangement under NATO.

The contrasting consequences of these two endings could not be more instructive.