The outbreak of The Great War in 1914 unified the German people to a degree previously unheard of. By 1918, the glorious Reichswehr, which had, but four years before, marched proudly to war, returned home in defeat. The political cacophony of the winter of 1918-19, from which emerged the Weimar Republic, divided the Germans in such a manner that half a century could not heal the scars. The Versailles Treaty, known derisively as the Diktat, which the fledgling Republic had been obliged to sign, left Germany in economic ruin, with extensive territorial forfeiture, the loss of international prestige, emasculating military restrictions, and the guilt of the entire war in its name. These events remained a living memory for the German people on 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. Hitler's National Socialists, like most of the nationalistic or conservative parties on the right of the Weimar political spectrum, had campaigned on a platform of opposition to both the Weimar Republic and the Versailles treaty. The appointment of Adolf Hitler to the office of Reich Chancellor and the subsequent political machinations of the Party transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a state run by a party which was dedicated to the return of what Germany had lost in 1919. The dominant feature of the Third Reich was, therefore, the "revision" of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles through rearmament, acquisition of territory through diplomacy, and military conquest.

The military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were designed to prevent Germany from ever again threatening its neighbors. The army was restricted to 100,000 men, for which conscription was prohibited, and the General Staff abolished. The navy was limited in both the number of sailors and officers, and the types and tonnage of ships. (Beyerchen) Under the military provisions, an air force was prohibited, as was the use of tanks, gas, submarines, and heavy artillery. (Herwig 229) Additionally, the territory west of the Rhein river, known as the Rheinland, was to be demilitarized. The German military had been subverting the military clauses of the Versailles Settlement long before the rise of the National Socialists by training additional troops in the Soviet Union and constructing forbidden armaments in foreign lands. (Herwig 243) Hitler, however, would begin a process of overt reversal of the military clauses of the Versailles settlement through diplomatic agreement and open disdain for the restrictions in the face of Allied complacency. In 1933 the Nazi regime created a "Police Army" of 56,000 men with full military training. Allied inspectors had, in 1920, disbanded similar police units formed from Freikorps units. (Browning 4) In the spring of 1935 the German leadership openly announced the return of universal male conscription and the establishment of the Luftwaffe, or air force, under World War I flying ace Hermann Göring. The Western Allies, Great Britain, France, and Italy, denounced the German rearmament plan, but otherwise did nothing. (Herwig 314) In June of 1935, Great Britain signed a Naval Accord with Germany, allowing the Germans to build a navy limited to 40% of the tonnage of the Royal Navy. (Beyerchen) The "final blow to Versailles" (Herwig 317) occurred on 7 March 1936, when the German army reoccupied the Rheinland. The Rheinland had been heretofore demilitarized, in order to serve as a buffer between the German military and Germany's Western neighbors. The arrival of German troops on the French frontier could have meant war, but again the allies took no decisive action. Again, Hitler "benefited from the weakness and willed myopia of his opponents, who were all too ready to believe the irenic protestations that followed his bold strokes, gradually demolishing the restrictive provisions of Versailles." (Stern 176) In the span of three short years, the leadership of the Third Reich managed to undo the military clauses of the Versailles Agreement through diplomatic agreement and audacious acts of defiance against the despised Diktat.

Similar to the case of the reversal of the military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler managed to further "revise" the territorial clauses of the Settlement through diplomatic and other means. The Versailles settlement stripped Germany of considerable territories, including all overseas colonies, and distributed them to Germany's neighbors. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France and the Saarland was put under French control for fifteen years. Eupen and Malmedy were awarded to Belgium and Northern Schleswig was returned to Denmark. In the East, the Memelland was given to the new Lithuanian Republic, Danzig was made a Free City under League of Nations control, and the newly reconstituted Polish state was given Poznania and West Prussia, thus rendering East Prussia no longer contiguous with the rest of Germany. Additionally, a special clause inserted into both the Versailles Settlement and the Treaty of St. Germain prohibited the unification of Germany and the rump Austrian state. Hitler's first victory over the territorial clauses of the Versailles Treaty was in 1935 when the residents of the Saarland, many of whom were opposed to Nazism (Beyerchen), nevertheless voted to return the Saar to the Fatherland. In March of 1938, the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schussnigg, while facing pressure both from Hitler abroad and Austrian Nazis at home, ordered a plebiscite to gauge Austrian support for unification with Germany. Hitler used this as an excuse to annex Austria to the Reich, in what is known as Die Anschluss. Again, the Western Allies did nothing in the face of German disregard for the Versailles Treaty. The Annexation of Austria left Czechoslovakia surrounded on three sides by Hitler's Germany. Under the aegis of "protecting" the millions of ethnic Germans living in the Sudetes mountains, Hitler concluded a series of meetings with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, culminating with the Munich Conference in the Autumn of 1938, during which Germany was awarded the Sudetenland. The Munich Conference symbolizes the approach taken by the Western Allies toward Hitler as one of appeasement. Indeed, war was averted, but at the sacrifice of Czechoslovak integrity. After Munich, Hitler concluded his peacetime territorial acquisitions in March of 1939 by occupying the remaining Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as seizing the Memelland from Lithuania. Over the course of the late 1930's, Hitler managed to revise the territorial clauses of the Versailles Treaty, insofar as extending Germany's borders well beyond those of 1919, without firing a shot.

After the acquisition of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear to the Western Allies that appeasement would soon fail as a deterrent to war. Hitler's efforts, thus far, to revise the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles demonstrated a clear pattern of uniting ethnic Germans with the Reich and regaining lost territories. The territorial separation of East Prussia from the Reich proper by Polish territory which had been German prior to the War, was a reality recognized by Paris and London, as well as by Warsaw and Berlin. Finally willing to make a stand against German aggression, the British and the French announced their "guarantee" of Polish sovereignty. Poland, however, was to be just the first step in Nazi Germany's efforts to expunge the legacy of Versailles from the German nation through bloodshed. Western Poland had been part of pre-1919 Germany. All of Poland, as well as much of the Western Soviet Union, and all of the Baltic states, had been included in the territory to remain occupied by the Central Powers, as specified in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Imperial Germany and Leninist Russia. Additionally, Hitler had written, in his political testament of the 1920's, Mein Kampf, of German expansion in the East. While the Western Allies and the Soviet Union were preparing for a War in Poland in 1939, Hitler was planning a war intended to achieve what defeat had precluded in 1918: German domination over the economies of Western Europe and the German colonization of Western Russia. After the defeat of Poland, Hitler turned his armies west, overrunning Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and defeating France. Indeed, Alsace-Lorraine, and Eupen-et-Malmedy, were returned to the Reich. As a clear indication to the intentions of the German leadership to erase the vestiges of the past, the conditions of the signing of the 1918 German Armistice were recreated for the signing of the 1940 French Armistice. (Herwig 330) Hitler's next major campaign was against the Soviet Union, a campaign designed to provide Germany with the vast resources of Russia and to fulfill the conquest that had failed with the defeat on the Western Front in 1918. Regardless of the outcome, the Second World War was initiated by the Third Reich as a means to overturn the Treaty of Versailles which had left Germany destitute, divided, and defeated.

Operation Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was called, began the downfall of the Third Reich. Hitler's dreams of creating a Germany unfettered by the Versailles Diktat, were dashed as armies pressed into Germany from two sides. The ideological nature of the war on the Eastern Front and the consequences thereof bring into question the nature of the Third Reich as a state whose mission was to cast off the shackles of the Versailles Settlement. Was the Third Reich based on the premise of state-sponsored racism? Racism, particularly the stratification of "races" in a hierarchy, was a dominant them in the Nazi ideology, and a firmly held belief of many of the party leaders. However, Nazi aggressive racism, as an ideal, did not command the support of the vast majority of German people, as did the erasure of the disgraces of the past, and is difficult to define as the "nature" of the Third Reich. Was the Third Reich merely a form of anti-Communism sponsored by the wealthy elites? The Nazis had been opposed to communism from the start, however, this opposition to Bolshevism was based on the Nazi misperception of the role of "race," specifically that of the "inferior" Jews and Slavs, rather than class struggle, as the power base behind communism. The dominant feature of the Third Reich was, therefore, the "revision" of the past by attempting to attain for Germany what the Versailles Settlement had taken away. The leadership of the Third Reich sought to return to Germany military glory, forfeited territory, and international prestige, all of which were lost as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.

Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1925. New York: Franklin Watts., Inc. 1984.

Bessel, Richard, ed. Life in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1987.

Beyerchen, Alan. In-class lectures. The Ohio State University. Columbus: January-March 1998.

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reseve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

Herwig, Holger H. Hammer or Anvil? Modern Germany 1648-Present. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company. 1994.

Stern, Fritz. Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism in the Drama of the German Past. New York: Vintage Books. 1989.

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