Consider the implications of the Treaty of Versailles. How much impact do you think it had on subsequent events? Explain your answer.

The main subsequent event of the Versailles Treaty was WWII, which would happen twenty years later. The Versailles Treaty had a large impact on WWII as it punished Germany for the war. Germany had to pay large indemnities to the Allied powers after the war. Germany considered these to be unfair as Germany did not start the war. Germany also lost a great deal of territory including Alsace-Lorraine and what would become part of Poland. Alsace-Lorraine was not conquered in WWI; rather, it was taken during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. This would further sow the seeds of anti-French sentiment in Germany as the nation claimed that France was out for revenge instead of searching for a just peace. Germany also claimed that the Allied desire for self-determination for Europeans was hypocritical as many German-speaking people were separated from their home country with the formation of Poland. When Hitler started annexing territory in 1936, he claimed that he was only bringing German people back to their native land. When he used this logic to annex the western part of Poland, it proved to be the start of WWII. The Soviet Union annexed the eastern part of Poland as part of a nonaggression treaty with Germany and to regain land it lost at the Versailles negotiations.
The Versailles Treaty also limited Germany's ability to make war by sharply cutting the size of its army as well as destroying the German navy and air force. Hitler was able to recreate the German armed forces as a way to provide jobs for Germans during the Great Depression and to restore German nationalism. It is hard to imagine WWII happening without the efforts the Allies made to punish Germany at the Versailles negotiations. The negotiations were not really negotiations at all as Germany was only consulted when it was time to sign the treaty and the nation was given the choice of either signing the treaty or resuming the war. Germany was also facing a blockade which kept food out of the starving nation during the armistice period. The nation was never invaded and many German citizens thought that the German army was actually successful. The abrupt end of the war with the punitive peace was too much of a shock. The treaty combined with the Great Depression led to the conditions which allowed Hitler to take power and start WWII.