Earlier this month, the German weekly Der Spiegel ran a cover story suggesting that the Treaty of Versailles is why the “Second World War had to follow the first.” Imposed on Germany in June 1919, the post-World War i treaty was “humiliating,” “harsh” and too demanding of the debilitated German state, lamented Spiegel—thus it was a justifiable pretext for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

This banter about Allied guilt for causing World War ii is not occurring in whispers among Nazi sympathizers in log cabins in the backwoods of Germany.

This was a cover story in Der Spiegel, a popular weekly newsmagazine which, like Newsweek or Time in the United States, shapes national conversation in Germany. And as translators at German-Foreign-Policy.com observed recently, the German daily Die Welt “takes a similar position” to Spiegel on this issue, as does the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the most popular newspaper in southern Germany.

Reassigning blame for World War ii to the Treaty of Versailles—and therefore the Allies—is becoming a disturbing trend in Germany!

It is equally disturbing that fodder for this world war blame game is plenteous in modern Western history books. There it is fashionable for revisionist historians to blame World War ii on Britain and America, and not Germany, whose only crime for two decades after World War i supposedly was to suffer under the jackboot of Versailles.

This false teaching is heinous. It is fundamentally Nazi in philosophy and character. More importantly, it numbs people’s minds to what will be the root cause of World War iii.

Don’t Blame Versailles

Like all peace treaties, the Treaty of Versailles had its imperfections, although, as historian Victor Davis Hanson has explained, the treaty was “far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917—or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War” (emphasis mine throughout).

Perhaps Versailles was a little too demanding on some points, but it was no harsher than peace accords imposed by Germany on France and Russia—and, after all, Germany had caused a conflict that ultimately snuffed out 10 million people!

“What ultimately led to World War ii,” explained Hanson, “was neither the Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.”

What was the true cause of World War ii?

If the Treaty of Versailles really was why “the Second World War had to follow the first,” as Spiegel put it, it would be logical that World War ii only became inevitable after Versailles, and, realistically, after years of built-up resentment and anger over its “unfair” and “harsh” stipulations. How then do revisionist historians explain the facts showing Germany began planning World War ii toward the end of World War i—before the Treaty of Versailles even existed?

“Nazism, the fascist phase of Pan-Germanism, was initiated in Germany immediately after the armistice of 1918 by direct instigation of the German General Staff,” explained Michael Sayers and Albert E. Khan in The Plot Against Peace (1945). The Treaty of Versailles wasn’t signed until June 1919; the seeds of Nazism were sown in Germany after the armistice in 1918.

So the spirit of Nazism, which ultimately transformed Europe into a cauldron of death during the Second World War, was operating inside Germany before the Treaty of Versailles existed. Historical evidence shows that Germany was even preparing physically for World War ii—developing new weapons and restocking armaments—as early as 1921, long before Versailles’ “harsh” and “humiliating” stipulations had the chance to take full effect.

The logic is undeniable: The spirit of Nazism that caused World War ii was not born of animosity among Germans toward the Treaty of Versailles!

Select leaders in Germany were planning World War ii before the First World War even ended. Many in Germany did not accept World War i as a defeat. The truth is, these people exploited the idea that the Treaty of Versailles was “harsh” and “humiliating” as a vehicle to advance the Nazi agenda to launch World War ii. Nazism thrived in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s when the Nazi propaganda machine fomented German pride and humiliation over the defeat, and blamed the country’s postwar woes on the Allied impositions of Versailles.

“The Treaty of Versailles created a political climate in Germany in which the right [Nazism] put all the blame on everything that went sour onto the treaty and the lost war,”explained prominent German historian Wolfgang Mommsen. “And that created this climate in which many people then began to think one had to fight the war once again.”

The Versailles Treaty was tough, and it created some hardship in Germany. But it was not the cause of World War ii. The cause of World War ii was the pervasive, war-mongering spirit of Nazism, injected into Germany before Versailles, which used Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party as its mouthpiece and “sold the Second World War to the Germans as righting the wrongs of Versailles” (ibid).

Ridiculing the Treaty of Versailles as “harsh,” “humiliating” and unfair was a Nazi tactic designed to provoke frustration and hostility among Germans toward America, Britain and France. It was a gigantic lie by which the Nazi propaganda machine groomed the minds of Germans for World War ii. Perhaps some Germans went to war thinking they were remedying what they saw as the mistakes made in the Treaty of Versailles, that they were fighting to reclaim the territory they had been forced to cede, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Not Hitler. His goal was to establish the Third Reich over all of Poland, all of France, all of the Balkans, all of Europe—including Britain—and ultimately the entire world! His goal was to purge Germany, then the human race, of the Jews.

Hitler didn’t care about righting the supposed wrongs of Versailles. He was a genocidal maniac gunning for world domination!

The Holy Roman Empire

Although the immediate cause of World War ii was German Nazism, led by the genocidal mass-murderer Adolf Hitler, there was a more fundamental reason for the war. As Sayers and Khan observed, “[A]lmost all the peculiar features of Hitler’s regime, its unbridled aggressiveness, its inordinate brutality, its homicidal racial chauvinism, have been characteristic of past political manifestations of the Pan-German secret ruling combine of Junkerism, Prussian militarism and economic feudalism.”

Put simply, World War ii was a short and vicious eruption of what historians admit is a long-held German goal for continental subjugation—and world dominance.

That is why the growing proclivity to blame World War ii on the Treaty of Versailles, and on the Allied powers, is so dangerous: It classifies the Second World War as a historical aberration, caused by unique political and economic conditions, that will never be repeated. The truth is, World War ii was actually a violent eruption of Germany’s enduring ambition for global domination—an ambition that remains rooted in the German national character today!

There is another common name for Germany’s long-standing quest for global domination: It’s called the Holy Roman Empire!

The Holy Roman Empire is a political, religious and military conglomerate that has risen and fallen from power in Europe over the past 1,500 years. As is explained in our free booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, this deadly empire began in a.d. 554, when the Roman Emperor Justinian recognized the supremacy of the pope and forged an alliance between Rome and the Vatican.

There have been five resurrections of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe since Justinian’s Imperial Restoration. In each case—be it Charlemagne’s vicious empire in the 8th century, Otto the Great’s German empire of the 10th century, Napoleon’s in the early 19th, or Hitler’s in the mid-20th—the Vatican was the primary influence over the empire. That’s why it’s called the “Holy” Roman Empire, though the use of the term “holy” is one of history’s cruelest misnomers.

This modern tendency, both inside Germany and out, to blame World War ii on the Treaty of Versailles and the Allied powers is diabolical. It is cut from the same cloth as the lies about the Treaty of Versailles promulgated by the Nazis during the 1920s and ’30s to help convince the German people of the need for World War ii. It also blinds people to the historical and biblical reality that the Holy Roman Empire was the ultimate cause of both World Wars i and ii.

Most importantly, however, it is a lie that numbs people to the reality that this same Holy Roman Empire is about to start World War iii!