The main goal of the Versailles Treaty was to weaken Germany. Several measures were undertaken to effect that objective:

Germany was only allowed a token military. It was not allowed to have tanks or planes.

Pieces of German land were given to Germany’s neighbors. Poland was given West Prussia and Danzig, Czechoslovakia was given the Sudetenland, and France was given the Rhineland and the Saar. This created a permanent bone of contention between Germany and its neighbors, and ensured Germany would always be encircled by enemies.

The above-described territorial arrangements also served to weaken Germany in terms of industrial capacity, population size, and access to natural resources.

Germany’s colonies were taken from it, and awarded to Allied nations.

Germany was crippled economically due to truly staggering reparations payments. As a result, it was unable to afford the food purchases necessary to feed the German people.

One of the (many) problems associated with this approach was that it represented an open, ongoing invitation to the Soviet Union to invade all of Europe. The Soviets first attempted to take advantage of that invitation in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. Step 1 of the Soviet plan was to conquer and annex Poland. Step 2 was to move into Germany. Germany was weak and disarmed because of Versailles, and was on the brink of a communist revolution. Upon arriving in Germany, Soviet communists would join forces with local German communists, and together would seize control over Germany. With the exception of a few French military advisors, the Allies did precisely nothing to help Poland. Polish victory in the Polish-Soviet war was due to two factors: 1) The courage and ability of the Polish military. 2) The fact that the Soviet Union was still in a state of civil war.

As a result of its defeat in the Polish-Soviet War, (and as a result of Germans communists’ failure to seize control over Germany), the Soviet government decided to postpone its plans to annex Germany. The purpose of this delay was to build up Soviet strength, so that the next attempt to conquer Germany would be more successful. During the delay, the communists destroyed their opposition in the civil war, industrialized, and militarized.

During the '20s, the leaders of Western democracies did not provide solutions to the long-term problem of Soviet aggression. The Western democracies did not guarantee the nations of Eastern Europe against Soviet attacks. The understanding was that if the Soviet Union invaded any nation in Eastern Europe, the Western democracies would do nothing more to help that that nation than they’d done to help Poland defend itself against the Soviet invasion of 1919 - '21.

During the Battle of France, the Allies fielded 144 divisions. By the late fall of 1941, the Red Army consisted of over 600 divisions. If the Soviet Union was allowed to absorb Eastern Europe and Germany without Western democratic opposition, Allied strength would have been insufficient to prevent a subsequent Soviet conquest of France. During the 1920s American presidents were isolationist. Starting in 1932 they were pro-Soviet. Neither an isolationist president nor a pro-Soviet president can be relied upon to resist Soviet expansionism. At no point prior to 1948 did the American government sign any treaties or take any military action intended to prevent Soviet expansion.

At least for some Allied politicians, the lack of interest in preventing Soviet expansion was due to a primitive, almost tribal hatred of Germany and of all things German. They were so focused on their idea that Germany was the enemy and the problem that they were blind to the tens of millions of innocent people Stalin had murdered. Blind to the Soviets’ stated long-term goal of world conquest. Blind to the implications of Stalin’s aggressive industrialization and militarization. Racial slurs such as “Hun” were used to describe Germans. Western democratic leaders almost never employed similar hate speech when describing Stalin or his henchmen.

Western democratic politicians were unwilling or unable to defend Europe from Soviet invasion–a fact which Hitler understood. Hitler’s proposed solution to that problem was for Germany, alone and unaided, to oppose Soviet invasion. In order to bear that burden, Germany needed strength. Upon taking office, Hitler rapidly grew Germany’s economy and its military. He began efforts to reclaim the German land taken from Germany at Versailles. Western politicians were alarmed by Germany’s growing strength, but (oddly enough) were not alarmed by Stalin’s massive efforts to industrialize and militarize the Soviet Union. Stalin’s efforts began well before Hitler took power; and were offensive, not defensive, in nature.

Some politicians–such as Hoover–felt that the Nazis and the Soviets were equally bad, and that they should be left alone to fight things out among themselves. However, the “equally bad” theory is not supported by mass murder totals. There were 1000 victims of Soviet prewar mass murder for every one victim of Nazi prewar mass murder.

For a time, it seemed as though Chamberlain had chosen the same “let them fight it out” perspective as had Hoover. His decision to allow the Sudetenland to be restored to German rule was consistent with a larger policy of allowing Germany to become stronger, so that it could better resist the Soviet Union. But due to the lies told by his political opponents, Chamberlain’s reputation suffered after Munich. In 1939, Chamberlain might have been motivated by the desire for political self-preservation, or by the desire to revenge himself against Hitler for perceived wrongs done to him. But whatever his motives may have been, he discarded his previous policy of neutrality in the Nazi-Soviet cold war. In place of that neutrality, he adopted the same kind of thinking the Allies had employed at Versailles, and that was also embraced by the British government during Churchill’s regime. Germany alone was considered the problem. German expansion alone must be contained. (While allowing Soviet expansion.) Poland was guaranteed against German invasion, but not against Soviet invasion. This was the second time in less than 20 years in which the Western democracies had chosen to do nothing at all in response to a Soviet invasion of Poland. From 1939 - 1941, the population of the eastern, Soviet-occupied half of Poland was decimated. One person out of every ten was either executed or deported to a gulag. Under Stalin, deportation to a gulag usually meant slow death due to cold and hunger.

In 1939, the Red Army was much better prepared to take advantage of its “free pass” to invade all of Europe than it had been during the Polish-Soviet War. How strong was the Soviet Union militarily? During the Nazi-Soviet War, the Red Army could expect to lose about 500,000 men in a typical month. That’s more men than the United States lost during the entire war. At the end of the war, the Red Army in eastern Germany outnumbered the democracies’ armies in western Germany by a margin of about 3:1. That numerical advantage continued into the postwar era. In the late '40s, the Truman administration decided that the Western democracies could not resist a Soviet invasion of Europe by conventional weapons alone. If the Soviet Union invaded, it was expected that Stalin’s armies would quickly push west. The only plan for stopping them consisted of dropping nuclear bombs on advancing Soviet soldiers. The Germans were less than delighted with this plan, considering that the nuclear bombs would be dropped in West Germany, and would have killed large numbers of Germans as collateral damage. The point here being that even after the Red Army experienced staggering losses in its war against Germany, and even after the United States had chosen to station large numbers of troops in West Germany to defend against Soviet invasion, the Red Army was still strong enough to conquer all of mainland Europe. Up until his death, Stalin had been making preparations to launch an invasion of Western Europe.

The policies of Chamberlain in 1939, and later of Churchill, represented the completion of the failure the Allies began at Versailles. Europe was to be left defenseless against the Soviet threat. The one European nation which might have had the strength to resist that invasion had been smashed to rubble. The western part of Europe was saved from the consequences of that failure by pure good luck. That good luck consisted of the following.

1. American foreign policy unexpectedly became anti-communist. Prior to 1948, American politicians typically came in one of two flavors. Anti-communist isolationists, and pro-communist interventionists. The idea of an _anti-_communist interventionist was almost unheard-of–at least prior to 1948.

2. Stalin died sooner than expected. His death appears to have been the result of having been given rat poison.

3. The United States invented nuclear weapons.

Had even one of those pieces of good luck not occurred, it’s very likely that Western Europe would have fallen to the Red Army. France, western Germany, Italy, and perhaps even Britain would have experienced the terror of the NKVD.