The Slide to War: Versailles and the Outbreak of War

Did the Treaty of Versailles lead directly to the outbreak of war in 1939?
I think it's safe to say that a direct line cannot be drawn from the Treaty of Versailles to the outbreak of war in 1939. Of course, the events are related, and it's unlikely that Hitler, largely embodying the proximate cause of war's outbreak in 1939, would have acceded to power if the Treaty of Versailles had not had its particularly punitive effects on Germany. However, it is also true that, had the international economies not crashed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it is less likely that democracy would have failed in Germany.

The readings for this week demonstrate, more than perhaps any other point, the intricacies of diplomacy in the final years before the war. Donald Watt's essay begins with his observation that, "[i]n western Europe, the German Foreign Minister Stresemann's successors were being driven by unemployment and the rocketing growth of the Nazi party to abandon his policy of gradual revision of Versailles for a policy of adventurism from weakness."[1] Given the extent to which gradual vision had worked between 1924 and 1929, there is little reason to believe that this strategy would not have continued to work. That said, it is also true that the depth of the depression experienced by Germany was greater because of its inability to implement monetary policies that would alleviate recessionary pressures because of the shortage of foreign reserve currency. It's true that the desired customs union with Austria might have alleviated, if not reversed, the negative economic trends in Germany post-1929, but it is also true that the Versailles treaty cannot be directly blamed for the refusal of the League of Nations to authorize the customs union.

The other point to consider is whether any force at all could have prevented war from breaking out in 1939. Were we to concede that Versailles led to the rise of Hitler and that Hitler was bent on having a war, then the only question really is whether war could occurred before or after 1939, rather than prevented. Zara Steiner's treatment of the previous preventive action makes clear that members of Hitler's own cabinet were deeply unsure about Germany's ability to go to war over the Sudetenland: "All those Germans who opposed war in 1938, and they were a very disparate group, agreed that given the state of Germany’s armaments and its economic position, the country could not risk a major war with Britain and France, particularly if those countries were backed by the United States"[2]; this group included Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister -- who would also be Nazi Germany's last chancellor after Hitler's (and Goebbels's) suicide.

More aggressive action from Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich might therefore have resulted in Germany being defeated far earlier and at far smaller cost. This matter is speculative, of course, but interesting nonetheless.
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[1] D.C. Watt, "Diplomatic History, 1930-1939," in The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. 12: The Shifting Balance of World Forces, 1898-1945, edited by C.L. Mowat (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1968), 684.
[2] Zara Steiner, "British Decisions for Peace and War 1938-1939: the Rise and Fall of Realism" in History and Neorealism, edited by Ernest R. May, Richard Rosencrance, and Zara Steiner (Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge UP, 2010), 134.