212: 1919 – Germany III

Period US political cartoon expressing the view that Allied reparations demands were excessive.

If people know only one thing about the Treaty of Versailles, they know that it imposed heavy reparations payments on Germany.

In this episode, we look at why the Allies made these demands and whether they were as big a burden as the German government made them out to be.

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Fanfare

Opening Theme

Intermezzo No. 2
Composed in 1892 by Johannes Brahms. Public domain.
Performed by Markus Staab, and used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
license. Source.

Closing Theme 



Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.

2 thoughts on “212: 1919 – Germany III

  1. I think this was the episode that I had to pause then rewind. While I stopped laughing. People’s Judean front……

  2. When you started to discuss the Treaty of Versailles and WWI reparations, I assumed you were going to repeat the “traditional” view that the demands of the allies were unequivocally unfair to Germany. Thank you for the nicely balanced discussion of this topic in this episode.

    Although only a small part of his series on the Treaty of Versailles (When Diplomacy Fails podcast), Zack Twamley argued that the reparations were not at all unfair. So, Mark, you two giants of the 21st century podcast pantheon are in agreement on the fairness of the Treaty of Versailles

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