The Treaty of Versailles was one of the factors which had taken part in the undermining of Germany. …show more content…
(1998). A Holocaust reader. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Count Rantzau is emphasising to his audience that the treaty would be a detriment to Germany and would lead to its demise. The Treaty had made many demands which were seen as unfair and unreasonable by the German people. By the Germans it had been seen as a ‘Diktat’ translated as Dictated Peace in which they had been forced to lose all of their colonies, reduced their army size and pay back reparations for the first World War. From this came the ‘dolchstosslegende’ or the ‘stab in the back legend’ which was a legend created to affirm the people that the socialists, pacifists, Jews and many more groups such as these had betrayed the German army who were claimed to be “winning the war”. This legend had become a convenient way for the Germans to accept their defeat and created discontent when the Treaty was supported by the Government. As a consequence, numerous amounts of Germans began to lose faith in their government, and were against them for agreeing to the Treaty. Soon after the signing of the treaty, Germany failed to make its second payment, and France had taken the …show more content…
The Spartacist Revolution in January 1919 was a factor that undermined Germany or the ‘Weimar Government’. The extreme left-wing parties had disagreed with having any form of democratic parliament, which sparked a revolution. Led by extremists and revolutionists, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who were apart of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) but alternatively had departed for the Sparticist Union. The pair first attempted to rally support within the parliament, but had not found any support amongst the people. Rosa Luxembourg believed that the Spartacists would only take over power by using the masses in one of her newspaper articles she expresses that “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power in any other way than through the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian masses in all Germany, never except by virtue of their conscious assent to the views, aims, and fighting methods of the Spartacus League.” (Spartacus Educational. (2016). German Revolution. [online] Available at: http://spartacus-educational.com/GERrevolution.htm). The Spartacists then took to the streets to perform demonstrations. This had left the government unsettled which was led by the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) who turned to the army to restore order within Germany. There had been other cases of uprisings in Bavaria by the Communist Workers’