Was the rise of Nazism a side effect of the 1918 flu pandemic?
In the spring of 1919, four men met 175 times in Paris, and decided the destiny of the world.
The prime ministers of France (Georges Clemenceau), Italy (Vittorio Emanuele Orlando), Britain (David Lloyd George), and US president Woodrow Wilson discussed the Treaty of Versailles, which established the official end of World War I and the peace conditions to follow.
Germany was declared responsible for the war and asked to pay—on top of disarmament and relinquishing 10% of its territory—crushing reparations. In his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that those reparations would lead to the collapse of the country, with consequences that would reverberate over Europe for years go come. Many historians agree that’s exactly what happened: The level of sacrifice imposed on German citizens created fertile grounds for far-right, nationalistic doctrines, leading to the rise of Nazism.
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