Hjalmar Schacht Quotes

Broadly speaking, the bitterness, confusion and economic uncertainty which have cursed Europe in the last four years have grown out of the controversies over these stupendous unsettled matters. The agencies created for liquidating the peace settlement have unfortunately operated instead to solidify national hatreds and conflicts.

I obtained the occupation of the Rhineland for fifteen years, with partial evacuation after five years. If Germany does not fulfill the treaty, there will be no evacuation either partial or definitive. At last I am no longer anxious. I have obtained almost everything I wanted.

When the war was in progress, England and France agreed wholeheartedly with the Fourteen Points. As soon as the war was won, England, France, and Italy tried to frustrate Wilson's program because it was in conflict with their imperialist policies. As a consequence, the Peace Treaty was one of the most unequal treaties ever negotiated in history.

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

As a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the officer corps of the old army became part of this class, as did that part of the younger generation who, in the old Germany, would have become officers or civil servants.

If I were the Germans, I shouldn't sign the treaty. It gives them no hope—either now or in the future.

This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

Although not ratified by the United States, the Peace of Versailles has been termed an American peace. It was based on propositions laid down in advance by the United States and in the main adhered to. This is particularly true of the geographical provisions where the doctrine of self-determination, which was one of President Wilson's cardinal tenets and which roughly corresponded with that of nationalities, was accepted as the guiding principle.

I now seriously ask whether an English victory would not be more desirable for our future than a German victory.

There can be no peace until this German spirit of Militarism is crushed.

Global transparency has been a goal of U.S. foreign policy since at least 1918, when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson called for an end to secret diplomatic agreements in his Fourteen Points. Yet Wilson ultimately conceded to British and French demands that the Allied powers honor existing secret pacts, such as the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, and consented to conduct the Paris Peace Conference negotiations behind closed doors.

Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French.

After 'Lindbergh,' my publisher asked whom I wanted to write about next. I said, 'There's one idea I've been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It's Woodrow Wilson.'

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

I was brought in touch with developing post World War I ideas in Europe.

After the Versailles treaty, the U.S. could have chosen to become a global economic loan shark, but we didn't, and let a lot of the tab slide. So not all lending and borrowing is bad.

Each colony became accustomed to planting new settlements and to claiming new boundaries.

Provision was also made for the distribution of Germany's foreign assets among the Allies.

There are hundreds of books about Woodrow Wilson, but I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him.

I had come to regard the U.S. Senate's rejection of the League of Nations as a tragic mistake.

As for your pope of whom you speak, he must be mad to speak of giving away countries that do not belong to him.

Everyone has come to recognize that the Great War [World War I] was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all.

No, but the Germans have been to France twice in my lifetime.

Please refresh my memory. Is it Upper or Lower Silesia that we are giving away?

Any time you see a straight line on a map of the Middle East, Winston Churchill probably drew it.