Similarly, Japan tentatively asked for terms at least twice during the Pacific War but never got any reply from US.
They sent a feeler to the Soviets asking if the Allies would be ok with a peace status quo ante bellum, because they wanted to rebuild and try again in a generation. They got told that only unconditional surrender would be offered and said "Fuck you! We'll go extinct while bloodying your nose as badly as we can before we do that!" until they got nuked and realized they could be slaughtered at will without taking a toll on the Allies in return.
Okay, keep telling yourself that.
CP surrender wounded German pride without showing all of them in person that they'd lost the war by having enemy soldiers march through their country. You cannot truly win a war unless the enemy bleeds profusely and begs for the bleeding to stop.
Most in the Japanese leadership were concerned more with spiting the Allies and making them suffered that they didn't care about their extinction as a result. It pissed them off to no end that the US had found a way for one aircraft to destroy a city virtually eliminating any form of attrition they'd suffer attacking Japan that would comfort their desire to kill Allies.
Wow. Where did you learn your history? Soviet Union or Texas?
How about you start reading about it.
Here's a start:
https://www.amazon.ca/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-Empire/dp/0141001461
I know it's hard to fathom these days the Japanese thinking so stereotypically, but they did and restructured their whole society anticipating an invasion they could throw themselves at.
A-H got destroyed by the terms but Germany didnt lose anything at all. Some French lands, some Danish lands and some Polish lands.
They didnt even pay the reparations at all.
A-H collapsed on it's own under the reign of Karl IV. Like Russia the war put enough pressure on it that it tore at the seams.
Much of Versailles is much ado about nothing beyond dealing with Germany parceling up the Ottoman Empire. By the time they got around do handling other things Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc had all set themselves up on their own and all the Great Powers could do given their wiriness and desire to just end shit was to rubberstamp what those nations had already done.
A good example of that is Anatolia where there was strong support by Mr. Self-Determination Wilson for much of the west to go to Greece and much of the east to go to Armenia, but by the time it came up to seriously deal with it everyone was tired and bullshitted about until Ataturk secured those regions and prevented them to enforcing anything. Oh, how nice it would have been today to have had them tackle that problem.
Another is Yugoslavia uniting on its own (despite the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs despising each other) out of fear of being parceled out, which prevented Italy from getting the lands that were agreed upon would go to them during the war that enraged them and threw them into the Axis camp down the line.
This left a lingering resentment in Germany and together with the absurd reparations and restrictions imposed on Germany only paved way for Hitler or some other radical demagogue to take over. Woodrow Wilson was the guy who was genuinely on the level in the conference, but British and especially the French were too dead-set on being assholes about the whole thing.
All of that is to the wayside, Germany didn't feel it lost the war, they were never overrun and occupied, they didn't "see" their defeat like they did in WWII. Any form of peace that didn't restrict their ability to rebuild and wage war again was a half measure, and as it was they were treated decently when it became apparent that they couldn't repay much of the reparations and so they were lowered.
As it was, they were force to pay reparations not much more than those they imposed upon France in 1872, an amount specifically set in hopes of crippling them for decades, but the French pick themselves up and paid it off within a decade, much to their shock. Say what you will about the Frenchies, but they don't sit moping and feeling sorry about themselves after a defeat.
I'd say Alsace-Lorraine/Elsass-Lothringen was technically "German" land given that vast majority of the inhabitants at the time spoke some dialect of German (in fact, only 2% of Alsatians spoke French with acceptable fluency and only 8% had limited knowledge of French language).
Ahhh, that funny way of determining things that just gives powers the ability to lord over others. Reminds me of the Mennonites and Baltic Germans, who were "German" and yet had nothing to do with Germany, and were pushed and pulled around by Germany and the Soviet Union treated like fellow countrymen but also foreigners and deeply mistrusted.
Things like this make me think the "ownership is 9/10ths of the Law" take on things is better in the long run.
I mean how can you even argue this, Germany started another world war in 20 years and did really fucking well, does this look like a defeated state to you? With no army, navy and industry?
It shows what they could have done had they focused on rebuilding and moving on waiting for others to make a mistake, like France did after 1872. Instead they busted their asses rebuilding too quickly and burned themselves out at a rate that couldn't be sustained. Germany under Hitler had to go to war or they'd have economically collapsed in the early 40s.
The only reason they got so far was the unwillingness of the Allies to fight, they kept given ground until Germany was actually too strong to contain. WWII is a testament to how true
si vis pacem, para bellum is, and one that Europe is making the mistake of once more today.
