The Treaty of Versailles (1919) officially ended World War 1 between the Allies and Germany, which was defeated and hence declared by the victors to be totally responsible for the war.

Germany "totally responsible for WW1"? But this is what schoolchildren of many countries read in their textbooks of history:

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, were shot to death in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Slav terrorist. The goal was to break away from Austria-Hungary her southern Slav provinces so that they could be incorporated in a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia.

Let me note only the "military restrictions" of the Treaty:

The German armed forces cannot number more than 100,000 troops, and no conscription is allowed. Prohibited is the manufacture of weapons as well as their import. Prohibited are tanks, submarines, and military aircraft. Naval forces are limited to 15,000 men.

By 1928, Stalin was ending the period of permission of private enterprise in order to go over to "industrialization," that is, all-out industrial militarization. In the 1930s, his Red Square parades twice a year, with Western diplomats present, gave special prominence to tanks and military aircraft. Stalin wanted to scare Hitler out of his attack on Russia. As the Soviet song went:

Let our power be known
By our foes!

Hitler for his part wrote to Mussolini on the night of Hitler's invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, that he did not trust Stalin and wanted to preempt Stalin's attack on Germany (aimed at preempting Hitler's attack on Russia?).

I, a Russian up to the age of forty, do not believe that Stalin would have preempted Hitler. As a Russian I know that Stalin was a pathological coward, which Hitler did not know, since as a foreigner he perceived Stalin as a ruthless and hence fearless risk-taker, "Stahl-in," a man of steel, quite able to invade Germany in order to preempt Hitler's preemptive invasion of Russia.

What would have happened if Stalin had been brave enough to invade Germany? Was Stalin's army powerful enough to occupy the country? In my (Russian) opinion, the key event in Hitler's invasion of Russia was the encounter near Moscow early in December 1941 of his troops and the Soviet Siberian and Far Eastern troops, having new Soviet tanks and other new weapons. German troops began fleeing. Hitler arrived personally and turned their panicky flight into an orderly retreat. But he said that the war was lost. So Stalin's invasion would no doubt have been successful.

Incidentally, Hitler's defeat at Moscow in December 1941 made him suspect that from now on his subordinates would begin betraying him to the English-speaking to save their own skins! Hence he staged a "Blutkitt." When the chief of a gang feels that members of his gang may betray him to the police to save their own skins, he stages a Blutkitt, that is, makes them to commit a crime so heinous that they would not escape capital punishment despite their betrayal. Hitler's Blutkitt ("blood bond") was to make his subordinates annihilate millions of Jews (Hitler took into account the number and influence of Jews in the United States), while pretending that he had never even heard of such an atrocity.

Hitler's anti-Semitism? Evidence shows that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not a visceral hatred, but a public propaganda pose, which he discarded in his personal life. The doctor of the Hitlers was a Jew. The doctor described, after he arrived in the United States, how Hitler had sent his official to Austria to help the Jewish doctor and his family to emigrate from Austria (lest they got-God forbid!-into the Blutkitt!).

After Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party in the Reichstag received more votes than any other party and hence Hitler lawfully became the Reichchancellor, Theodore Abel, a sociologist from New York Columbia University, convinced the new Nazi authorities that nothing but good publicity would come from his German "essay contest," in which any German who had joined the Nazi Party before it came to power in 1933 could explain why he had done so. Abel published his book "Why Hitler Came to Power" in 1938, and it was reprinted in 1986.

Altogether, 600 veteran members of the Nazi Party submitted their "life histories." Most of them did not even mention anti-Semitism. Yet these were veteran Nazis who publicly volunteered their "life histories" in Hitler's Germany, and some of them no doubt wanted to show off their Nazi ardor. What can be said about more than 17 million voters who voted for Hitler's Party in elections by secret ballot?

On May 20,1928, Hitler's Party in the Reichstag received 810 thousand votes, and on March 5, 1933, the number exceeded 17 million votes. The most dangerous truth was that the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany defenseless, while Stalin's military power was growing. What would happen if Stalin occupied Germany? To begin with, private owners in private enterprise would be sent to Siberia as were their Soviet brethren-in-private-enterprise. Germany would soon be as collectivized, depersonalized, and reduced to abject poverty as Russia was.

But there was one German statesman who proclaimed that he would do away with the Treaty of Versailles! That statesman was Adolf Hitler, a former WW1 soldier who received officer's decorations for bravery. It is owing to his defiance of the Treaty of Versailles that the Reichstag vote for his Party grew between 1928 and 1933 (five years) more than 20 times. Hitler defended his voters' lives and property, endangered by the Treaty of Versailles.

Ironically, the Treaty seemed to have disappeared. Its authors had carefully penned all those "military restrictions" in 1919, making Germany defenseless, but as Hitler kept violating them, the Treaty seemed never to have existed.

In contrast to Germany of June 28, 1914, Hitler did launch WW2, which he lost with heavy human losses (including those of his Blutkitt) as well as material losses (including those that resulted from the Allied bombing of Germany) and Stalin did occupy Eastern Europe, including eastern Germany and part of Berlin. So the Hitler voters hardly gained anything from his advent to power. Yet, it was due to the Treaty of Versailles that they voted for him and brought him into power. Hitler's power, with his WW2 and with his Blutkitt, ascends to the Treaty of Versailles, composed not by villains, but by idiots like Lloyd George.