Editing Treaty of Versailles (section)

===Military terms and violations===
During the formulation of the treaty, the British wanted Germany to abolish conscription but be allowed to maintain a volunteer Army. The French wanted Germany to maintain a conscript army of up to 200,000 men in order to justify their own maintenance of a similar force. Thus the treaty's allowance of 100,000 volunteers was a compromise between the British and French positions. Germany, on the other hand, saw the terms as leaving them defenseless against any potential enemy.{{sfn|Schmitt|1960|pp=104–105}}
Bernadotte Everly Schmitt wrote that "there is no reason to believe that the Allied governments were insincere when they stated at the beginning of Part V of the Treaty ... that in order to facilitate a general reduction of the armament of all nations, Germany was to be required to disarm first." A lack of American ratification of the treaty or joining the League of Nations left France unwilling to disarm, which resulted in a German desire to rearm.{{sfn|Schmitt|1960|p=104}} Schmitt argued "had the four Allies remained united, they could have forced Germany really to disarm, and the German will and capacity to resist other provisions of the treaty would have correspondingly diminished."{{sfn|Schmitt|1960|p=108}}

Max Hantke and Mark Spoerer wrote "military and economic historians [have] found that the German military only insignificantly exceeded the limits" of the treaty before 1933.{{sfn|Hantke|Spoerer|2010|p=852}} [[Adam Tooze]] concurred, and wrote "To put this in perspective, annual military spending by the Weimar Republic was counted not in the billions but in the hundreds of millions of ''Reichsmarks''"; for example, the Weimar Republic's 1931 program of 480&nbsp;million ''Reichsmarks'' over five years compared to the Nazi Government's 1933 plan to spend 4.4&nbsp;billion ''Reichsmarks'' per year.{{sfn|Tooze|2007|pp=26, 53–54}}
P. M. H. Bell argued that the British Government was aware of later Weimar rearming, and lent public respectability to the German efforts by not opposing them,{{sfn|Bell|1997|p=229}} an opinion shared by Churchill.{{Citation needed|date=January 2021}}
[[Norman Davies]] wrote that "a curious oversight" of the military restrictions were that they "did not include rockets in its list of prohibited weapons", which provided [[Wernher von Braun]] an area to research within eventually resulting in "his break [that] came in 1943" leading to the development of the [[V-2 rocket]].{{sfn|Davies|2007|p=416}}