More like the foundation. Da'ah.
... Germany's position of being in rubble was a prominent place for an extreme nationalist to rise to power. I think it's hard to disagree with that. Although please do expand on my knowledge if there was another fundamental reason for WWII; I understand that other factors had influence on the Great War's continuation, but I see the other factors as being secondary and the primary one that Germany had experienced a massive national trauma violently forced onto them by the Allies.
The national trauma wasn't "forced" on anybody; if anybody inflicted a trauma, it was the Germans that inflicted it on themselves, or rather
some Germans that inflicted it on the rest of the Germans.
To be sure, the peace that was made at Versailles was a bad peace. But it was a significantly more effective peace than the one made at Potsdam and other places in 1945, and most importantly, it only contained "the seeds of its own destruction"; somebody else had to plant those seeds. The Versailles system was kept up fairly reasonably effectively, especially with respect to Germany, for about a decade. The peace of Potsdam broke down within two years.
Peace isn't a natural state of being any more than war is. States have to make an effort to maintain peace arguably more than they do to maintain a state of war. That diminishes the relative importance of
specific treaties and increases the relative importance of
systems that grow up around the peace created by those treaties. Versailles was a bad peace that was converted into a reasonably decent peace for awhile, then was not kept up; Potsdam was a bad peace that was not kept up at all.
More to the point, the specific terms of the Treaty of Versailles were not what fired German revanchism. The fact that Germany had been defeated at all was the true problem. Much like France after 1871, Germany was going to resent its position to some degree regardless of the terms inflicted upon it. The fact that these terms were inflicted in a particularly humiliating and - considering the actions of the British - genocidal way merely added fuel to a fire that was already going.
The reason that some countries have ended age-old animosities and ceased to pursue them as revenge for humiliations inflicted in war has little to do with whether a peace is good or bad. France ended its conflict with Britain in 1815, despite a few hiccups along the way, not because the Vienna peace was a good peace, but because the French ceased to view their relationship with Britain as a conflict and more as a rivalry. There was no particular reason why they should have done this instead of redoubling their efforts to defeat
la perfide Albion. The poor behavior of British, Prussian, and Russian troops in the occupation of France up to 1818 would have provided ample fodder for French nationalistic hatred. Similarly, the occupying Russians, British, and Americans did not exactly cover themselves in glory after 1945, and the peace that they created then was objectively bad, especially with respect to Germany (a final settlement on Germany took
forty-five years to figure out, and required the collapse of the Soviet empire to put into place). The Cold War was a greater humiliation than the relatively benign occupation of the Rhineland or France and Belgium's occupation of the Ruhr, but one caused the Germans to effectively give up an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy, and the other caused them merely to redirect it temporarily.
If the distinction of whether a given peace is good or bad has little effect on the countries involved and their willingness to continue to make war, so does the effect of superior firepower. By any calculation, the Western Allies at the end of 1918 dwarfed German military capabilities. That was as clear a peace by superior firepower as any in history save perhaps the Second World War. Yet the myth of the German military's invincibility persisted in Germany anyway. By comparison, France was
not militarily crushed in 1815, and certainly not after 1818; within a decade, the French army was once again one of the greatest in Europe, depending on where you stand with respect to the military reforms of Nikolai I. And yet France did not use that army aggressively until internal revolution - an internal revolution unconnected with the peace settlement of Vienna - brought down the government in 1848. Peace with Japan in 1945 was made much as it had been with Germany in 1918, with roughly the same amount of superior firepower, but that peace endured while the German peace collapsed. Clearly, relative strength is no more decisive than a good treaty.