Treaty of Versailles

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaty of Versailles was signed on the 28th of June 1919, exactly five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that had ignited the war it was meant to end. The hall chosen for the signing was the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. That choice was not accidental. In 1871, after the German siege of Paris, the Second German Empire had been proclaimed in that very room. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau consciously chose it to ensure that the German Empire would be dismantled in the same space where it had come into being. The moment was saturated with historical memory, and the weight of that memory would follow the treaty for decades. What did this peace actually require of Germany? How did the nations who crafted it disagree with one another? And why did a document intended to end one world war help ignite another? The answers lie in the fractured goals of the men who built it, the punishing terms they imposed, and the bitter reactions of every nation touched by it.

• 2. The War That Produced the Peace

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  War broke out following the July Crisis in 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia on the 1st of August, and on Belgium and France on the 3rd of August. Britain declared war on Germany on the 4th of August after the German invasion of Belgium, and the conflict that would become the First World War took shape around two alliances: the Central Powers, led by Germany, and the Triple Entente, led by Britain, France, and Russia. Russia's withdrawal was a turning point. After the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the Kerensky government, the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic under Vladimir Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, a surrender highly favourable to Germany. Sensing that American forces were not yet ready, Germany shifted troops to the Western Front to attempt a decisive blow. It failed. The Allies won decisively on the battlefield, overwhelmed Germany's Turkish, Austrian, and Bulgarian partners, and forced an armistice in November 1918 that, in its terms and conditions, already resembled a surrender. Many provisions that would later draw criticism in the final treaty, including the German evacuation of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine, the surrender of vast quantities of war materiel, and an agreed payment of "reparation for damage done," were already embedded in the armistice agreement signed on the 11th of November 1918.

• 3. Blockade and Starvation

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  While diplomats assembled in Paris, the naval blockade of Germany remained in force. The Blockade of Germany was a naval operation the Allied Powers had conducted to cut off raw materials and foodstuffs reaching the Central Powers. The German Board of Public Health stated in December 1918 that 763,000 German civilians had died during the blockade, though an academic study in 1928 put the death toll at 424,000 people. The blockade was maintained for eight months after the armistice, well into 1919, and foodstuffs into Germany remained under Allied control until Germany signed the treaty in June of that year. In March 1919, Winston Churchill informed the House of Commons that the ongoing blockade was a success and that "Germany is very near starvation." From January 1919 to March 1919, Germany refused Allied demands to surrender its merchant ships so that food could be transported. Some Germans considered the armistice a temporary cessation of hostilities and feared their ships would simply be seized if fighting resumed. Over that winter the situation grew desperate, and Germany finally agreed to hand over its fleet in March. The Allies then allowed 270,000 tons of foodstuffs to enter. Max Rubner estimated that 100,000 German civilians died as a result of the continuation of the blockade after the armistice. Labour Party member Robert Smillie issued a statement in June 1919 condemning the blockade's continuation, citing the same figure.

• 4. The Negotiators and Their Goals

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  Talks between the Allied powers to establish a common negotiating position began on the 18th of January 1919 in the Salle de l'Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay. Initially 70 delegates from 27 nations participated. Russia was excluded for having signed a separate peace; Germany was excluded to deny it any opportunity to divide the Allies diplomatically. The real decisions were made by a much smaller group. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and United States President Woodrow Wilson formed the "Big Four," who met in 145 closed sessions. France had lost 1.3 million soldiers, including 25 percent of French men aged 18 to 30, plus 400,000 civilians, and its most industrialised region had been devastated. Clemenceau intended to weaken Germany economically, militarily, and territorially. As economist John Maynard Keynes, himself a Versailles negotiator, summarized it, Clemenceau aimed to "set the clock back and undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had accomplished." Britain's Lloyd George privately opposed revenge and sought a compromise, partly because he wanted Germany to remain a viable trading partner and a counterweight both to French dominance and to Bolshevik Russia. Wilson's Fourteen Points, delivered on the 8th of January 1918, had outlined free trade, open agreements, self-determination, and the creation of a League of Nations. His advisors had been drawn from a team of about 150 specialists known as the Inquiry, led by Edward M. House. Wilson firmly opposed harsh treatment of Germany, though he made a notable exception when he agreed to transfer the former German colony of Shandong in eastern China to Japan rather than return it to China, partly to prevent Japan from refusing to join the League of Nations.

• 5. The Terms Imposed

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  Article 231 of the treaty, which became known as the "War Guilt" clause, required Germany to accept responsibility "for causing all the loss and damage" suffered by the Allied governments "as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." The treaty stripped Germany of 25,000 square miles of territory and 7 million people. Germany was required to recognize the independence of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other states formed from former imperial territory. It had to cede control of the Saar coalmines to France and the Saar region to the League of Nations for 15 years, after which a plebiscite would decide sovereignty. Alsace-Lorraine was restored to France. Pomerelia, on historical and ethnic grounds, was transferred to Poland to give the new state access to the sea, creating what became known as the Polish Corridor. The German army was to be reduced to no more than 100,000 men by the 31st of March 1920, the General Staff dissolved, and conscription abolished. The navy was limited to six pre-dreadnought battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve torpedo boats, with manpower capped at 15,000 men. Germany was forbidden submarines entirely. Article 198 prohibited Germany from maintaining an air force of any kind. Germany was required to pay an initial sum equivalent to 20 billion gold marks while a Reparation Commission determined the final total, with Germany permitted to pay in cash or kind, including coal, timber, livestock, pharmaceuticals, and factory machinery. Article 227 required the handing over of Kaiser Wilhelm for trial before a bench of five Allied judges for what it described as a "supreme offence against international treaties," a provision that all parties understood was unlikely to be carried out since the Kaiser had taken refuge in the Netherlands.

• 6. How Each Nation Reacted

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  German Foreign Minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau arrived in Versailles on the 29th of April to receive the treaty terms. On the 7th of May, facing the so-called War Guilt clause, he told Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George: "We can sense the full force of hatred that confronts us here.... You demand from us to confess we were the only guilty party of war; such a confession in my mouth would be a lie." Germany's first democratically elected head of government, Philipp Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign. In an address to the Weimar National Assembly on the 12th of May 1919 he called the treaty a "horrific and murderous witch's hammer," exclaiming: "Which hand would not shrivel, that shackled itself and us in such a way?" The National Assembly ultimately voted 237 to 138 to accept the treaty, wiring the result to Clemenceau hours before the deadline. Outside the Palace of Versailles, the signing was met with roars of approval, singing, and dancing. In Paris, crowds rejoiced at the return of Alsace and Lorraine. But French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who criticized the treaty for failing to annex the Rhineland, stated: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." When Clemenceau stood for election as President of France in January 1920, he was defeated. In Italy, reaction was extremely negative. Orlando suffered a nervous collapse, walked out of the conference at one point, and lost the prime ministership just a week before the signing, effectively ending his active political career. Anger over the treaty's provisions helped pave the way for Benito Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship three years later. China's delegation, led by Wellington Koo, was the only national delegation that refused to sign the treaty at the ceremony, outraged that German concessions in Shandong had been handed to Japan. The sense of betrayal fuelled the May 4th movement. In the United States, Wilson claimed after Versailles that "at last the world knows America as the savior of the world," but the Republican-controlled Senate never ratified the treaty. Wilson collapsed during a nationwide speaking tour with a serious stroke. Congress passed the Knox-Porter Resolution to formally end hostilities, which was signed into law by President Warren G. Harding on the 2nd of July 1921.

• 7. Reparations, Defaults, and Aftermath

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  On the 5th of May 1921, the Reparation Commission established the London Schedule of Payments at a headline figure of 132 billion gold marks from all Central Powers combined. The genuine Commission assessment of what Germany alone could pay was 50 billion gold marks; the larger number was publicly presented to satisfy Allied publics. Germany made only one full cash payment under the unamended schedule, in June 1921, of 1 billion gold marks. In December 1922 Germany was declared in default of timber deliveries by a 3-to-1 vote of the Reparations Commission. On the 9th of January 1923, after Germany had defaulted on coal deliveries for the thirty-fourth time in thirty-six months, French and Belgian forces occupied the Ruhr coalfields on the 11th of January 1923. The German government responded with "passive resistance," and coal miners and railway workers refused instructions from the occupation force. The financial consequences, including the payment in paper currency of striking workers by the German government, contributed to the hyperinflation that gripped Germany from late 1921 to 1924. The Dawes Plan reorganized reparations and led to the withdrawal of French and Belgian troops from the Ruhr in 1925. Regular payments resumed in late 1924 and continued until July 1931, when they were suspended under a proposal by Herbert Hoover because of the Great Depression. The government of Adolf Hitler cancelled all further payments in 1933. Germany finally paid off its debts under the Versailles treaty, reduced by 50 percent at the 1953 London Debt Conference, in 2010. John Maynard Keynes had styled the treaty as a "Carthaginian peace," and bitter resentment of its terms powered the rise of the Nazi Party and eventually contributed to the outbreak of a second world war, fulfilling Foch's prophecy almost to the year.