World History (Grade 10)

World War I (Part 2)

Treaty of Versailles, peace document signed at the end of World War I by

the Allied and associated powers and by Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in
the Palace of Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919; it took force on January
10, 1920.

The Paris Peace Conference

When the German government asked U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson to

arrange a general armistice in October 1918, it declared that it accepted
the Fourteen Points that he had formulated and presented to the U.S.
Congress in January 1918 as the basis for a just peace. However, the
Allies demanded “compensation by Germany for all damage done to the
civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of
Germany by land, by sea and from the air.”

Further, the nine points covering new territorial consignments were

complicated by the secret treaties that England, France, and Italy had
made with Greece, Romania, and each other during the last years of the
war.

The treaty was drafted in the spring of 1919 during the Paris Peace
Conference, which was conducted even as the world was in the grip of
the influenza pandemic of 1918–19.

The conference was dominated by the national leaders known as the “Big
Four”—David Lloyd George, the prime minister of the United
Kingdom; Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France; Woodrow
Wilson, the president of the United States; and Vittorio Orlando, the prime
minister of Italy.

The first three in particular made the important decisions. None of the
defeated nations had any say in shaping the treaty, and even the
associated Allied powers played only a minor role. The German delegates
were presented with a fait accompli. They were shocked at the severity of
the terms and protested the contradictions between the assurances made
when the armistice was negotiated and the actual treaty. Accepting the
“war guilt” clause and the reparation terms was especially odious to them.

The population and territory of Germany was reduced by about 10 percent

by the treaty. In the west, Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France,
and the Saarland was placed under the supervision of the League of
Nations until 1935.

In the north, three small areas were given to Belgium, and, after
a plebiscite in Schleswig, northern Schleswig was returned to Denmark.

In the east, Poland was resurrected, given most of formerly German West
Prussia and Poznań (Posen), given a “corridor” to the Baltic Sea (which
separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany), and given part of Upper
Silesia after a plebiscite. Gdańsk (Danzig) was declared a free city.

All Germany’s overseas colonies in China, in the Pacific, and in Africa were
taken over by Britain, France, Japan, and other Allied nations (mandate).

German reparations and military limitations

The war guilt clause of the treaty deemed Germany the aggressor in the
war and consequently made Germany responsible for
making reparations to the Allied nations in payment for the losses and
damage they had sustained in the war. It was impossible to compute the
exact sum to be paid as reparations for the damage caused by the
Germans, especially in France and Belgium, at the time the treaty was
being drafted, but a commission that assessed the losses incurred by the
civilian population set an amount of $33 billion in 1921. Although
economists at the time declared that such a huge sum could never be
collected without upsetting international finances, the Allies insisted that
Germany be made to pay, and the treaty permitted them to take punitive
actions if Germany fell behind in its payments.

The Big Four, especially Clemenceau, wanted to make sure that Germany
would never again pose a military threat to the rest of Europe, and the
treaty contained a number of stipulations to guarantee this aim. The
German army was restricted to 100,000 men; the general staff was
eliminated; the manufacture of armoured cars, tanks, submarines,
airplanes, and poison gas was forbidden; and only a small number of
specified factories could make weapons or munitions. All of Germany west
of the Rhine and up to 30 miles (50 km) east of it was to be a demilitarized
zone. The forced disarmament of Germany, it was hoped, would be
accompanied by voluntary disarmament in other nations.

The Covenant of the League of Nations

The treaty included the Covenant of the League of Nations, in which

members guaranteed each other’s independence and territorial integrity.
Wilson had been convinced that no lasting peace would be possible unless
an international organization came into existence, and he chaired the
commission that drew up the Covenant, a short and concise document of
26 articles that was unanimously adopted at the conference on April 28,
1919. Under its terms economic sanctions would be applied against any
member who resorted to war. The league was to
supervise mandated territories, the occupied Saar Basin, and Danzig and
to formulate plans for reducing armaments. The treaty also established the
Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Labour
Organisation. Ironically, the effectiveness of the league was dramatically
undermined by the U.S. Senate’s decision in March 1920 not to approve
American involvement in the organization, an action that came in spite of
Wilson’s tireless campaign to win support for U.S. participation.

German resentment

The final version of the Treaty of Versailles was presented to a German

delegation on May 7, 1919, and signed, after their remonstrances, on June
28. (The Treaties of Saint-Germain and Neuilly provided the Allied terms for
peace with Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, respectively.) It was bitterly
criticized by the Germans, who complained that it had been “dictated” to
them, that it violated the spirit of the Fourteen Points, and that it demanded
intolerable sacrifices that would wreck their economy. In the years after it
was ratified, the Treaty of Versailles was revised and altered, mostly in
Germany’s favour. Numerous concessions were made to Germany before
the rise of Adolf Hitler, and by 1938 only the territorial settlement articles
remained.

Many historians claim that the combination of a harsh treaty and

subsequent lax enforcement of its provisions paved the way for the
upsurge of German militarism in the 1930s. The huge German reparations
and the war guilt clause fostered deep resentment of the settlement in
Germany, and, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 (a violation
of the treaty), the Allies did nothing to stop him, thus encouraging future
German aggression.