Treaty of Versailles
Signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — deliberately chosen to humiliate Germany in the same room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871 — the treaty formally ended the First World War. Article 231, the 'war guilt clause', compelled Germany to accept sole responsibility for the conflict and provided the legal basis for reparations ultimately set at 132 billion gold marks by the Reparations Commission in 1921, though the actual sum paid was far less. Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France, Eupen and Malmedy to Belgium, North Schleswig to Denmark (after a plebiscite), Posen and West Prussia to the new Poland, and Memel to Lithuania. The Rhineland was demilitarised and occupied. Germany was prohibited from maintaining an army above 100,000, a navy with capital ships, and any air force. The settlement reflected the competing priorities of Wilson (self-determination and a League of Nations), Clemenceau (security guarantees and reparations to rebuild France), and Lloyd George (electoral promises of punishment combined with private fears of a radicalized Germany). It satisfied none of them fully and was famously predicted by John Maynard Keynes to produce economic disaster in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The gap between what Germany was promised — a peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points — and what it received planted the specific resentments that German nationalist and Nazi politics would systematically exploit.
- Year: 1919 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
