Treaty of Versailles (1919): The Peace That Ended World War I

The Treaty of Versailles was the peace treaty between Germany and the Allied powers that formally ended the First World War. Signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles near Paris, it took away German territory and colonies, limited the German armed forces, required reparations and declared Germany responsible for the war’s damage. It created the League of Nations, redrew the map of Europe and remains one of the most debated treaties in modern history.

Background

The fighting ended with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, after Germany’s armies had been driven back in the Hundred Days Offensive and revolution had swept away the Kaiser. Germany had asked for an armistice on the basis of US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, which promised open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, reduced armaments, self-determination for peoples and a league of nations.

The victors met at the Paris Peace Conference, which opened on 18 January 1919. Representatives of some 30 countries attended, but the key decisions were taken by the leaders of the four main Allied powers: Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain, Woodrow Wilson of the United States and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy. The defeated powers were not invited to negotiate. Separate treaties were later made with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.

The negotiations

The “Big Four” had very different aims. France, which had lost about 1.4 million soldiers and seen its north-east devastated, wanted security against a future German attack, reparations, and the return of Alsace-Lorraine. Clemenceau also pressed for the Rhineland to be separated from Germany. Lloyd George, who had just won an election in which many candidates promised to make Germany pay, wanted compensation and the end of German naval and colonial power, but also feared that an overly harsh peace would leave Germany embittered and push it towards Bolshevism.

Wilson put his hopes in the League of Nations and in self-determination, though he accepted compromises in order to secure the League. Orlando sought the territory promised to Italy by the 1915 Treaty of London and the port of Fiume; when he did not get it, he briefly walked out of the conference in April. The final treaty was a compromise between these positions, satisfying none of the leaders fully.

Terms of the treaty

The treaty, with 440 articles, was presented to a German delegation led by Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau on 7 May 1919. Its main provisions were:

Territory in Europe. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France. Eupen-Malmedy went to Belgium. Most of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia went to the restored state of Poland, creating the “Polish Corridor” that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig became a Free City under League of Nations protection, and Memel was placed under Allied control. Plebiscites were to decide the future of northern Schleswig, parts of East Prussia and Upper Silesia. The coal-rich Saar was put under League administration for 15 years, with its mines given to France. Union between Germany and Austria was forbidden.

Colonies. Germany lost all its overseas colonies, which were distributed as League of Nations mandates, mainly to Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Germany’s rights in the Chinese province of Shandong passed to Japan.

Disarmament. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, and conscription was banned. Germany could have no tanks, heavy artillery, military aircraft or submarines, and its navy was restricted to six obsolete battleships and a few smaller ships. The Rhineland was to be permanently demilitarised and occupied by Allied troops for up to 15 years.

War guilt and reparations. Article 231 stated that Germany and its allies accepted responsibility for causing all the loss and damage suffered by the Allies as a result of the war. On this basis Germany was required to pay reparations, with the total to be fixed later by a commission. Article 227 called for the former Kaiser, Wilhelm II, to be tried, but the Netherlands, where he lived in exile, refused to hand him over.

The League of Nations. The first part of the treaty contained the Covenant of the League of Nations, the new international organisation intended to keep the peace.

Signing the treaty

The German government protested that the terms broke the spirit of the Fourteen Points and called the treaty a Diktat, a dictated peace. The Allies made only limited changes, including a plebiscite for Upper Silesia, and on 16 June gave Germany an ultimatum to sign or face renewed war. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than accept it. On 21 June the interned German fleet was scuttled by its own crews at Scapa Flow, and on 23 June the German National Assembly voted to accept the treaty.

On 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the German representatives Hermann Müller and Johannes Bell signed the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors, where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. The treaty came into force on 10 January 1920.

By the numbers

Reaction and consequences

In Germany, almost every party condemned the treaty, and many people believed, wrongly, that the army had not been defeated in the field but “stabbed in the back” by politicians at home. The new Weimar Republic was blamed for accepting the treaty, and its enemies on the right used it as a weapon against democracy.

Elsewhere the treaty was also criticised. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, who resigned from the British delegation, argued in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) that the reparations were economically unworkable; his book was widely influential, especially in Britain and the United States. In America, the Senate twice refused to ratify the treaty, mainly over the League Covenant, and the United States never joined the League of Nations. China refused to sign because of the decision over Shandong, which sparked protests at home.

Enforcement soon became a central issue. When Germany defaulted on reparations deliveries, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in 1923, contributing to the crisis of German hyperinflation. Reparations were then rescheduled under the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Young Plan of 1929, and were effectively cancelled at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. After Adolf Hitler came to power, Germany openly broke the military clauses, announcing rearmament and conscription in 1935 and sending troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936, without effective response from Britain or France.

Myths and facts

Myth: the treaty was the harshest peace in history. It was severe, but Germany remained intact as a large, united industrial state, larger than France in population. Historians often compare it with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that Germany imposed on Russia in March 1918, which took far more territory and population.

Myth: reparations bankrupted Germany and directly caused hyperinflation. Reparations were a heavy political and financial burden, but most economists and historians now attribute the 1923 hyperinflation mainly to wartime borrowing and post-war government monetary policy, worsened by the Ruhr occupation, rather than to reparations alone.

Myth: the treaty made World War II inevitable. German resentment of Versailles helped the Nazis, but the treaty was revised repeatedly in the 1920s. The Great Depression, the failure of the Allies to enforce or revise the settlement consistently, and Hitler’s own aims were all crucial. A remark attributed to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, that the treaty was not a peace but an armistice for twenty years, is often quoted with hindsight.

Legacy

For much of the 20th century the Treaty of Versailles was widely seen as a failure: too harsh to reconcile Germany, too weak to restrain it. Since the 1970s, historians, and more recently writers such as Margaret MacMillan and Alan Sharp, have offered a more balanced view, stressing the enormous difficulty of making peace after a war of unprecedented destruction, the pressures of public opinion in the victorious democracies, and the fact that later leaders chose not to uphold it.

The treaty’s ideas also outlived it. The League of Nations was the first attempt at a permanent global organisation for peace and the forerunner of the United Nations. The mandate system, the principle of self-determination and the new borders of central and eastern Europe shaped international politics for decades.

Timeline

• 1918, 8 January: Woodrow Wilson announces his Fourteen Points.
• 1918, 11 November: The Armistice ends the fighting on the Western Front.
• 1919, 18 January: The Paris Peace Conference opens.
• 1919, 7 May: The draft treaty is presented to the German delegation.
• 1919, 21 June: The German fleet is scuttled at Scapa Flow.
• 1919, 23 June: The German National Assembly votes to accept the treaty.
• 1919, 28 June: The treaty is signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
• 1920, 10 January: The treaty comes into force; the League of Nations is established.
• 1921, May: The London Schedule of Payments sets reparations at 132 billion gold marks.
• 1936, 7 March: German troops reoccupy the demilitarised Rhineland.

Why it matters

The Treaty of Versailles set the terms on which Europe tried to rebuild after the First World War. It redrew borders, created new states, launched the League of Nations and attempted to hold Germany responsible for the war. Its successes and failures, and the bitter arguments it provoked, shaped the troubled two decades that led to the Second World War and still inform debates about how wars should end.