11.4 — 1917–18, Versailles, and the Peace That Failed

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 — five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination — in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

The room was chosen deliberately. It is the room in which the German Empire had been proclaimed in January 1871, after France's defeat (Chapter 10.7). The French had waited forty-eight years.

The German delegation was not permitted to negotiate. They were shown the terms and given three weeks to submit written observations. When they objected, the reply was that the alternative was resumption of the war. The German press called it a Diktat.

How the war ended

Two things happened in 1917 and both changed everything.

Russia left. The Bolsheviks took power in November 1917 (Chapter 11.5) and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, surrendering Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and Finland — around a quarter of the former empire's population and a large share of its industry and agriculture.

The terms Germany imposed at Brest-Litovsk matter for judging Versailles, and they are routinely omitted from the argument: they were considerably harsher than anything imposed on Germany a year later.

And the United States joined, in April 1917, following unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram — an intercepted German proposal that Mexico attack the United States in exchange for recovering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

American entry did not decide the war immediately — it took a year to raise and ship an army — and it made the outcome arithmetically certain. Germany could not out-produce or out-recruit the United States, and it knew it.

So Germany gambled in the spring of 1918. Troops released from the east, using the stormtrooper tactics of Chapter 11.3, attacked before the Americans arrived in force. The offensives gained more ground than anything since 1914 and did not break through, and they exhausted the German army's best troops.

The Allied counter-offensive from August 1918 — the Hundred Days — pushed the German army back continuously. Its allies collapsed: Bulgaria in September, the Ottomans in October, Austria-Hungary in November.

Ludendorff told the German government in late September that an armistice was needed immediately.

The armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918.

The stab in the back

This is the most consequential falsehood of the twentieth century and it should be described precisely.

When the war ended, no Allied soldier stood on German soil. German armies were still in France and Belgium. The German public had been fed victory reports throughout, and censorship had concealed the collapse.

And the armistice was requested by the army and signed by civilians. Ludendorff and Hindenburg pressed for it, and then arranged for a new civilian government to take responsibility for signing it — a deliberate transfer of blame that Ludendorff later effectively admitted.

So a population that believed its army undefeated saw civilian politicians — disproportionately identified in the propaganda as socialists and Jews — sign a surrender.

The Dolchstoßlegende — the stab-in-the-back legend — held that the army had been betrayed by the home front.

It was false. The army had been beaten in the field and its commanders knew it. Hindenburg himself gave evidence to a Reichstag inquiry endorsing the legend, which gave it enormous authority.

And it became the foundation of Nazi politics (Chapter 11.6). Hitler used it in every major speech. The "November criminals" were the politicians who had signed.

The lesson is a general one about information. A population lied to about the course of a war will not accept the outcome of it, and the cost of that lie was paid twenty years later.

What the treaty contained

Territorial. Alsace-Lorraine to France. Eupen-Malmedy to Belgium. North Schleswig to Denmark after a plebiscite. West Prussia and Posen to the new Poland — creating the Polish Corridor, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig a free city under League administration. The Saar under League administration for fifteen years with its coal to France. All colonies confiscated and distributed as League mandates.

Germany lost around 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population.

Military. Army limited to 100,000 men with no conscription. No tanks, no military aircraft, no submarines. Navy limited to a handful of obsolete ships. The Rhineland permanently demilitarised and occupied for fifteen years. The General Staff abolished.

Reparations. Article 231 required Germany to accept responsibility for causing the loss and damage. The sum was fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks, though the structure was such that the amount actually expected was substantially less — a distinction that was not communicated and that had no effect on German opinion.

And Article 231 was drafted by American lawyers as a legal basis for the reparations claim rather than as a moral verdict. In Germany it was universally read as a war-guilt clause and it became the single most resented provision.

The League of Nations was created by the treaty, and the United States Senate refused to ratify, so the organisation designed by an American president operated without American membership.

Keynes

John Maynard Keynes attended as a British Treasury official, resigned in protest, and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919.

His argument. The reparations were beyond Germany's capacity to pay. Germany's ability to pay depended on its ability to export, and the treaty had taken its coal, its merchant fleet and its colonies while the victors erected tariffs against its goods. Europe's economies were interdependent, so impoverishing Germany impoverished everyone. And a peace that humiliated a great power would produce a demand for revision.

The book was a bestseller and it shaped opinion, particularly in Britain and the United States, toward the view that the treaty was unjust — which contributed materially to the reluctance to enforce it in the 1930s (Chapter 11.6).

And the modern assessment is mixed. The economic historian Sally Marks and others have argued that Germany's payments were substantially lower than the headline figure, that Germany paid less than it could have, and that its 1920s economic problems owed more to its own fiscal choices, including the deliberate non-collection of taxes and the hyperinflation of 1923 (Chapter 9.8), than to reparations.

The political effect was real regardless of the economics. Reparations were a permanent grievance, and every German government sought revision.

The map that was drawn

Four empires ended: German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian.

Woodrow Wilson's principle was self-determination — that peoples should choose their own governments — and it was applied selectively and could not be applied cleanly.

Central Europe's populations were mixed. Any border drawn leaves minorities on the wrong side. Czechoslovakia contained around three million German speakers in the Sudetenland; Poland contained Germans and Ukrainians; Yugoslavia combined Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and others with distinct histories.

And self-determination was not applied to the colonies. The German and Ottoman territories became League of Nations mandates, administered by Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, Australia and South Africa — which is colonial rule with a supervisory paragraph.

This was noticed immediately. Delegations from Egypt, Korea, China and Vietnam came to Paris seeking a hearing and were refused or ignored. A young Vietnamese man working in Paris submitted a petition for Vietnamese rights under French rule; he later took the name Ho Chi Minh. The historian Erez Manela has documented what he calls the Wilsonian moment: the raising of expectations across the colonial world and their immediate disappointment, which radicalised a generation of nationalists — including in India, where the same year produced Jallianwala Bagh (Chapter 6.21).

China's case is the sharpest. China had entered the war on the Allied side and sent around 140,000 labourers to France. The treaty transferred German concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China. The news produced the May Fourth Movement of 1919 — mass student protests that are the founding moment of modern Chinese nationalism and, indirectly, of the Chinese Communist Party.

Could it have been different

The two alternatives available, and their problems.

A Carthaginian peace — occupation, dismemberment, permanent disarmament. Marshal Foch, on seeing the terms, said it was not peace but an armistice for twenty years. He was out by 65 days. His view was that the treaty was too soft, not too harsh.

A conciliatory peace — the Vienna model of 1815 (Chapter 10.4), in which the defeated power is restored to the community of nations without permanent humiliation.

The treaty was neither. It was harsh enough to enrage and not harsh enough to disable. That is the standard verdict and it is a fair one.

And the deeper problem was enforcement. The treaty depended on France and Britain being willing to enforce it, and within a few years neither was. The United States had withdrawn, Britain had concluded the terms were unjust, and France alone could not act — its 1923 occupation of the Ruhr over a missed delivery produced the German hyperinflation (Chapter 9.8) and international condemnation, and France did not try again.

A treaty nobody will enforce is a piece of paper, and Chapter 11.6 shows exactly that being demonstrated between 1935 and 1939.

Where this shows up in your life

The borders of central Europe and the Middle East (Chapter 12.5).

The United Nations was designed explicitly to avoid the League's failures — great power membership guaranteed by permanent Security Council seats, and enforcement mechanisms, however imperfect (Chapter 13.7).

And the post-1945 treatment of Germany and Japan was deliberately the opposite — occupation, reconstruction, integration and Marshall Aid rather than reparations — and that decision was taken with 1919 explicitly in mind (Chapter 12.1). It is one of the clearest cases in this volume of a lesson actually being learned.

What the next page covers

Russia left the war because it had a revolution. Chapter 11.5 covers the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment — why the Tsarist system collapsed, how a small party took power in a country of 140 million, what the civil war and War Communism did, what Stalin's industrialisation and collectivisation achieved and cost, the famine, the purges, and the honest assessment of a system that turned a peasant empire into a superpower in thirty years by methods that killed millions of its own people.