The Treaty of Versailles

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 455.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. Although the armistice signed on 11 November 1918 ended the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty.

Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial, required Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. The total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks in 1921 which is roughly equivalent to US$ 382 billion in 2010, a sum that many economists at the time deemed to be excessive because it would have taken Germany until 1988 to pay.

Millions of Germans were placed under foreign rule in a hostile environment, where harassment and violation of rights by authorities are documented.

Germans of all political shades denounced the treaty—particularly the provision that blamed Germany for starting the war—as an insult to the nation's honor.

The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition, are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. After Germany's defeat in World War II, payment of the reparations was not resumed.

In the 1930s the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany. In 1933 the party's leader Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor and became known as der Führer. He promised to take revenge on the countries that had defeated Germany in the First World War and make Germany the most powerful country in the world. He also claimed that only Germans were the true race and wanted to get rid of Jews, Communists and other weaker people.

On Nazi Germany's rise to power, Adolf Hitler resolved to overturn the remaining military and territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Military buildup began almost immediately in direct defiance of the Treaty, which, by then, had been destroyed by Hitler in front of a cheering crowd.

Germany was not pacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. This would prove to be a factor leading to later conflicts, notably and directly to the Second World War.