Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was the peace settlement between Germany and the Allied powers that formally ended World War I. It was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, five years to the day after the assassination in Sarajevo, and came into force on 10 January 1920. Its territorial losses, disarmament terms and reparations shaped European politics for the next two decades, and its fairness has been argued over ever since.

The fighting had ended with the armistice of 11 November 1918. The victors met in Paris from January 1919. Germany and the other defeated states were not invited to negotiate, and the main decisions were taken by the leaders of four powers: Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy and Woodrow Wilson of the United States. Their aims conflicted. France, which had suffered most on the Western Front, wanted security against a future German attack; Wilson hoped for a just peace based on his Fourteen Points and self-determination; Lloyd George sought a balance between the two. Germany was presented with the finished terms in May and signed under protest.

Germany lost about 65,000 square kilometres in Europe, with some seven million inhabitants. Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, and small districts went to Belgium. Most of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia went to the new Polish state, creating a corridor to the Baltic that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig became a free city under the League of Nations, and the Memel territory was detached. Plebiscites decided other borders, including northern Schleswig, which joined Denmark, and part of Upper Silesia, which went to Poland. The Saar coalfields were placed under League administration for fifteen years, with their output going to France. All German colonies were taken and became mandates under the League.

The German army was limited to 100,000 men, conscription was banned, and Germany was forbidden tanks, military aircraft and submarines, while its navy was reduced to a handful of ships. The Rhineland was to be occupied by Allied troops for up to fifteen years and permanently demilitarised.

Article 231 stated that Germany and its allies were responsible for the loss and damage caused by the war. It was meant as the legal basis for reparations, but in Germany it was read as a declaration of moral guilt and bitterly resented. The treaty left the total to a commission, which in 1921 fixed it at 132 billion gold marks, though a large share of that sum was widely understood never to be collected. The economist John Maynard Keynes attacked the settlement as ruinous in 1919, while some French leaders thought it too weak.

The first part of the treaty contained the Covenant of the League of Nations, Wilson's project for collective security. Yet the United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and the United States never joined the League, making a separate peace with Germany in 1921.

Many Germans saw the treaty as a dictated peace, and nationalist parties, above all the Nazis under Adolf Hitler, campaigned against it. During the 1930s Germany rearmed and remilitarised the Rhineland in breach of its terms. Historians today often argue that the treaty was neither as crushing as Keynes claimed nor strong enough to contain Germany, and that its enforcement mattered as much as its terms.

Our 1914 map shows the German Empire before the war, and our 1920 map shows Germany's reduced borders and the Polish corridor, alongside a restored Poland.