Treaty of Versailles

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The entire Treaty of Versailles amounted to fifteen parts and 440 articles. It was one of five treaties written up as a part of the Peace of Paris, dealing with each of the defeated powers—in 1919, besides Germany, the independent states of Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey. The Treaty of Versailles was by far the most important of these treaties, because it dealt with the fate of the most significant of the defeated powers and it established the League of Nations Covenant in its first section. In Part XIII, the new League established the International Labour Organization to counteract the appeal of Soviet Communism.

Those sections of the treaty excerpted here were the sections that caused the most offense to the new German republic and became the focus of contention in European diplomacy. In other sections, Germany's African, Chinese, and Pacific colonies were given away; its prisoners of war were sent home; financial and trade agreements were put into place or renewed; and German airspace and waterways were opened to international traffic. One interesting part of the full treaty was Part VII, in which the Allies made a confused and uncertain bid to put Kaiser Wilhelm II and several other German conductors of the war on trial for crimes against humanity. The language made it into the treaty, yet there was reluctance to define just what a war crime constituted, since it opened up the Allies to a number of charges of hypocrisy. In the end, the Dutch government's refusal to give up Wilhelm for trial once he settled there in exile scuttled the concept, to the relief of many of the treaty's authors.

Part II

The borders that the treaty laid out for Germany meant that the German nation-state lost territory to Belgium and that the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, which were not unexpected revisions. In the south, three million German speakers in the Sudetenland aspired, like the new territory of Austria, to join postwar Germany, but the Allies insisted that Austria be an independent state and, in Article 27.6, that the Sudetenland remain a part of Bohemia in the new Czechoslovakia. The east saw the most devastating territorial restructuring. The new nation-state of Poland was given a “corridor” to the Baltic Sea, cutting off East Prussia from the rest of the German state. Three million people were removed from German sovereignty, though by the important standard of national self-determination that the conference emphasized, most of those three million people were not of German ethnicity. That hardly mattered to the German government and people, who were humiliated at having East Prussia—home of the Junker aristocracy that had been responsible for uniting the German nation between 1864 and 1871—cut off from the rest of Germany.

Part III

The third part of the treaty gave the French the ability to access German territory in order to maintain French security. In Section III, the Rhineland, which ran between the French and Belgian borders and the Rhine River, was to remain without fortifications or troops, such that, should another war take place between France, Belgium, and Germany, the French and Belgians would be able to occupy German territory before any German army could invade. Section IV gave over the profits of the coal mines in the Rhineland's Saar basin to France for fifteen years.

Part V

If Part III was meant to keep Germany from launching a surprise invasion of its western neighbors, Part V sought to make the German state all but indefensible. Article 160 reduced the size of the German army—numbering some three or four million men at its height during the war—to a mere hundred thousand men in seven divisions, allowed only to maintain Germany's internal order. Limits were placed on the production of armaments. The navy, built before the war to rival the British Royal Navy as the largest in the world and employing submarines effectively during the war, was reduced to six battleships, and submarines were forbidden. There would be no air force.

Part VIII

The German government and people found the eighth part of the treaty the most objectionable. The prearmistice agreement had called for any reparations to be based on civilian damages, and the actual armistice called for “reparation for damage done.” Yet any such amount would seem incalculable and understated considering that the conservative estimate had ten million people dead at the end of the war, with thirty million wounded. Eventually, the negotiators decided that the most important “damage done” was to the soldiers themselves and that any German reparations payments would go toward covering the amount of their pensions, as stated in the first annex. However, soldiers were not civilians; somehow, the prearmistice agreement had to be abrogated.

To that end, it was suggested by a young American negotiator, John Foster Dulles, that Germany should be made to acknowledge its responsibility for the propagation of the war and therefore for its culpability for all the war's damages. This notion was written into Article 231, the famous “war guilt clause.” Article 232 acknowledged that it was beyond Germany's capacity to pay reparations for such an astronomical sum of damages, and in Article 233 it was determined that a fixed sum would be calculated by a reparations commission within the next two years. Effectively, Germany had to admit guilt for causing the war and had to agree to pay an undetermined amount for its damages. Eventually, in May 1921, the amount was set at 132 billion marks, or $31.5 billion, to be paid in 2 billion mark installments per year. Though Article 234 claimed that the Allies would periodically review Germany's ability to pay and adjust the yearly sum accordingly, at 2 billion marks per year, the German government would not finish paying for the war until 1987, at which point it was assumed that most veterans of the war would be dead.

Part XIV

Article 428 of Part XIV placed Allied troops in the Rhineland for the next fifteen years, to guarantee that Germany upheld the terms of the treaty. No occupation of enemy territory had ever lasted so long after a major war, and the German people resented it. In Article 429 the Allies spelled out their slow evacuation of the Rhineland pursuant to Germany's demonstration of good faith, and the rest of Section I outlined ways in which Germany could see the troops removed sooner should the German government accept their culpability for the treaty's terms.