Treaty of Versailles

Impact

On May 7, 1919, the draft text of the Treaty of Versailles was handed over to the German delegation for its perusal. The German government's chief representative, Count Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made his displeasure known by remaining seated while making his speech accepting the treaty for revision, a major breach of diplomatic protocol. Over the next month and a half the new German republic fought the terms of the treaty by stalling, writing letters of observation that amounted to protest, and considering the possibility of renewing the war—all while a British naval blockade of their ports, in place since 1914, starved their people of trade in foodstuffs and thus applied intense pressure to Germany to sign the treaty. Finally, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in a climate of icy tension in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, where the unification of the German Empire had been declared in 1871.

Assessing the impact of the Treaty of Versailles after June 1919 is an exercise in defining the most critical events of the twentieth century in Europe. Four factors determined how the treaty's long-term implications played out in European politics and diplomacy: the Germans' hatred of the terms and effort to avoid meeting them, the French government's desire to force the Germans to uphold the terms, French politicians' increasing unwillingness to have the French military act unilaterally in enforcing the terms, and the British government's lack of desire to enforce the treaty from virtually its beginning.

From the start, the German government and military did everything possible to avoid disarmament and to evade making the reparations payments. In 1923, enforcing the required terms of the reparations payments, the French Army invaded the Ruhr Valley and occupied coal mines and timber yards to extract raw materials equivalent to the treaty-determined 2 billion marks per year. However, they were condemned by nearly every major Western power, including the United States and Great Britain, for overreacting to Germany's alleged inability to pay. The inflationary crisis that followed the occupation was largely due to the German government's policy of printing paper currency, without regard for whether there was gold to back it, in order to pay off the reparations. The policy and its consequences seem to confirm the idea that the German economy was artificially crippled, a notion most famously put forward by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

In late 1923 the German government stabilized behind a new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, and Stresemann stayed on as foreign minister through 1929. Under his diplomatic leadership, a new plan was negotiated, the Dawes Plan, temporarily lowering the reparations payments and attaching them to the profits of the German railroad industry, which were considerable. Stresemann later guaranteed Germany's borders with Belgium and France in the Pact of Locarno in 1925, after which the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty seemed outdated and mistaken to many politicians in all the Allied countries. A general air of relaxation of terms settled upon Europe.

This air of calm was based on the notion that Germany had moved on from the war and that its governments were willing to accept the treaty's provisions. Such was far from the case. The German army never completely demobilized and, under General Hans von Seeckt, continued to buy the latest weapons on the black market. By secret agreement, German officers were trained within the borders of Germany's only equal as an international pariah, the Soviet Union. Even the West's German hero, Stresemann, explained to colleagues that his negotiations in 1924 and 1925 were about “getting the wolf from our throat” so that disputes over the treaty could be negotiated in the future—or fought over—from a position of comparative strength. Meanwhile, numerous petty political parties of the left and right plotted the destruction of the government that had signed the treaty and dreamed of renouncing its terms in the future. One was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, and in 1933 their leader, Adolf Hitler, would accomplish just that. His repeated efforts to roll back the territorial terms of the treaty would launch World War II in 1939.

Ever since, historians, intellectuals, politicians, and others have argued over whether the Treaty of Versailles should have been written differently. Some say that it correctly punished the German people, not just their government, for creating the climate in which World War I became possible. Proponents of that position claim that if it had been enforced to the letter, there might never have been a second world war. Others argue that it would have been better if the treaty had reflected the terms of Wilson's Fourteen Points, which were far more visionary and aimed at promoting peace above and beyond the notion of punishment. The integration of a new German democratic republic into the international system of nations as an equal—similar to the integration of the restored monarchy of France after the Napoleonic wars—might have promoted a genuine “peace in our time,” to quote the phrase of Great Britain's prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

One thing seems certain. The treaty should not have included such draconian terms—deserved or otherwise—if the Allied politicians and their successors were not prepared to enforce those terms. Despite the warnings of a select few politicians in France and Britain, their governments clearly were not prepared to demand that the Treaty of Versailles be upheld to the letter by any German government. The result was, as predicted, a cease-fire of twenty years.