Versailles settlement

Versailles settlement. The armistice of 11 November 1918 that ended the First World War led to a peace congress in Paris at which the French, British, and American delegations, assisted by a myriad of diplomats from other allied powers, worked out a new map of Europe and, under pressure from the American President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the structure of a new international organization, the League of Nations, designed to prevent future world wars. Revolutionary Russia was not invited; nor did its leaders wish to be present. German delegates were summoned in May 1919 to receive the final text of a treaty that was signed at Versailles on 28 June 1919. Germany meanwhile remained under strict blockade, and its people suffered from hunger.

The treaty's opening clauses constituted the covenant of the League. Germany's boundaries were revised, to the benefit of most of its neighbours: France retook Alsace and Lorraine, Belgium and Denmark took some frontier districts, and newly independent Poland secured the free and secure access to the sea guaranteed to her by one of Wilson's Fourteen Points (of January 1918), to which Germany had agreed at the armistice (see Danzig). This access, through the Polish corridor, separated east Prussia from the rest of Germany and was particularly resented. So were the clauses which severely restricted German armaments, and the one which affirmed German guilt for the outbreak of war in 1914.

Under the treaty, Germany accepted the principle of paying reparation for war damage inflicted on Belgium and France; the details, left to be worked out later, were never satisfactorily settled, and remained a focus for international resentment.

Separate treaties handled the affairs of Austria (Saint-Germain, 10 December 1919) and Hungary (Trianon, 4 June 1920) as well as Bulgaria (Neuilly, 24 November 1919). Austria and Hungary were separated, and the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire; Romania also secured large gains of territory at Hungary's and some at Bulgaria's expense. A treaty signed with Turkey at Spa in August 1920 was repudiated by the regime of Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938); a fresh settlement was eventually reached at Lausanne in 1923, after a Greco-Turkish war.

Hitler repudiated the settlement in March 1935. However, that June he did come to an arrangement with the UK under the Anglo-German Naval Treaty which allowed Germany to construct up to 35% of the Royal Navy's tonnage and which, under certain circumstances, allowed the German Navy a submarine fleet of equal size. In April 1939 Hitler repudiated this treaty, too. See also diplomacy and origins of the war.

M. R. D. Foot