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The Treaty of Versailles (signed in 1919) and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments required the Central Powers to pay 132 billion gold marks (US$33 billion at the time) in reparations to cover civilian damage caused during the war. This figure was divided into three categories of bonds: A, B, and C. Of these, Germany was required to pay towards ...
Germany lost World War I. In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the victorious powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allied states) imposed punitive territorial, military, and economic provisions on defeated Germany. In the west, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France.
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Oct 7, 2019 · The Treaty of Versailles was signed by Germany and the Allied Nations on June 28, 1919, formally ending World War One. The terms of the treaty required that Germany pay financial reparations, disarm, lose territory, and give up all of its overseas colonies.
- Overview
- German reparations and military limitations
- The Covenant of the League of Nations
- German resentment
The war guilt clause of the treaty deemed Germany the aggressor in the war and consequently made Germany responsible for making reparations to the Allied nations in payment for the losses and damage they had sustained in the war. It was impossible to compute the exact sum to be paid as reparations for the damage caused by the Germans, especially in France and Belgium, at the time the treaty was being drafted, but a commission that assessed the losses incurred by the civilian population set an amount of $33 billion in 1921. Although economists at the time declared that such a huge sum could never be collected without upsetting international finances, the Allies insisted that Germany be made to pay, and the treaty permitted them to take punitive actions if Germany fell behind in its payments.
The Big Four, especially Clemenceau, wanted to make sure that Germany would never again pose a military threat to the rest of Europe, and the treaty contained a number of stipulations to guarantee this aim. The German army was restricted to 100,000 men; the general staff was eliminated; the manufacture of armoured cars, tanks, submarines, airplanes, and poison gas was forbidden; and only a small number of specified factories could make weapons or munitions. All of Germany west of the Rhine and up to 30 miles (50 km) east of it was to be a demilitarized zone. The forced disarmament of Germany, it was hoped, would be accompanied by voluntary disarmament in other nations.
The war guilt clause of the treaty deemed Germany the aggressor in the war and consequently made Germany responsible for making reparations to the Allied nations in payment for the losses and damage they had sustained in the war. It was impossible to compute the exact sum to be paid as reparations for the damage caused by the Germans, especially in France and Belgium, at the time the treaty was being drafted, but a commission that assessed the losses incurred by the civilian population set an amount of $33 billion in 1921. Although economists at the time declared that such a huge sum could never be collected without upsetting international finances, the Allies insisted that Germany be made to pay, and the treaty permitted them to take punitive actions if Germany fell behind in its payments.
The Big Four, especially Clemenceau, wanted to make sure that Germany would never again pose a military threat to the rest of Europe, and the treaty contained a number of stipulations to guarantee this aim. The German army was restricted to 100,000 men; the general staff was eliminated; the manufacture of armoured cars, tanks, submarines, airplanes, and poison gas was forbidden; and only a small number of specified factories could make weapons or munitions. All of Germany west of the Rhine and up to 30 miles (50 km) east of it was to be a demilitarized zone. The forced disarmament of Germany, it was hoped, would be accompanied by voluntary disarmament in other nations.
The treaty included the Covenant of the League of Nations, in which members guaranteed each other’s independence and territorial integrity. Wilson had been convinced that no lasting peace would be possible unless an international organization came into existence, and he chaired the commission that drew up the Covenant, a short and concise document ...
The final version of the Treaty of Versailles was presented to a German delegation on May 7, 1919, and signed, after their remonstrances, on June 28. (The Treaties of Saint-Germain and Neuilly provided the Allied terms for peace with Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, respectively.) It was bitterly criticized by the Germans, who complained that it had been “dictated” to them, that it violated the spirit of the Fourteen Points, and that it demanded intolerable sacrifices that would wreck their economy. In the years after it was ratified, the Treaty of Versailles was revised and altered, mostly in Germany’s favour. Numerous concessions were made to Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler, and by 1938 only the territorial settlement articles remained.
Many historians claim that the combination of a harsh treaty and subsequent lax enforcement of its provisions paved the way for the upsurge of German militarism in the 1930s. The huge German reparations and the war guilt clause fostered deep resentment of the settlement in Germany, and, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 (a violation of the treaty), the Allies did nothing to stop him, thus encouraging future German aggression.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
With this ultimate intention in mind, the Allied efforts to impose war costs on Germany began on 5 April 1919, when Lloyd George asserted that Germany should stipulate in the peace treaty "her obligation for all the costs of the war." The United States opposed, on legal grounds, the inclusion of war costs in the reparations total, although ...
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The formal Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, but the US Senate refused to ratify the treaty. The United States suffered 53,402 battle deaths in World War I, in less than six months of fighting. Another 63,114 died from accidents and disease. After the Civil War and World War II, World War I is the deadliest war in American history.
