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This page went down in
November 2005, so I have
copied it here.
Treaty of Versailles
Background Information
This page contains information about what historians have said about the
Treaty.
The events surrounding the Treaty of Versailles are
well known to most people interested in the Great War, or in any kind of
history. However, like many well known events, the Treaty is the subject of
a surprising amount of heated academic debate. This issue centres on the
vexed question of just how fair or unfair the Treaty was supposed to be. In
the post World War 2 period a degree of historical détente emerged, and an
agreed interpretation developed, along these lines:
| The outbreak of WW1 was seen to be the result of
collective foolishness by all the great powers. Therefore, the Treaty of
Versailles, which placed sole responsibility for the war on to Germany,
was unfair and unjust. As a result, Germans rejected the Treaty. |
Count
Brockdoff, leader of the German delegation which signed the Treaty of
Versailles, speaking in May 1919:
We are
told that we should acknowledge that we alone are guilty of having
caused the war. I would be a liar if I agreed to this. We are not trying
to avoid all responsibility for this world War. However, we emphatically
deny that the German people should be seen as the only guilty party.
Over fifty years the Imperialism of all European states has poisoned the
international situation.
| The rejection was further justified by the invasion
of the Ruhr by French and Belgian forces in 1923. This was to enforce the
terms of hated treaty. It also triggered an economic crisis in Germany.
This in turn created hyperinflation which devastated the lives of many
Germans. |
The value
of the German currency, the mark, compared to the US dollar in the
period 1919-23:
July 1919 |
$1 = 14
marks |
July 1920 |
$1 = 39
marks |
July 1921 |
$1 = 77
marks |
January 1923 |
$1 = 17 972
marks |
July 1923 |
$1 = 353 412
marks |
November
1923 |
$1 = 4 200
000 000 000 marks |
|
Even in the 1920s and 1930s
many British politicians came to question the wisdom of the Treaty. All of
these factors helped to explain the rise of Nazism and its devastating
consequences. |
Historians and the Treaty
In the 1960s historians began to upset the approved
version of the history of the Treaty. The German historian Franz Fischer
turned the historical world upside down with his vast and detailed
researches which seemed to suggest that German was mostly responsible for
the Great War. In the same vein, other historians began to question just how
unfair the Treaty of Versailles was. They examined the extent of the
repayments in relation to Germany’s wealth and found that the repayments
amounted to about 2% of Germany’s annual wealth. They examined Germany’s
policies and motives in the war, and found that Germany had made no plans as
to how to pay its war debts. The plan was to take those costs from the
defeated countries. There was also the fact that Germany had ruthlessly
stripped Russia of vast amounts of population, land and resources in the
Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Mounting evidence suggested that the Allies might
well have been much harsher, and that the German reaction to the Treaty was
based more on outrage and national pride than it was on Germany’s inability
to pay.
Historian
Anthony Wood writing in 1986:
Allied
statesmen, urged on by the pressure of public opinion, had made peace in
a spirit of revenge. The cries of 'Hang the Kaiser' and 'squeezing the
German lemon until the pips squeak' were indicative of the desire not
merely for a guarantee of future security, but for national humiliation
of Germany … The Germans saw every difficulty in subsequent years as a
further indignity that they alone must suffer as a result of the hated
Treaty of Versailles.
|