The armistice
of November 1918 that brought an end to four years of war
between the European powers was followed some six months later (May 7,
1919) by the presentation of the formal peace treaty to the German government
(The other defeated powers--Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria--were dealt with
in separate treaties). After the terrible experience of a war in which millions of
soldiers had died, it was expected that the general cry in the victorious nations
would be a call, especially from the French, for harsh retribution against
Germany in particular. For quite apart from the normal destruction wrought by
the weapons of war, the German army had engaged in massive destruction of
the infrastructure of those areas of France which it had overrun: stripping
factories of machinery for transfer to Germany, sending hundreds of thousands
of cattle and other livestock across the border and flooding or blowing-up coal
mines and, during their retreat at the end, engaging in looting and pillaging on a
massive scale by destroying railways, bridges and ransacking thousands of
private homes. The drawing up of the treaty, therefore, was an attempt to
reconcile the conflicting notions among the Big Four (Britain, France, U.S.A.,
Italy) on how severely the Germans were to be treated. While the British
representative, Lloyd George, for both political and economic reasons, favored
moderation, the French prime minister Clemenceau firmly advocated a "peace
of revenge" so that Germany would never again be in a position to threaten his
country. The compromise fell between these two stools; not lenient enough to
elicit a grudging acceptance by the Germans nor severe enough to
permanently
weaken their country (through dismemberment, for instance) beyond hope of
emergence to her former strength.
The issue of reparations proved to be exceedingly troublesome as payments
were exacted from Gernmany for years before any fixed sums were specified.
The irony lay in the fact that all reparations were ended in 1932 in the wake of
the world economic depression while a country like Britain was still paying her
financial debts to the U.S. as late as the 1960s. The treaty was forced upon the
reluctant German government under threat of continuing the war against an
exhausted Germany and signed into law on June 28, 1919, five years to the day
after the event that triggered the war in the first place--the assassination at
Sarajevo. The treaty is a long document of over 200 pages, incorporating 440
separate articles in addition to annexed provisions. The treaty is
divided into 15 Parts of which the most relevant for the present purpose
are those, shown below, dealing with political/territorial, colonial and
military issues as they affect Germany as well as the Reparations that
were to be paid by Germany to the allied victors. A selection of the more
significant items from the text follows (Ref: Fred L. Israel (ed.),
Major Peace
Treaties of Modern History, Vol. II, 1967)
