The Treaty of Versailles

The Versailles Treaty became operative on January 10, 1920. The Treaty formalized the terms of peace between the Allies and Germany and was imposed on the Central Powers by the Allied and Associated Powers, the winners of World War I.

It is generally acknowledged that the Treaty of Versailles was a failure because it imposed harsh penalties and irrational demands on Germany for its misdeeds, including large reparations payments and demilitarization. The Versailles Deal was fundamentally not a peace treaty but rather the archetypal instance of retaliation. Given the destruction caused by the war, it is simple to understand why someone would want to exact retribution.

The lengthy accord eventually did not satisfy any country. Germany was compelled by the Versailles Treaty to cede all of its foreign territories in China, the Pacific, and Africa to the Allied states, return Alsace and Lorraine to France, and transfer territory to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It also had to consent to the demilitarization and Allied occupation of the area around the Rhine River, as well as dramatically cut back on its military. Most crucially, Article 231 of the treaty made Germany solely responsible for starting the war and required it to pay the Allied nations billions in reparations.

Since the Weimar Government signed the Treaty of Versailles that put an end to World War One, it became known as a failure. By ending the war too soon, many nationalists thought the government had betrayed Germany and sold it to its adversaries. When the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union gathered in 1945 at Potsdam, they attributed the need for another major fight to the Versailles Treaty's shortcomings. It is one of the major causes of World War II.