Introduction: Germany and the Infamous Treaty of Versailles
In the following essay, I make the counterintuitive case that the Treaty of Versailles (1919) was not unfair to Germany. On the contrary, Germany emerged from the chaos of the early post-war years in a deceptively strong position, especially compared to the war's other losers, and even one of its winners, France. Of course, it didn’t seem so at the time. But now, a century later, we can view these events from a comfortable distance, without all the passions of the age, and with the insights of modern historical scholarship.
Setting the Scene: Germany Gets the Bad News
Setting the Scene: Germany Gets the Bad News
The moment everyone was waiting for came on 7 May 1919. The main part of the Paris Peace Conference was over and the Allies were ready to deliver peace terms to the defeated Germans. Since the armistice six months earlier, intense and often contentious discussions between the main allied leaders took place in Paris shrouded in secrecy and without any German participation. Now the public would find out how it all turned out.
And the Germans too.
What would the Allies demand?
Would the peace be based on Wilson’s relatively lenient Fourteen Points? After all, those had been the basis for Germany agreeing to the armistice in the first place.
Or would it be what economist John Maynard Keynes called a “Carthaginian Peace” meant to eliminate Germany as a threat once and for all? Premier Clemenceau and the French public fervently wanted this, and for good reasons. Germany had invaded France twice in the previous fifty years, soundly defeating it the first time and nearly so the second.
Victory, when it came in 1918 after four miserable years of grinding trench warfare, was pyrrhic and only possible thanks to allied support. Still, over 1.3 million Frenchmen perished in the war, and another 4.4 million were wounded and maimed. Ten percent of Frenchmen died at the front, including three out of ten between the ages of 18-28. (1) American visitors in 1919 noted how Paris was filled with the sad sight of limbless veterans begging on every street corner.
Moreover, northeastern France lay in ruins, its coal mines flooded and factories plundered by the retreating German armies. The French, so prone to bickering amongst themselves, united around two facts: Germany was solely responsible for all this suffering and should be made to pay a steep price to set things right.
On the other side, many Germans still embraced the fantasy that Wilson’s "peace without victory" vision of a less vindictive post-war order would win out, though they had little to base this on beyond rumors and press leaks. Still, there was hope that the war fatigue experienced by all the combatants, combined with a collective sense of “never again,” might tip the scales toward a softer peace that promoted reconciliation.
Germany's Foreign Minister, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, a veteran diplomat, led the new Weimar Republic's delegation. When he and his team of 180 experts departed Berlin bound for Versailles on 28 April, they didn’t know what to expect. But once the train entered France, they found out. The French intentionally slowed the train to a crawl as it crossed the devastated landscapes of northeastern France, no doubt to make damn sure they saw what Germany had done to their beautiful land.
“It was a spiritual scourging,” commented one of the Germans and a signal of the coming narrative: “Ours, therefore, the sole responsibility for all the shattered life and property of these terrible four and a half years.” (2)
It got worse.
They were housed in the same shabby hotel where the French delegation stayed during negotiations after France’s defeat in 1871. The French also surrounded the hotel with a stockade, ostensibly for the delegation's safety.
But that’s how it was going to be: symbolic paybacks and ritual humiliations.
Only two men spoke on that long-awaited day when the Allies read the terms. First, Clemenceau opened, addressing the Germans in cold and haughty tones.
“The hour has come for the heavy reckoning of accounts. You have asked us for peace; we are disposed to grant it…I must add that this second peace of Versailles has been too dearly bought by all the peoples represented here for us not to be unanimously resolved to obtain by all the means in our power the legitimate satisfactions which are due to us.” (3)
“We shall present to you now a book which contains our conditions….you will find us ready to give you any explanation you want, but we must say at that same time that this peace which we are about to discuss has cost all the nations here assembled too much, and we are unanimously resolved to make use of every means in our power to ensure that we obtain every justifiable satisfaction that is our due.” (4)
Whatever illusions the Germans clung to that this might be a soft peace shattered into a thousand tiny pieces at that moment. This wouldn’t be like the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when France, recently defeated but with a new, more amenable government, played a crucial role in rebuilding the post-Napoleonic order.
No such collegial council of nations would meet this time, at least not with German participation. The shaky Weimar Republic representing Germany at Versailles would have to pay for the Kaiser's sins.This time, four leaders decided the fate of Europe. (Really 3.5, Italy’s drama-queen Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando didn't contribute much; Clemenceau dubbed him “the Weeper” for his operatic histrionics.)
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When Clemenceau finished, Brockdorff-Rantzau responded in tones of righteous indignation. He’d brought two speeches, just in case, one short and conciliatory, the other longer and confrontational. He pulled out the latter and began to read in a shrill and hissing voice that startled the attendees.
Here are some samples.
“We know the power of the hatred which we encounter here…”
“It is demanded of us that we shall confess ourselves to be the only ones guilty of the war.”
“Such a confession in my mouth will be a lie! I ask you when reparation is demanded not to forget the armistice. It took you six weeks till we got it at last, and six months till we came to know your conditions of peace….The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since 11 November by reason of the blockade were killed with cold determination after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured to them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and of punishment.” (5)
By the end of his address, British Prime Minister Lloyd George had snapped his pencil in two, so furious was he to hear such impertinence. Clemenceau wasn’t doing much better. Onlookers noted he was crimson with anger. He’d expected more hat-in-hand contrition from his beaten rivals. So had everyone else. Murmurs of indignation echoed throughout the hall about what had just happened.
'He didn’t even stand up to address the room!'
'How disrespectful!'
'How undiplomatic!'
Seething, Clemenceau adjourned the meeting. On the way out, one of the Germans asked him, "What will history say of this?" He responded, "It will not say that Belgium invaded Germany." (6)
Score a point for Clemenceau.
Brockdorff-Rantzau strolled onto the street, trying to project nonchalance by casually lighting a cigarette, though his trembling hand gave him away. His team retreated to its shabby hotel to pore over the details and write up vigorous rebuttals that the Allies would admire for all their thoroughness before being promptly ignored.
Despite Brockdorff-Rantzau’s passionate recommendation not to sign the treaty, the Weimar cabinet reluctantly did so, believing it had no choice under the circumstances. They were probably right. If they hadn’t, the crushing blockade would resume and France would have a pretense to invade and occupy more German land.
Keynes, a member of the British delegation, trashed the treaty in the press at every opportunity, calling it “outrageous and impossible,” and that it would “bring nothing but misfortune.” His book, The Economic Consequences of Peace, is an extended rant against the Versailles Treaty and its many flaws. His view that it was too harsh soon became the dominant narrative in Germany, Britain, and America.
The left-leaning magazine The Nation declared that approving the treaty would display “blindness and moral callousness beyond belief.” The New Republic concluded it would form the “prelude to quarrels in a deeply divided and hideously embittered Europe.” (7)
Yet the terms were not considered punishing enough in France, and Clemenceau paid a political price for his compromises. He had been the most strident in demanding a hard peace to compensate France and protect it from future German aggression. It didn’t matter. His fellow citizens wanted more. He ended up getting pilloried by the French press for negotiating a "soft peace" and was unceremoniously voted out of office later that year.
No one was happy with the peace.
The world moved on anyway.
Germany soon recovered, so much so that by 1933, Hitler seized a nation primed and ready to flex its muscles again. The Versailles Treaty did not devastate or ruin Germany. There were temporary setbacks, to be sure, but the core of German power remained intact: a large population and a massive industrial complex. Many aspects of the Treaty don't seem so bad when you look at them from another perspective.
Let's start with the Allied occupation of the Rhineland.
The Rhineland: French Loss = German Win ^
“The Rhine alone is important. Nothing else matters.”
- French Marshal Ferdinand Foch 6 May 1919
One of the most contentious issues addressed during the Paris Peace Conference was the future of Germany's Rhineland. The final treaty ended up permanently demilitarizing this region, though it could have been worse if the French had their way.
Clemenceau and Foch fought hard to turn the Rhineland into an autonomous puppet state independent from Germany and beholden to France. The justification was military: Holding the frontier at the Rhine would have made it easier to defend France.
Unfortunately for the French, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson vetoed this plan, fearing it would only inflame tensions between France and Germany. Wilson told Clemenceau, “You’re trying to create another Alsace-Lorraine,” meaning this would become another disputed border region destined to poison relations and fuel future conflicts. (8) Wilson was probably right.
Clemenceau reminded his two co-negotiators that France’s hardline position came from experience. If the French struck too strident a tone, he explained, there was a reason. France needed a way to keep the German juggernaut at bay. To be fair, they had indeed learned some hard lessons about great power politics on the continent that England and America, both protected by bodies of water, never fully grasped.
One was that geography favored invasion from the east. France had no natural defensive barriers to slow the Germans down. Clemenceau warned, “We must not compromise the result of our victory….America is very far away, protected by the ocean. Not even Napoleon himself could touch England, you are both sheltered; we are not.” (9)
In the end, however, France yielded on this point, making a deal that looked better than it was. The French occupation along the Rhine would remain in place, but only temporarily. In fact, the last troops departed in 1930. The Rhineland remained German, though bitterness lingered and its de-militarized status hurt German pride. It should come as no surprise that one of Hitler’s first foreign policy priorities and triumphs was the re-militarization of the region in 1936.
In return for giving way on this point, Clemenceau received very solemn security guarantees from Britain and America that they would come to France’s aid if she ever again faced German aggression. Foch worried this was an empty promise.
Sure, Wilson and Lloyd George intended to honor their word in 1919. But what about in ten or twenty years after they were long gone and different governments with differing priorities were in office?
Foch feared his country would be left to face Germany alone. Yielding on this point meant France had to rely on allies who, even in the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, would never be able to intervene in time to make a difference. Mere promises from fickle friends didn’t solve the French security dilemma. A resurgent Germany would be well-placed to invade again, just like in 1870 and 1914.
Clemenceau needed the deal, however, and agreed to the security guarantees. In a last meeting with the three allied leaders before the presentation of the terms, Foch made one final, desperate pitch, if for no reason other than to have it on the record where he stood.
“If we do not hold the Rhine permanently [Foch told them] there is no neutralization, no disarmament, no written clause of any nature, which can prevent Germany from breaking out and across it and gaining the upper hand. No aid could arrive in time from England or America to save France from complete defeat.” (10)
It did no good. The decision had been made. But you know what? Foch was right. American and British security guarantees did turn out to be worthless. In July 1919, the British Parliament approved the Treaty of Guarantee, but only on the condition that the United States also ratified it. When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify either the Treaty of Guarantee or even the Versailles Treaty that Wilson had labored so hard on, the French felt cheated. Per the treaty, the Germans kept the Rhineland, but France had no security guarantees.
As Shirer puts it, “The French regarded this as a betrayal. It was. They spoke of being cheated by their wartime allies. They were.” (11)
Foch’s prediction would slowly begin to take shape in the coming years. He bitterly told the New York Times: “The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into Northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England.” (12)
Foch died in 1929 and didn’t live to see his prophecy come true.
So much for security guarantees.
What Germany Lost: Not So Bad, Considering ^
Another top priority at the Paris Peace Conference was suppressing German military power. The army was limited to only 100,000 soldiers, just strong enough to handle territorial defense and maintain internal order. That, and little more. No air force, no tanks, and no submarines were permitted, nor a surface fleet of any power. The general staff, the brains behind German militarism, was banned.
While these conditions wounded German pride, they did little real harm. If anything, they removed the burden of maintaining a massive military at a time when the nation couldn't afford it.
Okay, but what about all the territory stripped away from Germany? Surely that was excessive? Not really, at least when viewed in the context of the time and in comparison to how the war's other losers fared. The Treaty took 13 percent of Germany’s 1914 territory and 10 percent of its population, almost half of which was non-German. (13)
In the east, the losses infuriated the Germans as slices of territory went to the newly formed state of Poland. Danzig became a "free city" while East Prussia found itself geographically separated from Germany proper after the creation of the Polish Corridor to give the new nation access to the Baltic. These were some of the dumbest map revisions that came out of the Paris Peace Conference. Germany never accepted the existence of a Polish state in the first place, and especially one cobbled together from strips of former imperial lands that cut the Reich in two.
In the west, Germany lost Alsace and Lorraine but this hardly came as a surprise. Keep in mind that Germany took these territories from France after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870-1871. Now that the roles of winner and loser were reversed, Germany should not have expected to keep them. Number Eight of Wilson's Fourteen Points (upon which Germany's hopes had rested for a fair peace) had a clause returning Alsace and Lorraine to France
The loss of its overseas colonies hurt the German ego more than its pocketbook. After all, the idea was still in vogue that mighty nations must have vast colonial holdings overseas. Britain and France still did. Why not Germany as well? No one at the time knew the age of colonialism was nearing the end. Germany's coal-producing Saar was to be administered by the League of Nations for fifteen years, with the French getting the region's coal in compensation for the coal mines Germany flooded at the end of the war.
Again, France didn't get what it wanted, not even close, which was the total annexation of the Saar region. As with the Rhineland, Wilson and Lloyd George offered the French empty promises and nothing lasting.
Not only that, but German industry escaped the war unscathed. Unlike World War II, no bombs gutted Reich cities, and no armies invaded its territories. The Reich was intact. Dr. Steiner notes, "Despite the loss of the Saar coal and Lorraine iron ore, Germany remained Europe's "industrial powerhouse,' able, in a remarkably short time, to dominate the trade of the central and eastern European states." (14)
Germany Was a Greedy Winner Too ^
None of these territorial losses appear excessive when compared to how Germany treated its defeated enemies. For this we have several examples. Like when Germany crushed France in 1870 and took Alsace and Lorraine as a prize. Bismarck went out of his way to humiliate France by proclaiming the unified German Empire from the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, for centuries the symbol of French culture and hegemony.
German troops then remained as occupiers until the French paid a five billion franc reparation. This meant France had to cover the costs for the privilege of being invaded, conquered, and occupied. Put in this context, the French occupation of the Rhine feels less like an unprecedented crime against international law and more like the continuation of precedents set by Germany.
And let's not forget about the draconian peace of Brest-Litovsk (1918) that ended the war in the east with a complete German victory. Russia received no mercy. Germany took and took and took some more.
Why?
Because it could.
So it did, of course.
Russia surrendered almost 2.5 million square kilometers of its richest European territories, about three times larger than Germany itself, and around 55 million inhabitants, almost a third of the total Russian population, including the breadbasket of Ukraine, the Baltic states in the north, and Poland, plus 90 percent of Russia’s coal mines, 54 percent of its industry, a third of its agriculture, and a one million gold ruble reparation was slapped onto the treaty after the fact like an exclamation mark. The Germans made vassal states out of these newly conquered territories and then set to work trying (and mostly failing) to extract resources for the war effort. (15)
The same German voices howling in protest over the injustice of Versailles were oddly silent a year earlier when Brest-Litovsk was signed. After this, Allied resolve strengthened. Now they knew what kind of peace to expect if Germany won the war. It would make the peace of 1871 seem like a slap and a handshake in comparison.
After Versailles, if anyone complained that the terms the Allies offered were excessive, the French would point out - quite rightly, I might add - that Germany would have treated them no better had the outcome been reversed.
They would know.
The Treaty of Versailles was Unfair (compared to whom?) ^
What about Germany's allies from the war? How did they fare? Better or worse than Germany?
Much worse.
The Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated at the war's end into a bunch of smaller states loosely based on ethnicity. Austria and Hungary, the former Habsburg Empire's two most powerful entities, emerged as tiny ethnic rump states. Indeed, Hungary lost 67.3 percent of its pre-war territory and 73.5 percent of its population. (16) Elsewhere, the Turks held on to nothing more than Asia Minor, and they had to fight to keep even that.
If you’re looking for examples of any so-called Carthaginian Peace, you'll find them here among these the war's biggest losers: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarians. Two out of three ceased to exist altogether as great powers. Russia was too large to fail but still quite easy to plunder once it descended into revolutionary chaos beginning in 1917.
By the time dust settled in the early 1920s, the former Tsarist Empire was now the Soviet Union but minus Poland, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Finland. Compared to the war's other losers, which either disintegrated or lost immense territories, Germany got off easy.
And something else to consider. Some historians argue that - all things considered - the Treaty of Versailles oddly improved Germany's strategic position in Central Europe. As historian Zara Steiner put it, "It [Germany] was now surrounded on almost all its borders by small and weak states, none of which, including Poland, posed a danger to its existence." (17)
The only rival on the continent that came close to Germany's economic potential was France. But this comparison doesn't bear scrutiny. Though the treaty took some territory on the frontiers, Germany still dwarfed its Gallic neighbor, with 63 million bitter Germans facing 39 million fretful French. Strategically, Germany was secure and insulated from harm, even with a tiny token army of 100,000. It didn't need anything bigger than that at this time.
Other than France, all of its neighbors were military midgets, little bite-sized morsels that would later be gobbled up one after the other by Hitler. And even France was no longer any real threat by the late-1920s. In fact, by then all of the Allies had lost interest in enforcing the terms.
Historian Niall Ferguson makes a separate point about why the treaty failed, "The real problem with the peace was not that it was too harsh, but that the Allies failed to enforce it: not so much [Germany] 'won't pay' as 'can't collect.'" (18)
Once it became clear by the mid-1920s that Allied unity and motivation were waning, the Germans began chipping away at the Treaty's terms. That's something to remember: This process didn't begin with Hitler; he merely finished it.
And About Those Ruinous Reparations... ^
And about those reparations, the most famous symbol of the so-called "Carthaginian Peace." The post-war narrative endlessly preached by the Germans and Keynes was that Germany’s economy could never pay such a high reparations bill as the one imposed on her in 1921.
As the story goes, unrealistically high reparations led to the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation of the early 1920s, giving beerhall rabble-rousers like Adolf Hitler a hate-filled stump speech to take on the road. It’s a just-so story, one that leads straight from French hubris to German nemesis, a cautionary tale for students of history to remember.
But this narrative is very misleading.
Let’s look at the numbers.
In 1921, the Reparations Committee levied 132 billion gold marks ($33 billion) as reparations with the threat of occupying the industrial Ruhr region if payments were not made. While this initial sum was undoubtedly a crushing amount that Germany was in no position to pay back, the structure of the payments gave her ample wiggle room to evade, resist, and obfuscate, which she did quite successfully in the coming years. (19)
When Germany repeatedly failed to make reparation payments, the French occupied the industrial Ruhr from January to September 1923. Though Germany capitulated and agreed to resume reparation payments, the occupation was a political disaster for the French, alienating them further from Britain and America. They never again tried to use force to extract reparations. In retrospect, this was the peak of Allied treaty enforcement. From this point on, the French gradually gave way, unwilling to go it alone as Britain and America retreated from affairs on the continent. Germany sensed weakness and pushed for a further easing of payments.
That's what happened. The trend line after the Ruhr occupation moved toward reducing the payments, first with the Dawes Plan of 1924, which lowered the payments Germany had to make, and then the Young Plan of 1929, which lowered the payments even further, and then the Hoover Moratorium of 1931 ordered a halt on further reparations because of the Great Depression. At last, in 1932 at the Lausanne Conference, reparations were ended in return for a one-time German fee of $750 million.
Ultimately, Germany only paid around $5.5 billion out of the $33 billion, and this comes with a huge caveat: Most of the reparations weren’t paid with German wealth but by American loans. This to me is one of the more astonishing facts of the post-war period. (20)
Germany took out enormous loans that America eagerly offered, which they then used to pay whatever minimal reparations they had to make to keep the French off their backs. While America funded Germany’s reparations, France and Britain were still on the hook to pay back (with interest) the massive loans they took out during and after the war.
William Shirer sums it up best. “Actually, on balance, Germany never had to pay a single mark out of her own resources. Her borrowings from American bankers, which were never repaid, amounted to more than her total reparation payments. Naive American investors footed the German reparations bill” (21)
So much for those crushing reparations.
Final Thoughts: The War's Unfinished Business ^
"No enemy has conquered you"
- Weimar President Ebert to returning German troops in December 1918
One last thing, and this ties into everything else above: Germany didn't see itself as conquered, and other than the Rhineland, it wasn't. There was also an emerging consensus in Germany that the army had not been decisively beaten. To some extent that's true. Though the Imperial Army was in full retreat by the armistice, it really hadn't been routed, at least not compared to previous conflicts.
That meant Germany's defeat in World War I was only a partial one, tagged with caveats that went something like this: "We would have won if traitors hadn't stabbed us in the back!" "We could have held on for at least a stalemate." "The enemy hadn't even reached German soil yet! Why did our government capitulate?"
This last one resonated with many Germans. It's true that no army occupied all of Germany or its capital, in contrast to what would happen in 1945.
Radical German Zionist Arthur Ruppin wrote this in his diary in December 1918: ‘Has a people been confronted with such terrible armistice terms and admitted its complete defeat, although no enemy has yet set foot on its soil and, on the contrary, its armies are still deep within the territories of its enemies? The simple man in the street cannot understand what has happened so suddenly and feels completely lost." (22)
This summed up the German public's view at the time. Why were the Treaty terms so harsh when they had not been resoundingly defeated? It didn't make sense.
Historian Margaret MacMillan agrees. "The mistake the Allies made, and it did not become clear until much later, was that, as a result of the armistice terms, the great majority of Germans never experienced their country’s defeat at first hand. Except in the Rhineland, they did not see occupying troops." (23)
Compare this with other conflicts that ended in a knockout blow to one of the belligerents.
A lopsided result tended to prevent much pushback from the loser. France had suffered two total defeats in the century prior, one in 1815 after Waterloo and the other in 1870 after the capture of Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan and the fall of Paris soon after. Both times the enemy destroyed French armies on the battlefield before taking Paris. Knockout blows.
Also in both cases, France as the loser found itself with little bargaining power. The victor dictated the peace terms to the vanquished, and that was that. Occupying armies left when the those terms were fulfilled, thus adding incentives to comply and pay up as fast as possible. This is what France did in the 1870s. It paid the reparation and the last German troops went home in 1873. (24)
These were all total defeats and far from what Germany experienced at the end of World War I. So once again, Germany got off easy, at least in comparison. The populace wouldn't experience the terror of invasion or the humiliation of nationwide occupation until 1945, a terrifying experience for German civilians and one filled with all the horrors of war, rape, pillage, murder, and destruction. This was so traumatizing that German patriotic militarism died once and for all by showing - once and for all - that it was a dead end leading to nothing but rubble and ruin. No 'Stab in the Back' myth (Dolchstosslegende) blossomed its poisoned petals out of the ashes of World War II. By May 1945, there was simply no back to stab anymore. The entire German Reich was overrun, its armies totally annihilated, and its cities were nothing but bombed-out ruins.
But that was all in the future. All things considered, Germany came out of World War I intact. Her civilian population had not experienced the violence of modern warfare like the French had. Militarily she was still weak, but her economy soon roared back. Germany faced no threats other than France, and that faded after 1923.
The impact of reparations was negligible when it was all said and done, thanks to American investors who supplied massive loans on a bet that a thriving German economy would offer a higher return on investment.
As France retreated behind the false safety of its Maginot fortifications, the Nazi Party was gaining seats and power in the Reichstag on a platform of grievance and revenge against all those who had humiliated Germany since 1918.
Yet for all the cries about how the Allies mistreated Germany after the war, it was still whole enough, big enough, and wealthy enough to quickly rebuild, rearm, and relaunch another bid for European hegemony and to right the wrongs of 1918.
That's exactly what happened. In 1933, Hitler took power and the countdown to war began. Reparations were done and the Versailles Treaty became a distant and fading bad memory for all sides. France and Britain were sleepwalking toward disaster and America had retreated into its snug and smug isolationist shell.
We know how that turned out.
Supplementary Materials ^
Endnotes ^
(1) William Shirer. The Collapse of the Third Republic. Simon and Schuster, 1969, 142.
(2) Margaret MacMillan. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World. Random House, 2001, 706.
(3) David Watson. Georges Clemenceau : France, Haus Publishing, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central., ix.
(4) Charles L Mee. The End of Order, Versailles, 1919. Dutton, 1980, 216.
(5) Ibid.
(6) S.L.A. Marshall. World War I. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987, 474.
(7) Mee. 276.
(8) Shirer, 145.
(9) Richard Striner. Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, 202.
(10) Shirer, 145.
(11) Ibid., 146.
(12) MacMillan, 705.
(13) Niall Ferguson. The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. Basic Books, 1999, 409.
(14) Steiner, 67.
(15) Alexander Watson. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, the People’s War. Basic Books, 2014, 491-499.
(16) Ibid., 562.
(17) Zara S. Steiner. European International History 1919-1933. Oxford University Press, 2007, 67.
(18) Ferguson, 419.
(19) Shirer, 146-148.
(20) Ibid., 150-151.
(21) Ibid.
(22) Martin Gilbert. The First World War: A Complete History. Rosetta Books, 2014, 507.
(23) MacMillan, 249.
(24) Ferguson, 419.
(25) Ibid., 409.
Sources
Atwood), Marshall, S. L. A. (Samuel Lyman. World War I. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.
Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. Basic Books, 1999.
Gilbert, Martin. The First World War: A Complete History. Rosetta Books, 2014.
Keegan, John. The First World War. Vintage Books, Random House, 2000.
Keynes, John Maynard. The End of Laissez-Faire: The Economic Consequences of Peace. BN Publishing, 2009.
MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World. Random House, 2001.
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. Random House, 2014.
Mee, Charles L. The End of Order, Versailles, 1919. Dutton, 1980.
Shirer, William. The Collapse of the Third Republic. Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Steinberg, Jonathan. Bismarck: A Life. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Steiner, Zara S. European International History 1919-1933. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Striner, Richard. Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Watson, Alexander. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, the People’s War. Basic Books, 2014.
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P. Wilke
13 June 2023