The Treaty of Versailles

[peterhof]

“I cannot conceive any greater cause of war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small States, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable system of government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land. The proposal of the Polish commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgment, lead to a new war in the East of Europe . . .”

Lloyd George
Prime Minister of England, March 25, 1919



In the first plenary session, less weighty matters were quickly disposed of. Harold Nicolson, a young Foreign Office assistant describes Clemenceau as “highhanded with some of the smaller powers . . . ‘Y-a-t-il d’objections? . . . Non? . . . adopté!’ . . . like a machine gun.” But major roadblocks soon appeared.

The first problem was the highly embarrassing matter of the Secret Treaties that bound the Entente Powers together. When these are mischievously revealed by Lenin, Churchill reacted defensively and complained that “The United States Delegation had no grounds for taking a lofty and judicial view of these proceedings.” He protested that the Entente had every right to lure Italy and Rumania into the War with tempting and generous offers of territory. He admitted that “there were features in all of them [the Treaties] which nothing but duress could explain and excuse,” but harrumphed that “It is not open to the cool bystander, who afterwards becomes the loyal and ardent comrade and brave rescuer, to set himself up as an impartial judge of events which never would have occurred had he outstretched a helping hand in time.”

But Churchill doth protest too much—and misses the point entirely. It is not of course the Treaties with Italy, Rumania, Japan and others, made after the start of hostilities that shocks world opinion, but those between France, Russia and Britain made before the War:

France will get not just Alsace-Lorraine, she will also extend her borders to the Rhine and assert her historic “rights” to Syria. Russia will get Constantinople and the Straits and a large slice of European Turkey. England gets Germany’s African possessions and eliminates Germany as a naval and commercial competitor. A continuous stretch of British territory from the Cape to Cairo had made Cecil Rhodes’ dreams of empire a reality while the collapse of Turkey made Britain predominant in the Middle East.

The peace treaties signed in Paris gave Britain dominion over 450 million people in every continent of the globe and made her the largest empire in the history of the world. These were the “ideals” for which the Entente Powers initiated the War in 1914 and which now scandalize the world. “Is there any man or woman,” asked Woodrow Wilson in 1919, “let me say is there any child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? This was an industrial and commercial war.” The Secret Treaties are the first signs of tarnish on the shining hallowed edifice of “sole” German war guilt.

As the full plenary sessions of the Conference with all delegates present proved unwieldy, the Powers formed a Supreme Council of Ten, consisting of the heads of government and the Foreign Ministers of the five big states: France, Britain, Italy, Japan and the United States. But when this proved cumbersome as well, the decision-making was quickly limited to the four men who really counted. Out of secret meetings between Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando came the final five Treaties, each named for a suburb of Paris, that marked the end of one war and laid the groundwork for another.

Each man had his own particular handicap. Of Lloyd George, Churchill writes that “he reached the Conference somewhat disheveled by the vulgarities and blatancies of the recent General Election. Pinned to his coat-tails were the posters, ‘Hang the Kaiser,’ ‘Make them pay’ and this sensibly detracted from the dignity of his entrance upon the scene.”

Lloyd George emphatically rejected Point 11 dealing with ‘Freedom of the Seas’ and stated that “Great Britain would spend her last guinea to keep her navy superior to that of the United States or any other Power, and that no Cabinet Official could continue in the Government in England who took a different position.”
(This of course was the attitude that triggered the War of 1812 and almost caused Wilson to follow in Madison’s footsteps and side with Britain’s enemies. He [George] was unmoved by House’s warning that “We do not intend to have our commerce regulated by Great Britain whenever she is at war.” Generally however, Lloyd George tended to have a moderating influence on the vengeful Clemenceau, who inspired the British journalist C.P. Snow to comment “There seems to be no limit to French vindictiveness and commercial jealousy.”

There was also the persistent rumor that Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – had facilitated the torpedo attack on the Lusitania to undermine American neutrality. Some months before the attack, Churchill had written to Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany. The German formal announcement of indiscriminate submarining has been made to the United States to produce a deterrent effect on traffic. For our part, we want the traffic – the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still . . .”

Wilson was hamstrung by the new Republican majority in Congress which opposed the League of Nations, and the not inaccurate perception that House, who interviewed some forty visitors a day, made all the important decisions. One newspaper opined that “What Colonel House thinks today, Wilson says tomorrow.” A cruel wit called Wilson “the Jack that House built.” House himself boasted that “Wilson never disavowed any act of mine.” Through all of this reverberated Theodore Roosevelt’s recent thunder, seconded by Senator Lodge:

“Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them. Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”

The French got along with their allies no better in peace than in war. Clemenceau’s vindictive demands reached a high point over the issue of the Saar Valley which he adamantly demanded for France, and threatened to withdraw the French Delegation from the Conference.

“Then if France does not get what she wishes,” said Wilson, “she will refuse to act with us. In that event do you wish me to go home?” Clemenceau replied: “I do not wish you to go home but I intend to do so myself” and thereupon left the room.

Frustrated, Wilson summoned the American Delegation to his quarters: “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am in trouble and I have sent for you to help me out. The matter is this: the French want the whole left bank of the Rhine. I told M. Clemenceau that I could not consent to such a solution of the problem. He became very much excited and then demanded ownership of the Saar Basin. I told him I could not agree to that either because it would mean giving 300,000 Germans to France . . . I do not know whether he will return to the meeting this afternoon. In fact, I do not know whether the Peace Conference will continue. M. Clemenceau called me a pro-German and abruptly left the room.”

Clemenceau later wrote that “Your [American] intervention in the War, which you came out of lightly, since it cost you but 56,000 lives instead of our 1,364,000 killed, had appeared to you, nevertheless, as an excessive display of solidarity.”

Even on the seemingly routine matter of Alsace-Lorraine, House comments: “I wanted to make Alsace-Lorraine an autonomous province of Switzerland, creating a neutral barrier between Germany and France, and giving both nations free access to its resources. The people of Alsace-Lorraine are much more akin to the Swiss than to the French or to the Germans. They were not happy under German rule and they do not seem to be happy now.”
Later, recalling the acrimonious and exhausting negotiations with the French, Wilson exploded: “I should like to see Germany clean up France, and I should like to meet Jusserand [the French Ambassador] and tell him that to his face.”
It should not be supposed that House and Wilson were unprepared as the following amazing entry from House’s personal diary makes clear. It is dated January 5, 1918:

"Saturday was a remarkable day. I went over to the State Department just after breakfast to see Polk and the others, and returned to the White House at a quarter past ten in order to get to work with the President.
He was waiting for me. We actually got to work at half past ten and finished re-making the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve o’clock."


Italian territorial demands were no less rapacious. The secret Treaty of London had promised Italy the line of the Alps and Orlando was determined to collect. On the cession of the Brenner Pass to Italy, House comments: “I would have never given her that bit of purely German territory, the Brenner Pass, delivering 150,000 pure Germans to an alien flag. Both Clemenceau and Lloyd George were against this decision.” But the latter were bound by the Secret Treaties and Wilson concurred. The Southern Tyrol and Triest similarly passed to Italian sovereignty. Other bits of “purely German territory” were similarly dealt with in the troublesome case of Poland.
It was soon after Wilson returned to the Conference on March 13 that he became estranged from Colonel House. Historians differ about the reasons and House himself sheds little light on the matter. In her book, My Memoir, Edith Wilson gives this vivid account:

“It was after midnight and very still aboard, when I heard my husband’s door open and the Colonel take his leave . . . Woodrow was standing. The change in his appearance shocked me. He seemed to have aged ten years, and his jaw was set in the way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself. Silently he held out his hand, which I grasped, crying ‘What is the matter? What has happened’?
“He smiled bitterly. ‘House has given away everything I had won before I left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again, and this time it will be harder.’”

House summed up the conversation in his diary: “The President comes back very militant and determined to put the League of Nations into the Treaty.” The next day Wilson ordered Ray Stannard Baker, his official biographer, to issue a formal statement to the press:

“The President said today that the decision made at the Peace Conference at its plenary session, January 25, 1919, to the effect that the establishment of a League of Nations should be made an integral part of the Treaty of Paris, is of final force and there is no basis whatever for the reports that a change in this direction was contemplated.”

The estrangement between Wilson and House was the gossip of Paris. The distinguished writer, Henry L. Stoddard throws up his hands:

“Who knows the facts of that sundering of the most intimate ties that ever existed between the executive of a great nation and a man in civil life? The relation began in silence, it continued in silence, it ended in silence. Was it a myth—that unity of purpose and mind? Or was it real? Mystery of mysteries! Politics never saw its like.”

On June 29, House and Wilson had their last meeting. They would never see each other again.

“Guided only by the star of the Covenant,” wrote George Sylvester Viereck, “rejecting the knowledge of House, Wilson steered now to the left, now to the right, now forward, now backward. Dropping the pilot, House, he sailed alone in the treacherous waters of Paris . . .”

Czechoslovakia had proclaimed its independence on October 28, 1918. Yugoslavia followed on December 1. Hungary proclaimed itself an independent monarchy, the Austrians proclaimed a republic. Both declared that they were a new State and should not be penalized for the alleged misdeeds of a vanished empire. This was the situation as the Peace Conference prepared to wrestle with the demands of the Polish Commission.


The history of Poland begins in the year 963. A Polish-Lithuanian State, created in 1569, maintained an empire that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Three successive partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) among Prussia, Austria, and Russia resulted in the disappearance of Poland from the map of Europe. When these three were defeated in the Great War, Polish nationalism reasserted itself and an independent Poland was proclaimed with Joseph Pilsudski as Chief of State. On the problem of a resurrected Poland’s border with Germany, Winston Churchill wrote as follows:

"The actual crisis arose upon the report of the Commission on the future frontiers of Poland and Germany. The Commission among other things had assigned the whole of Upper Silesia to Poland as well as Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Mr. Lloyd George at once stigmatized the report as ‘unjust,’ since according to the statistics of the Commission itself, the number of Germans to be assigned to Polish sovereignty was too great. He therefore moved that the report should be sent back to the Commission. The Commission reconsidered it, but refused to alter their recommendations. The French championed the Commission.
According to present-day opinion, Mr. Lloyd George was, of course, entirely in the right. The proposals of the Commission were indefensible." (my italics)

Through the intervention of Lloyd George, Danzig was not transferred to Polish sovereignty as originally proposed by the Commission but given the status of a self-governing civic state; Poland would administer the harbor and its relations with the outside world. A corridor through east Prussia was assigned to Poland to provide her with access to Danzig.

All of this was problematic enough, but the Conference was deadlocked on the issue of Upper Silesia. Wilson and Clemenceau insisted upon its cession to Poland, Lloyd George remained opposed and Germany invoked the principle of self-determination. After a long and bitter debate, it was decided to hold a plebiscite.
This was belatedly done in 1920 under the supervision of British and French troops. As these were preparing the disputed zones for voting, Polish guerrillas under the leadership of Korfanty invaded the region with the intention of stopping the plebiscite. The Germans retaliated and the fighting quickly escalated into a minor civil war, and reached a dangerous pass with Britain sympathizing with the Germans and France siding with the Poles. Good sense prevailed however and the plebiscite was duly held with Germany winning a large majority.
Even this did not resolve the impasse and the matter was referred to the Council of the League of Nations which in turn referred it to one representative each of Brazil, Spain, Belgium and China. In the end, a compromise was reached which failed to respect the results of the plebiscite and was bitterly resented by Germany. Churchill was moved to write:

“This was the greatest blot upon the draft Treaty with Germany. The rest was implicit in the acceptance of the Fourteen Points; but the enforced cession of the whole of Upper Silesia was received with vehement German resentment and indeed with general surprise.” It was however the awkward and unwieldy Danzig arrangement that would prove to be the flashpoint for a second World War two decades hence.

Some 3,500,000 Sudeten Germans were to be integrated into the new state of Czechoslovakia while hundreds of thousands living in the Polish Corridor were to be transferred to Polish sovereignty. On June 21, 1919, the Vossische Zeitung wrote: “The flight from West Prussia and other parts of the Eastern Marches, which are about to be transferred from Prussia to Poland, to the Western and Central German provinces, is increasing to such an extent, that the Germans remaining there are very depressed.”

Germany’s armed forces fared no better. On this Churchill writes: “The military terms finally agreed to are astonishing! A nation of sixty millions, hitherto the first military power in the world, was forbidden for all time to have an army of more than 100,000.”

Many others besides Churchill objected to this almost criminal clause in the Treaty which left Germany vulnerable to the newly-created States on her borders. On May 26, 1919, Hans von Seeckt, the monocled creator of the Reichswehr, submitted a memorandum to the leader of the German delegation, Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau: “I want to state clearly,” he wrote, “that according to all competent military opinion an army of 100,000 men, with a limited officer corps, is not sufficient to fulfill the foreign tasks still remaining to Germany, even presuming a League of Nations, or to give the necessary backbone to its domestic policy . . . If Germany accepts these conditions, she becomes helpless in both the domestic and the foreign fields.” Such objections were ignored.

Germany’s urgent request for a reduction in reparations payments; her request for an independent inquiry into the causes of the War; Austria’s request for Anschluss with Germany—all were denied.

Private property belonging to German nationals was to be confiscated in China (Articles 129,132), Egypt (Article 148), Liberia (Articles 135-140). Germany was to be deprived of all colonial possessions, forbidden to import war materials or maintain air-forces or submarines.

The Allied Powers were to have free access to the German market for five years while Germany herself faced high foreign tariff barriers and was forbidden to invest in neighboring countries.

France was allowed to occupy all German territory west of the Rhine for fifteen years and to collect the profits of the coal mines in the Saar district. These were the conditions that enabled a chaotic post-war Germany, even the Communists, to agree on one thing: “Versailles muss fallen!”

To this day the ghost of Versailles haunts the capitals of Europe and America, its plaintive and disturbing refrain echoing through the musty corridors of power, almost audible to diplomats and politicos: Germany was innocent in 1914 . . .

[Terry Duncan]

Germany’s armed forces fared no better. On this Churchill writes: “The military terms finally agreed to are astonishing! A nation of sixty millions, hitherto the first military power in the world, was forbidden for all time to have an army of more than 100,000.”

The USA was a larger nation with a population of 99,111,000 people, and managed with an army of 98,000 men in 1914, so this size standing army is by no means tiny. It may well have been smaller than pre-war, but then as the loser in that conflict Germany could hardly expect to see the 1914 status quo restored.

As to the rest, it really needs no further comment from me.

[peterhof]

The USA was a larger nation with a population of 99,111,000 people, and managed with an army of 98,000 men in 1914, so this size standing army is by no means tiny. It may well have been smaller than pre-war, but then as the loser in that conflict Germany could hardly expect to see the 1914 status quo restored.

As to the rest, it really needs no further comment from me.

Perhaps, But the USA was not "surrounded by a number of small States, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable system of government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of [Americans] clamouring for reunion with their native land."

Henry W. Nevinson was a distinguished British war correspondent who covered the Boer War, the Balkan Wars, and the Gallipoli landing where he was wounded. An author of over thirty books and a major figure in the British women's suffragette movement, Nevinson wrote the following about the 1919 Treaty of Versailles:

"Shameful and disastrous as was the whole Treaty of Versailles, there was one clause in it that surpassed all others in shame. It was Article 231, and it ran:-

'The Allied and Associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of herself and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.'

Other Articles in the Treaty are shameless in their bullying treatment of a gallant and vanguished enemy, and in the acquisitive greed that is sure to engender future wars, but that Article expresses a lie of such grossness that I wonder the hand which first wrote it did not wither. I do not wonder that the German representative to whom it was first shown refused to sigh such an atrocious perversion of the truth. Ultimately a German did consent to sign, and his consent is the most terrible evidence of the abject misery to which war, disease, and the starvation of women and children owing to the British blockade for seven months after the Armistice had reduced the German people.
Whether M. Clemenceau or Mr. Lloyd George concocted the lie, I cannot be sure, but amid all the orgy of iniquity that prevailed in Versailles in 1919, that Article stands out as conspicuous, and no historian will ever dare to repeat it except with indignant scorn. That is quite certain, no matter what view of the War's origins history may take.

Indeed! History's verdict of the infamous Treaty of Versailles is still evolving, but there seems little doubt that the real truth about the origin of the Great War will reveal the "Treaty" in the fullness of shame and hypocrisy which it will forever symbolize for future generations..

[South]

Good morning Peter Hof,

References to the UK-US War of 1812, the Lloyd George quote of 25 March 1919, the 26 May 1919 comment by Hans von Seackt on the reduced German army size (and esp. no capital ships) ... but an absolute silence on an event in Russia precluding the Czar from sending a delegation...

I don't know about today's European capitols but in Washington, D.C. Germany was not considered "innocent in 1914".

Germany had an initial confrontational involvement since 1871.


Warm regards,

Bob

[ljadw]

About the statement of LG from march 1919 about the Polish proposals to include 2.1 million Germans in the Polish state
1)if it was that bad,why was LG approving it ?
2)that a lot of Germans would form part of Poland,was inevitable,otherwise a lot of Poles would form part of Germany
3)IMHO,the real culprit was Wilson,who,with his book-learning,and ignorant of the situation in the concerned territories,was making the situation worse:the multi-cultural A-H empire had to disappear, to be replaced by ...a multicultural Poland,a multicultural Yugoslavia,a multicultural Romania,a multicultural Czechoslowakia ,who were dominated by the Poles,the Serbs,the Romanians,the Czechs
4)Clemenceau about Wilson :a mixture of a missionary with a arms dealer :in the left hand :the bible ,in the right hand :the catalogue of new weapons
5)The same could be said about Wilson II :FDR.
6)the tragedy was that in 1919 and in 1945,there was in the White House an arrogant liberal American thinking that he had the mission to solve the problems in Europe .

[David Thompson]

peterhof -- You're still not sourcing your quotes, although I warned you about the requirement at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 1#p1628921. This is your second warning. There won't be a third.

[Terry Duncan]

A lengthy post from Peterhof has been removed as it contained nothing to do with the Treaty of Versailles except the opening statement;

The greatest tragedy of the treaty of Versailles is in what it did NOT do. It did NOT deal with Lenin and the Bosheviks.

Peterhof, there is a forum dedicated to the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1945 where posts about matters concerning Lenin and interwar politics may well be welcome;

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewforum.php?f=79

Such matters do not belong in the WWI forum. Making the statement X did not deal with Y, does not provide sufficient grounds to post topics outside the scope of the forum. Please try to place your posts in the correct forum in future.