To Crush Your Enemies and See Them Driven Before You

Signed one hundred years ago today, the Treaty of Versailles contributed more to the outbreak of World War Two than any other event not named "Adolf Hitler." Meeting amidst the splendors of Louis XIV's palace with representatives of the German state, the victorious Allies kicked their Great War adversaries in the teeth, hard. Germany lost most of its armed forces and twenty-five percent of its territory, and took on a reparations bill of 130 billion marks (about 400 billion dollars in modern currency), a sum so great that it fueled the hyperinflation that ruined the Weimar Republic. Germans also had to accept responsibility for World War One, declaring themselves the sole guilty party and Britain and France spotless victims. The German commissioners had no choice but to accept this humiliating treaty: thousands of their countrymen were dying from Britain's blockade, which the Royal Navy continued after the Armistice to keep Germany on its knees. The British and French planned to keep the German nation in that posture for years to come.

Joseph Finnemore, Signing of the Treaty of Versailles (Public Domain, 1919)

As important as the onerous terms of the Versailles treaty was the Allies' decision to conclude it with a united Germany. The victors of World War One had broken up the other two empires in the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire), but left the German polity of 1871 intact. A.J.P. Taylor drew attention to this peculiarity of the post-1918 peace settlement in Origins of the Second World War (1962). He did not need to explain why the German exception proved a fateful one. When a violent nationalist regime took power in Berlin in the 1930s, and began looking for vengeance, a united Germany's population and resources ensured that it would be able to take revenge on its former conquerors.

Also worth noting: the statesmen at Versailles and the other post-WWI treaty conferences may have thought themselves makers of a lasting peace, but hundreds of thousands of more obscure men still had guns in their hands and wounded pride in their hearts. The guns fell silent in France and Italy but continued their deadly work elsewhere. Germany surrendered, but the reactionary freikorps kept killing in Bavaria and the Baltics, gunning down socialists and Latvian nationalists. Fighting continued on the old Eastern Front for years, until the Bolsheviks triumphed over the counter-revolutionary armies who opposed them. By then over a million people had died, not including those who succumbed to famine in southern Russia and Ukraine. Turkish nationalists did not accept the Allies' colonization of the Ottoman Empire. Under Kemal Ataturk they defeated a Greek army sent to colonize western Anatolia, forced Britain and France out of Istanbul, and created a united Turkish ethnostate. At the southern end of the Ottoman domain, the Saud family cancelled the political victory of Britain's clients, the Hashemites, seizing the Hejaz in 1924-25 and establishing the independent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Domination and humiliation make poor foundations for peace, particularly if those doing the dominating and humiliating are themselves exhausted by years of war. (See Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End [2016].)