Treaty Of Versailles

Treaty of Versailles

The treaty of Versailles was signed by German foreign minister Hermann MÐ"јller on June 28, 1919 and ratified by the League of Nations on January 10, 1920 - the culmination of six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference. Of the many provisions of the treaty, the most significant were articles 231-247, which placed all blame and responsibility on Germany for the outbreak of World War I.

The treaty penalized Germany in territorial, economic, and military areas. Germany was forced to surrender 13 percent of its prewar territory. Upper Silesia was abdicated to Poland, Eupen-et-MalmÐ"©dy was given to Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine was finally returned to France. In addition, German colonies and former Ottoman territories in the Middle East were assigned to the various victors under supervision from the League of Nations. The treaty also reduced the size of the German army to 100,000 volunteers and its navy to six cruisers and a few smaller vessels. Germany was forbidden to possess offensive weapons such as submarines, aircraft, tanks or heavy artillery, and its general staff was dissolved. Unlike any previous European peace treaties, Germany also had to pay the pensions of war victims and some compensation for their families. Additional penalties included the immediate payment of $5 billion in cash and the payment of France of large amounts of coal as compensation for Germany's destruction of French mines. Many German patents, including Bayer Aspirin, were seized and its Germany's major rivers were internationalized.

However, this treaty was a weak compromise that left the German's embittered and wanting of another war. One of the problems was that the treaty created a disproportionate number of German's in surrounding small countries. As a result, the principle of self-determination by the Fourteen Points was doomed to failure. Czechoslovakia had three million Germans, one million Hungarians, and a half million poles out of a population of 15 million.