Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, formally ending the state of war between the German Reich and the Allied and Associated Powers, five years to the day after the assassination that triggered the war. Article 231, the so-called War Guilt Clause, held Germany and its allies responsible for all the loss and damage the Allied governments had suffered as a consequence of a war imposed upon them, and made that responsibility the legal basis for reparations; the treaty itself did not fix a final reparations total, leaving an Inter-Allied Reparation Commission to notify Germany of the amount by 1 May 1921, while requiring an immediate 20 billion gold marks in the meantime. Germany lost its overseas colonies and about 13 percent of its European territory, including Alsace-Lorraine to France, and its army was capped at 100,000 men with no air force, tanks, or submarines permitted. Part I of the treaty was the Covenant of the League of Nations, founding the League as part of the same postwar settlement. The treaty's severity has been debated ever since: British Treasury representative John Maynard Keynes resigned from the peace conference in protest and, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), argued it was a punitive Carthaginian peace that would financially ruin Germany and destabilize Europe, a reading that became close to orthodoxy for decades; later historians, including Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2001), have argued the treaty was less exceptional in its harshness than that reputation suggests, noting Germany's territorial losses were considerably smaller than those Germany itself had imposed on Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918.