Treaty of Versailles
The 1919 peace that ended the First World War, stripped Germany of territory and weapons, and convinced Germans they had been robbed rather than beaten.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors of the palace outside Paris. The date was five years to the day after the assassination in Sarajevo, and the room was the one where the German Empire had been proclaimed after France's defeat in 1871. None of that was an accident. The treaty was a settlement and a humiliation at the same time.
Germany was not at the negotiating table. Its delegation was brought in at the end, handed the text, allowed to file written objections, and told that refusing to sign meant the return of the naval blockade that had already killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians. Germans called it the Diktat, the dictated peace, and that word did more political work over the next twenty years than any clause in the document.
What it required
Germany lost about thirteen percent of its European territory and all of its colonies. Alsace and Lorraine went back to France. Eupen and Malmedy went to Belgium, northern Schleswig to Denmark after a vote, and a large stretch of the east to the new Polish state, including a corridor to the sea that cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany. Danzig became a free city. The Saar coalfield went to France for fifteen years. Union with Austria was forbidden, which meant national self-determination applied to everyone in Europe except Germans.
The military terms capped the army at 100,000 men and abolished conscription, the general staff, submarines, military aircraft, and tanks. The Rhineland was permanently demilitarized and occupied for fifteen years.
Then there was Article 231, which assigned Germany and its allies responsibility for the damage caused by the war. American lawyers wrote it as the legal basis for charging reparations, and an almost identical clause went into the treaty with Austria. In Germany it was read as a verdict of guilt and became a permanent grievance. The reparations bill was set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks, a headline figure that hid a structure in which only about 50 billion was ever seriously expected.
Was it too harsh?
Versailles has the worst reputation of any modern peace treaty, and a good part of that reputation is propaganda that worked. John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, convincing a generation of British and American readers that the terms were vindictive and impossible to meet. That belief fed straight into the appeasement of the 1930s. If the treaty was unjust, German demands to revise it sounded reasonable.
The numbers do not support him. Germany paid a fraction of what it owed, largely with money borrowed from American banks. Its factories and cities came through the war untouched, and both of its great continental rivals, Russia and Austria-Hungary, had collapsed. Looking at the map alone, Germany was in a better strategic position in 1925 than in 1913.
The real problem was that the treaty fell between two stools. It was harsh enough to make revenge a permanent theme in German politics and not harsh enough to stop Germany acting on it. The Allies then failed to enforce what they had written, which taught Berlin that the terms were negotiable for anyone willing to test them.
Compare 1945. The Allies occupied Germany for a decade, put its leaders on trial, rebuilt its economy with American money, and brought it into institutions it helped to run. That was far harsher in the short term than Versailles, and it produced an ally instead of an enemy.