The Treaty of Versailles

The victors met at the palace of Versailles in 1919 to settle the war, and Germany was not invited to negotiate — it was handed the terms and told to sign, which Germans bitterly called the Diktat. The treaty's Article 231 assigned Germany and its allies responsibility for the war, and that clause became the legal basis for reparations later fixed at 132 billion gold marks. Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France and territory to a reconstituted Poland, forfeited its overseas colonies, had the Rhineland demilitarized, and saw its army capped at 100,000 men with no air force, submarines, or tanks. The treaty also created the League of Nations — which the United States, whose president had proposed it, then refused to join. The British economist John Maynard Keynes resigned from the delegation in protest and published a book predicting the settlement would wreck Europe's economy and produce another war. Whether it actually caused what followed is genuinely disputed by historians — but the resentment it fed was real, and it was harvested.