home | 1901-World War II | Turkey and Islam, 1900 to 1930

Germany's Social Democrat
chancellor, then president,
Friedrich Ebert

Negotiations

In elections in November 1918, Republicans captured both the U. S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The U.S. public favored a rapid return home of American troops in Europe and the hanging of Wilhelm. Wilson was preparing to go to Paris to join with other leaders in creating the settlement that would turn the armistice into a formal settlement of the war. And the Republicans were making the settlement of the war a partisan political issue. They opposed Wilson acquiring glory at Paris. The Senate Majority Leader, Lodge of Massachusetts, was disappointed that Wilson had not included him in his entourage going to Paris. And no Republican was working with Wilson on foreign policy.

Abroad in the Allied nations, Wilson enjoyed prestige. Massive numbers of people were giving Wilson's pronouncements more attention than they were the utterances of their own leaders. They saw Wilson not only as a victor but also respected him for being an idealist and a moral force. They failed to realize that Wilson's idealism was at odds with their views. Many of these people in the Allied nations still hated Germany. They still wanted to see revenge against Germany and to "make Germany pay for the war."

The Paris Peace Conference began in January, with representatives attending from twenty-seven nations. Many Germans hoped that because Germany was now a democracy that it would be treated with a modicum of fairness. The world needed reconciliation and renewed economic ties - renewed integration. President Wilson favored reconciliation. But, among the Allies, self-righteousness and vindictiveness prevailed. The peace conference began without Germany having been invited to speak for its interests.

The representative at Paris for the British was its prime minister, David Lloyd-George. Lloyd-George had recently announced his opposition to a peace that would ruin Germany. But at Paris, Lloyd-George echoed the sentiments of the British public: he said he wanted Wilhelm to be hanged. He also wished to see Germany made impotent as a naval power. He called for stripping Germany of its colonies in Africa and the Pacific. And he joined the British public in favoring making Germany pay for the war.

France wanted assurances that Germany would not march again into France. France considered that Germany had twice the population of France and was more advanced industrially, and the leader of the French delegation, France's premier, Georges Clemenceau, remained convinced that no agreements on paper would compensate France for these realities. Clemenceau proposed dividing Germany into a number of independent states, to weaken Germany economically, and to take from Germany the Rhineland - although the Rhineland was clearly a land of Germans. And Clemenceau and the French wanted Germany to pay for the war, including damages to French property and pensions to French war widows and orphans.

Italy wanted the rewards it had been expecting for having entered the war: lands at the expense of what had been the empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans - regardless of ethnic distributions. And Italy wanted the port of Fiume, not minding that this would be punishing South Slavs (yugo-Slavs) for the sins of Austria-Hungary.

President Wilson had leverage at Paris. Europe was dependent on food supplies from the United States, and Wilson had troops in Europe that he could threaten to withdraw. Wilson could have threatened to make a separate peace with Germany. Wilson did threaten to walk out in opposition to the French proposal to divide Germany into independent states, but otherwise he was too much of an idealist to threaten his Allies. Wilson was eager to please. He wanted to cooperate and compromise so he could create his dream: the League of Nations

The Paris Peace Conference planned a League of Nations whose members were to respect and help preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of all other League members - aimed most importantly at preserving the security of France against Germany. The League, moreover, was to establish a court to settle conflicts submitted by member states. The production of arms and  munitions were to be kept below a level desired by League members. And League members were to be obliged to maintain fair and humane conditions for their people.

Continuing the wartime military alliance - similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after World War II -  would have been a better instrument in deterring future aggressions than the League of Nations. And, in this direction, Wilson promised military aid to France if France were the victim of an unprovoked attack by Germany, but this needed the approval of the U.S. Senate - as did the entire treaty - and Clemenceau must have been aware that such approval might be difficult to obtain.

The Treaty Conclusions

The settlement created at Paris was signed in a ceremony just outside Paris, at Versailles, and became known at the Treaty of Versailles (pronounced ver-SI, the I like the word eye). It included no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe: nothing that would help stabilize Europe economically. The treaty put limits on Germany's military strength. The German army was to be cut to 100,000, with no General Staff. Germany was to have machine guns with which to put down revolution and a few boats to guard its coast, but it was to have no airforce, navy, tanks or heavy guns. Germany's Rhineland was to remain permanently disarmed. And France was to occupy Germany's Rhineland and Saar regions for fifteen years.

The treaty took territory from Germany and placed ten percent of Germany's population outside of the newly created German boundaries. Alsace and Lorraine were to be transferred from Germany back to France. A chunk of territory that was traditionally German (Western Prussia) was detached from Germany and given to a newly created Poland. The German port city of Danzig (Gdansk) was detached from Germany and made a free city to be governed by a commission appointed by the League of Nations. A corridor was established between Danzig and Poland, splitting East Prussia from the rest of Germany; and in Danzig the Poles were given control over customs. The city of Memel, which had been in East Prussia and largely German in culture and population (with some Lithuanian inhabitants) was removed from East Prussia, placed under the administration of the League of Nations, and eventually it would be given to Lithuania. And Germany had lost its colonies in China, the South Pacific and Africa.

For propaganda purposes, the treaty included a clause that described Germany alone as responsible for the war. And the treaty proclaimed that Wilhelm was to be tried in a special court - an Allied tribunal - for "the supreme offense against international morality and sanctity of treaties."

The Paris settlement disbanded the Habsburg Empire. Hungary was to become an independent entity, and a state called Czechoslovakia was created. Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro were to join Serbia, creating the new state called Yugoslavia. Austrian Tyrol was give to Italy. And Austria, - a predominately German land - was forbidden to unite with Germany.

The economic impact of the treaty was detrimental for Germany. Wilson had given into the demand that Germany pay huge sums of cash for years as reparations to France and Britain. And other economic issues were troubling. The shift in boundaries deprived Germany of fifteen percent of its rye and wheat potential, and Germany had lost twenty-seven percent of its hard coal production in the shift of territory to Poland. The treaty demanded more coal from Germany than Germany could give while meeting its own minimal needs. Where the Rhine River separated Germany and France, France was to have the only right to water for irrigation and power. Germany was to be allowed to import but not to export - and to be limited in the duties it could impose on imports from Allied and other powers. Unable to export, Germany, an industrial power, would not be able to earn the money it needed to import raw materials for its industries or to import the food it needed to feed its people.

A British delegate to the conference, John Maynard Keynes, resigned from his delegation in protest. He denounced the treaty as ruinous for Germany and as damaging the international economic structure of Europe. The health of Germany's economy, he pointed out, was important to Europe as a whole, Germany having been, before the war, the best customer of many European nations and the second and third best customer of some others, including France. Keynes was later to describe Wilson as able at making speeches but as a "blind and deaf Don Quixote"  who allowed swifter men at the conference table to maneuver him "off his ground."

Pope Benedict XV was disappointed with the settlement. He had been opposed to a dictated peace and described the treaty as a "consecration of hatred" and a "perpetuation of war." 

The Impact on Germany, Asia and Africa

The treaty was presented to the German government in May, 1919, with the threat that if Germany did not accept the treaty by June 23, hostilities would resume. Germans were outraged by the contents of the treaty, by the corridor at Danzig, by the reparations payments that they saw would be taken from the pockets of working people in the form of lower wages, and they were outraged over the clause describing Germany as guilty for having created the war.

Germany's Social Democrat president, Ebert (president since February 11) considered resuming the war by taking up defensive positions. He telephoned Hindenburg's assistant, General Groener, who spoke to Hindenburg, and Hindenburg is reported to have told Groener "you know what must be done. I am going for a walk." And Groener told Ebert that the army was in no shape to fight.

Again, Germany's military had left the civilians in government with the onus of defeat. Because Social Democrats were in power, Social Democrats would be blamed for accepting the treaty. As soon as the treaty was presented to the Germans, tensions arose in Germany. Known pacifists, such as Albert Einstein, felt threatened - Einstein withdrawing his support of a group that supported the League of Nations. The treaty signed at Versailles had begun to poison German society.

On June 21, Germans sank their warships rather than turn them over to the Allies. Then, on June 28, Germany signed the treaty. Austria signed in September, and Bulgaria in November. Hungary, which had driven Béla Kun from power and returned to right-wing rule, signed in June 1920. The Turks signed in August, 1920. The Dutch remained a little more objective about Wilhelm than those among the Allied powers: they refused to allow the Allies to take Wilhelm prisoner. And the Dutch  thwarted an attempt by a cabal of United States military officers to kidnap him.

Racism and Imperialism in Africa and the Middle East

At the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had tried to include a clause on racial equality, but the leaders of the western powers at Paris, Wilson among them, were unwilling to support such a declaration. Colonialism was still dependent upon the notion of superiority of the white race, and rather than move to end imperialism, the creators of the peace treaty sought its perpetration. They made Germany's colonies in Africa the common property of the League of Nations. Without consulting the local people concerned, the settlement gave Britain control of German East Africa and a part of the German Cameroon. It gave France control over Togoland, South Africa took control over another portion of Germany's African empire. And Germany's holdings in the Pacific were divided between Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

Arabic speaking peoples felt betrayed by the Peace Treaty. Arabs fighting with the Allied powers against rule by the Turks had been promised independence, and they had been looking forward to the independence called for in Wilson's Fourteen Points. A proclamation poster distributed in Baghdad when British troops passed through in 1917, spoke of Arabs managing their "civil affairs in collaboration with the Poltiical Representative of Great Britain ... in realizing the aspirations of your Race." Britain occupied Bazra believing that the sacrifice of British blood "for the peace of the world" gave them the right to do so. It was an occupation designed to safefuard British oil interests in Persia. The Arabs found themselves without a voice at the Paris conference, and at Paris it was decided that Palestine and Mesopotamia (the latter to be called Iraq) would be administered by Britain, and it was decided that Syria and Lebanon would be administered by France - all under mandates of the League of Nations.

In 1920 the British were fighting an insurrection in Iraq. Britain's prime minister, Lloyd-George responded to complaints by asking what would happen if his forces withdrew and saying that he would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion."

Unrest in China

Among those King George of Britain had wired congratulations to at the end of the war were the Chinese. China had joined the Allies during World War I, hoping to win some favor with them, especially control over Germany's holdings in China, and China had sent laborers to Europe as their contribution to the Allied war effort. The Chinese had been unaware that the Allies had promised the Japanese control of Germany's holdings in China (in Shandung Province, which protrudes into the Yellow Sea), and when this was disclosed during the Paris Conference student protests erupted in China. The students learned that the Japanese had paid a Chinese warlord in Beijing a huge sum of money to agree to Japan's taking over the German holdings. The student protests gave birth to the May 4th Movement, whose slogans were "struggle for sovereignty" and "throw out the warlord traitors." The Chinese viewed the peace treaty as a betrayal. And they saw the moralism in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points as hypocritical. At the Paris Peace Conference, the delegation from Beijing's warlord government acceded to public opinion in China and refused to sign the peace treaty.

Korea

Koreans also felt betrayed by the Paris conference. Wilson’s talk of a just settlement to the war in 1918 had inspired wishful thinking among the Koreans, who yearned for freedom from Japanese rule, which they had been living under since 1910. The Koreans had suffered censorship by the Japanese, and. under the Japanese, education opportunities had been denied to all but a few. The Koreans had been denied the full benefits of their own rice crops. And business opportunities had been preserved for the Japanese.

With the beginning of the Paris Peace talks, the Koreans had planned a peaceful demonstration in their nation's capital, to be accompanied by a public pledge of support for Korean independence, a move made largely by Korea's teachers, Christian pastors and professional men. Participants in the day of demonstration were asked to carry homemade flags, to parade, wave flags and chant "may Korea live a thousand years." It was a day that was to become a great day of remembrance, and mourning. The march was about 500,000 strong and witnessed by some American citizens. Japan's agents in Korea labeled the demonstrations as riots. Troops fired into the demonstrators. Japanese forces attacked and burned Christian churches. 6,670 Koreans died, 14,611 were wounded, and 52,770 arrested. Across Korea, outrage against the Japanese intensified, and rebellion took the Japanese months to control. Many Koreans - some armed - fled into Manchuria and into Korea's mountains, while at Paris the Peace Conference refused to allow Koreans to plead their case.

Some Koreans tried assassinating Japanese officials in Korea. Koreans in Los Angeles began organizing a drive for Korea's independence. A new organization called the National Council of the Korean Provisional Republic appointed as its leader a Korean in exile in the United States, Syngman Rhee (Yi Sung-man), and Rhee established his headquarters in Honolulu.

Japanese authorities claimed that the trouble in Korea stemmed from their having been too lenient with the Koreans, but Japan did an about face in August 1919. It sent a new Governor General to Korea, Admiral Saito Makoko, who claimed to respect Korean culture and customs and announced his intention to work toward and promote the happiness and well being of the Korean people. The new Governor General kept police less visible. But force against Koreans remained, as did Japanese censorship. And 11,831 Korean dissidents remained in prison.

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