Versailles Treaty Violations

A Violation

The Treaty of Versailles was a violation of Wilson’s ideals. The Treaty is one of the most important agreements (or disagreements) that shaped 20th century Europe socially and physically. Woodrow Wilson on January 22, 1917 in an address to the United States Senate called for a peace without victors, but the Treaty signed by the participating nations was everything but that. The blame for the war was placed on Germany and justified the reparations that were outlined by the treaty for the war. The terms of the treaty were very harsh to the Germans and they took on great resentment. It was a fragile peace agreement that would be used as fuel to keep hostilities going 20 years later.

When the details of the treaty were published in

Several of the clauses of the Treaty were thought to be very harsh. It was going to be almost impossible to pay the reparations. In fact, the German government gave up after only one year, and the War Guilt Clause seemed very unfair. How could Germany be the only country to blame for the war? After all it had started when a Serbian shot an Austrian. It was felt that Germany had been simply made a scapegoat by the other countries for all that had happened. Looking back it is clear that the Treaty of Versailles created more problems than it actually solved.

The treaty broke up empires and changed boundaries. The Germans lost territory and other countries tried to weaken Germany’s military potential and strengthen their own to compensate for the destruction of their lands caused by the Germans. The Germans were unanimously against the Treaty of Versailles. They viewed the terms of the treaty as humiliating and merciless, designed to keep Germany militarily and economically weak. To the Germans, the Treaty of Versailles was not the beginning of the New World that Wilson had promised, but a horrible

The conclusions of the war included the following; Germany was forced to reduce its army to 100,000 men, reduce the navy to 6 warships and was not allowed to have any submarines, destroy all of its air force, give land to Belgium, France, Denmark and Poland, hand over all of its colonies, agree to pay reparations to the Allies for all of the damage caused by the war, put no soldiers or military equipment within 30 miles of the east bank of the Rhine, and accept all of the blame for the war (War Guilt Clause.) Italy was given the two small areas of Istria and the South Tirol. The Adriatic coast was made part of a new country called Yugoslavia, which included Serbia and Bosnia. Other new countries were created; Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were formed from land lost by Russia. Czechoslovakia and Hungary were formed out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Allies also gave Germany a new form of government based on proportional representation. It was meant to prevent Germany from being taken over by a dictatorship, but it led to the creation of more than thirty political parties; none of them was big enough to form a government on