A German View on the Treaty of Versailles in Retrospect

A German View on the Treaty of Versailles

"She paid £2,000,000,000 in reparations. We experienced insuperable difficulties in paying £1,000,000,000 to America - and we are a much richer country than Germany.

We stripped her of all her colonies.

We deprived her of part of her home provinces.

We took her great fleet away from her.

We reduced her army of millions to 100,000 men.

We deprived her of artillery, tanks, airplanes, and broke up all the machinery she possessed for re-equipping herself. " David Lloyd George

That is how David Lloyd George described the treaty of Versailles. Of course, the treaty was very harsh, and he was not the only one who thought that. Most of the English and especially the Americans were shocked when they read the Treaty, never imagining that their once reasonable punishments would amount to such a value. Most said that this was because when you analyze aspect after aspect, view after view, it just seems reasonable for Germany to pay so much or to be punished that badly. When you add all the punishments together, you get a huge and shocking result, though, that no country would have managed to tolerate. Out of the £2,000,000 that Germany had to pay, England barely managed to give £1,000,000 back to U.S.A. to pay back it's debts, and at the time England was a much richer country than Germany, so we can imagine how hard it must have been. Since everyone thought that the Treaty was harsh in the end, and they would never have managed to bear it, how were the Germans supposed to feel about it"

"The Treaty seemed to them to be wicked, unfair, dictation, a slave treaty. All Germans intended to repudiate it at some time in the future, if it did not fall to pieces of its own absurdity" AJP Taylor

First of all I would like to underline the fact that the Germans never accepted the treaty and if it weren't for England and France threatening to invade the country, they would have never signed it. In other words they were forced to accept...