Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad
-- SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by W.H. AUDEN
When the German delegation of 180 diplomats and technicians went to Versailles in 1919 to negotiate a peace treaty ending World War I, the French forced their train to creep along at 10 m.p.h. so that the Germans would get a vivid sense of the devastation their armies had wrought. In Versailles's Hall of Mirrors, Premier Georges Clemenceau had ominous words for them: "The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our account."
That account dated back not just to the murderous offensives on the Somme in 1916, but to 1870, when Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck provoked Emperor Napoleon III into declaring war, then smashed him at Sedan, annexed the iron- rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and imposed on France a heavy financial indemnity. But the Germans had their own view of this account, in which they had repeatedly been attacked and despoiled by the French, by Napoleon, by Louis XIV. Indeed, this conflict went back beyond the birth of either nation, to the time when the Romans subdued the Gauls but not the Germans, thus establishing the Rhine as the frontier of what was then considered the civilized world.
The Allied terms at Versailles were harsh. France would regain Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a trusteeship over the rich coal mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally to being guilty of aggression and pay all war damages, a sum estimated at more than $100 billion (around $600 billion in today's dollars). Until the Germans accepted these terms, the Allies would continue the strangling naval blockade they imposed in 1915. The Germans signed.
Germany was in a state of turmoil, ruin and mass hunger. It had lost nearly 2 million men, and its mutinous army had virtually disintegrated. Kaiser Wilhelm II had fled into exile in Holland. The Social Democrats had proclaimed a republic, with themselves in charge, and the Communists were challenging them for control of the streets. And in a hospital northeast of Berlin, raging at the nation's defeat, lay a 29-year-old Austrian corporal partly blinded by mustard gas. "In vain all the sacrifices," Adolf Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf (My Struggle). "In vain the death of 2 million . . . Hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed . . . I decided to go into politics."