As we've already seen,
the end of fighting in World War I,
or I guess we have the end
of fighting in World War I
at the end of 1918.
In 1919 it's time to talk about
the terms for peace.
This happens at the Paris Peace Conference.
At this conference, you have all the
parties of all the major warring parties,
but the terms of peace
are dictated by the winners.
The major powers among the winners
are led by these gentlemen right over here.
This is Prime Minister Lloyd George of the UK,
Vittorio Orlando of Italy,
Georges Clemenceau of France,
President Woodrow Wilson of the United States.
They come to the Paris Peace Conference
with very different outlooks of
what the peace should look like.
We already learned about
President Wilson's "Fourteen Points".
It was very idealistic.
It talked about making the world
safe for democracy, how people should
determine their own fate,
how we should have the self-determination,
the end of empires, free trade,
creating a League of Nations so that
you can avoid things like World War I again.
The European side was not quite
as idealistic, especially the French.
As you can imagine, the U.S. lost a lot
of soldiers in World War I, but
the French lost a significant fraction
of their adult males in World War I.
The ugly western front was fought
in their country, so they were much more
eager to make Germany pay for what it's done.
The terms of the treaty with Germany,
the Treaty of Versailles,
and the Treaty of Versailles,
it's important to note, is only one of
several treaties that came out of the
Paris Peace Conference.
It tends to get the most attention
because it was a treaty with Germany,
Treaty of Versailles, and many people
blame it for being part of the cause
for World War II.
It so humiliated Germany that it was
so unacceptable, that it allowed
a character like Hitler to come along
and lead Germany back into war.
The Treaty of Versailles was the treaty
with Germany .
You have other treaties; with the Austrians and now since
the Austro-Hungarian empire is being broken up,
the Hungarians, the Ottomans, so on and so forth.
The Treaty of Versailles did several things.
First, this was kind of in line
especially with the French-thinking, is
it assigned the guilt to Germany ...
So war guilt.
War guilt for Germany.
And depending on where you view,
you could view this as a fairly strong thing.
The argument for saying Germany is
responsible for the war is in
late July, early August of 1914,
it didn't take much for Germany
to declare war on Russia, then on France,
and then invade Belgium.
This was literally a matter of days.
It was pretty clear that Germany was
already mobilized to do this,
it was eager to do this,
and it did do this without much provocation.
At that point, it was really just based on
Russian mobilization.
Those who would argue this was a little strong,
would say Germany definitely played a role
in the war, in maybe escalating the war,
but it didn't start the war.
You have the assassination of
the Archduke of Franz Ferdinand,
of Austro-Hungary.
It was supported by elements in Serbia.
Then you have the Austro-Hungarians who
put out these very hard terms to
the Serbians, bring these people to justice
immediately, otherwise we're declaring war.
It seemed like they wanted to declare war.
They do declare war in July of 1914.
The Russians, they don't let that be
a little regional conflict,
the Russians decide to start mobilizing,
giving the Germans the pretext to
justify their invasions,
to kind of trigger this blank check
that they've given the Austro-Hungarians.
There's a lot of blame that could go around,
but the Treaty of Versailles places it
with Germany.
This justifies the rationale to make
Germany pay for the war.
This leads to reparations ...
Reparations for Germany,
which is essentially is like,
"Look, Germany, you don't have to pay
the ally powers for all of their lost,
especially their losses to their
economy due to the fact that you
are guilty of starting of this war guilt."
The reparations were not just in
paper currency, the reparations were
in gold, in resources.
It was a very tangible reparations.
It's an interesting question because
these reparations are often referred to
when people talked to,
these were disabling reparations.
They brought the German economy down.
It is an open question. They were large.
In modern dollars, the estimates I've seen,
they were approximately
$400 billion in 2013 money.
That is a very, very large number,
but it's not a huge number for
a reasonably-sized economy like Germany.
Although the economy was in bad shape
at the end of World War I.
It's not clear whether it by itself
would have debilitated their economy.
More likely, or if you were to think
it's a cause, it's more the humiliation of it,
that generations of Germans,
many of them; 10, 20, 30 years in the future,
had nothing to do with World War I,
would be continuing to pay
reparations to the allies.
So there's a question of its impact on
the economy and there's just the question
of how humiliating it was.
As we go, the reparations only last
for about 10 years and
Germany pays the equivalent of about
$60 billion in modern terms,
$60 billion in 2013 dollars.
That's equivalent to about $5 billion
in 1920 money.
On top of the reparations,
the allies were not interested in
fighting another war with Germany,
although ironically, by having very harsh
terms of the treaty, they might have
triggered the next war in World War II,
The Rise of Hitler.
Since they didn't want to have another
war with Germany, they essentially limited
the German army to 100,000 men,
which is a very small army,
as we've seen in many of the battles.
You had battles with 400,000 or 500,000 men,
so this is pretty much just like a
police force, it's not really an army.
They weren't allowed any longer to have
submarines, U-boats, any kind of
heavy military equipment, artillary,
heavy artillary, military airplanes,
battleships of any kind.
It was really just a scaffold of an army
so that there wouldn't be another,
or they hoped there would not be,
another German invasion.
On top of that, Germany was stripped of territory.
... Territory ...
Some of that was directly in Germany.
Poland was carved out of part of
the German empire.
This is the new Poland that's carved out
out of the Paris Peace Conference.
You see right over here, it cuts Germany
into two pieces.
East Prussia is still part of Germany,
but it's all by itself right out here.
Poland is cut out,
Germany loses Alsace-Lorraine, which
it captured in 1871 after the
Franco-Prussian war.
Mineral-rich region, the French had been
eager to get it back.
The Germans, actually that was one of their
arguable justification why they wanted
to premptively attack France,
because they knew that France was
eager to capture it back
at some point in the future.
On top of that, Germany lost its colonies.
Germany was nowhere near as big of an
empire as the British or even the French,
it was actually a fairly new country
formed in 1871, but it did have an empire.
It had colonies in southwest Africa,
I'll do this in darker colors,
actually throughout Africa and had colonies
in the Pacific.
It even had a colony in China.
All of that was then given over to
the allies.
The big idea, from the Treaty of Versailles,
is that, most historians would say it
was really kind of sticking it to
the Germans.
The Germans felt it was humilating
and one could argue that it led to
some of the extremism that we'll see
in the next few decades of Germany.
The one win that Woodrow Wilson was able
to get out the Treaty of Versailles,
is it did set up the League of Nations.
The League of Nations.
The irony here is that the US does not
ratify the Treaty of Versailles because
it's suspicious of these kind of
extra national organizations.
It actually wasn't happy with some of the
territorial distribution, that it was
just giving it from empire to another
as opposed to having self-determination.
The US was not actually a signatory,
it did not actually sign the treaty.
It did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
Regardless of that, the Treaty of Versailles
had a huge impact in sticking it to the Germans.
On top of that, the Paris Peace Conference,
as we've already said,
had various treaties with the other
central powers and some of the,
and I'm not going to go into detail
on what happened, especially
the Ottoman Empire, that's worth another video,
but the big effect on the Austro-Hungarian
Empire is that it essentially is not
an empire anymore.
It was split up into various countries.
Austria was set up as a separate country.
Actually the Treaty of Versailles,
in the Treaty of Versailles,
Germany is forbidden from in any way
merging with Austria, a German-speaking country.
You have Hungary becoming a separate state.
You have a new state of Czechoslovakia.
You have a new state of Yugoslavia.
All of a sudden, the trigger of
World War I, the desire of having this
unified southern Slavik state is now
becoming a reality.
You have Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia ...
and Slovenia are taken out of
the Austro-Hungarian empire.
You have a major redrawing of the map
of Europe.
Some of these new nations here
in eastern Europe are out of
the old Russian empire.
They were able to declare their independence,
some of it short-lived before becoming
satellite states or becoming part of
the USSR, but they had their
short-lived independence after the fall
of the Russian empire.
The map of Europe is dramatically changed
due to the Paris Peace Conference,
the Treaty of Versailles,
the fall of the Russian empire,
the other treaties that were outcomes
of World War I.