12 Mark Question

Pelayo Martinez

Why did The Treaty of Versailles Anger the Germans so much in 1919?
A good reason to start off with is the great loss of territory. Not only they lost territory which they won in the war, but they also lost very valuable pieces of land all along its reign. A territory that hurt them a lot was Alsace-Lorraine, lost to France. It was a great loss of a very valuable land with a lot of industrialised zones. They also lost some land to the south so that a barrier could be created between Germany and Austria. They also lost a lot of land to the East, this was probably the most important loss of territory that Germans suffered. They lost a major part of East Germany to the Polish. They even lost land up in the north to Denmark. In the end she lost an 18% of her land. Another territory article of the treaty was that thee Rhineland would have to be demilitarised.

This also angered the Germans because a lot of crime rose because policemen couldnt carry weapons. This is also linked to the demilitarisation of Germany. This was probably the most hated condition of the treaty because Germany was a military based society. It was obviously really painful to go from an army of 8 million soldiers to only 50.000. The Navy was also reduced to 8 battleships and even the merchant ships were reduced. The other harsh condition of the demilitarisation was that their air force was banned, it wasnt reduced, it was completely forbidden. As you can see, as this was a military based society, loosing basically its complete army, did not make the Germans happy.

Now reparations, reparations were one of the points that was most difficult to agree to. Germany had to pay SOME reparations, but France wanted her to pay an incredibly high amount of $12.000.000.000, but the US and Britain thought it was too harsh. In the end, it was agreed between all three of them that a special committee to establish a price that Germany should pay. It took this conference about two years to achieve this. At last, Germany had to pay $6.6 mi, still an incredible amount of money but not as much as France wanted. Still, this completely paralysed their economy, because after losing around 50% of her production in coal and iron, they just had to pay and pay all this debt. A young cartoonist in the world wars, made a cartoon of a mother hugging his extremely skinny little son and saying When weve paid a hundred million francs Ill give you something to eat. This is a very clever illustration of the state of Germanys economy, which is also a reason why they voted for Hitler, because he promised to restore the economy and pay the debt back and saying What is this? When our children are old, their grandchildren will still have to pay

History GCSE

Y10