Germany’s humiliation lights fuse

– As the guns fell silent in 1918, World War I victors all agreed on one thing: Germany must pay.

How much was a matter of debate but there was never any doubt that the post-war settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles was going to be punitive.

Germany did pay, but it was not alone. A century on, the world lives with the consequences of a peace accord that, even at the time, was criticised as making another war inevitable in Europe, a continent which had dominated the world for centuries.

Economist JM Keynes, then a British Treasury official, resigned rather than be associated with a treaty he denounced as “Carthaginian” in its harshness. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch judged it “not so much a peace as a 20-year armistice”.

The “war to end all wars” turned out to be the opposite. By ensuring Germany’s economic ruin and political humiliation, the post-war settlement provided fertile ground for the rise of Nazism and its horrors.

Beyond Germany, the slew of peace treaties redrew the map of Europe, carving up vanquished empires and creating as many future conflicts as new countries and borders from the Baltic States to Turkey, via Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Just as important, the war served as an incubator for the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages, military failure left the Tsarist state crippled and vulnerable to an assault by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who then established the Soviet Union as an authoritarian Communist state. – AFP