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The Treaty of Versailles [ii] was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919. As the most important treaty of World War I , it ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers . It was signed in the Palace of Versailles , exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand , which led to the war.
Left to right: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, Erich Raeder partially obscured and Walther von Brauchitsch in front of the Armistice carriage The Compiègne Wagon was the train carriage in which both the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and Armistice of 22 June 1940 were signed.
[79] [80] The Marxist historian Fritz Klein wrote that while there was a path from Versailles to Hitler, the former did not make "Hitler's takeover of power inevitable" and that "the Germans had a choice when they decided to take this path. In other words, they did not have to. Hitler's victory was not an unavoidable result of Versailles." [81]
Hitler had always taken the line that Germany did not consider itself bound by the Diktat of Versailles but would respect any treaty that it willingly signed, such as Locarno, under which Germany had promised to keep the Rhineland permanently demilitarised. Thus, Hitler always promised during his "peace speeches" to obey Locarno, not Versailles.
Between 1919 and 1932, Germany paid less than 21 billion marks in reparations, mostly funded by foreign loans that Adolf Hitler reneged on in 1939. Many Germans saw reparations as a national humiliation; the German Government worked to undermine the validity of the Treaty of Versailles and the requirement to pay.
While the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles were in progress, the region was under a state of siege and the number of occupation troops stood at approximately 240,000 (220,000 French and 20,000 Belgian). By February 1920, a year after the Treaty had gone into effect, the number had dropped to 94,000 French and 16,000 Belgian troops. [15]
The theory was that dictatorships arose if peoples had grievances and that by removing the source of those grievances, a dictatorship would become less aggressive. A popular belief was that the Treaty of Versailles was the underlying cause of Adolf Hitler's grievances. Chamberlain, as even his political detractors admitted, was an honourable ...
That March, Hitler announced an expansion of the Wehrmacht to 600,000 members—six times the number permitted by the Versailles Treaty—including development of an air force and an increase in the size of the navy (Kriegsmarine). Britain, France, Italy, and the League of Nations condemned these violations of the Treaty but did nothing to stop it.