The treaty that ended the war between the Allied powers and Germany was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The harshness of its terms virtually guaranteed a future conflict. The Germans had ended the war expecting a treaty based broadly on the terms outlined by the US president Woodrow Wilson in his ‘Fourteen Points’, but instead they got a treaty that they felt was manifestly unjust. Woodrow Wilson had envisaged a ‘New World Order’, but Versailles simply reinforced the old as Britain and France enriched themselves and expanded their empires at the expense of the Central Powers.
The Germans referred to the treaty as a ‘diktat’. Politicians across the German political spectrum united in their condemnation of the terms. President Friedrich Ebert declared a national ‘week of mourning’ and Gustav Stresemann (future chancellor and foreign minister) declared it a ‘moral, political and economic death sentence’.
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