When World War I broke out, neither side of the war thought it was a protracted world war. The great powers were confident that the war would soon be over. But the war lasted four years, and 33 countries were involved. This was an outcome that neither the Allies nor the Allies had anticipated in the early days of the war. The war ended in the defeat of the Allies. As a defeated party, Germany suffered a humiliating blow after the war. This also laid the foundation for the subsequent Second World War.
On 8 November 1918, a German delegation with a white flag crossed the front line to the Compiègne Forest in a car to request an armistice, and Ferdinand Foch, as military commander of France, read to them the terms of the armistice:
First, the Germans should guarantee within 15 days the withdrawal from the occupied territories in Belgium, France, Luxembourg and other countries, abandon Alsace, Lorraine and Romania, and withdraw from austria-Hungary and Turkey;
In addition, Germany should hand over to the Allies 5,000 heavy and field guns, 30,000 machine guns, 2,000 aircraft, 6 capital ships, 8 heavy cruisers, 10 cruisers, 300 submarines, 5,000 locomotives and 5,000 vehicles intact;
In addition to providing military supplies to the other side, Germany was also forced to surrender the Rhine, the Left Bank of the Rhine was occupied by the Allied forces, and the supplies of the occupying forces were borne by Germany; Germany abandoned the Treaties of Brest and Bucharest; those captured by the Germans in the war should be repatriated, but the German prisoners of war were to continue to be detained; and the blockade of Germany was maintained.
The terms of the armistice proposed by the Allies revealed everywhere the inequality between victory and defeat, each of which forced Germany. Foch demanded that the German representatives must respond within seventy-two hours, and after the delegation's bargaining and minor concessions from the Allies, an armistice was signed in the early hours of November 11.
The armistice was only the beginning of the Allied exploitation of Germany, and on January 18, 1919, the imperialist conference on the sharing of the spoils was officially opened at versailles.
The meeting was held at the Palace of Versailles as a deliberate insult to Germany by France.
After prussian chancellor Bismarck unified Germany in 1870, on January 18 of the following year, King Wilhelm I of Prussia held a coronation ceremony here and changed his name to German Emperor. On 26 February, France was forced to conclude a Franco-German treaty at Versailles, stipulating that France would cede Alsace and Lorraine to Germany and pay Germany 5 billion francs in war reparations.
France had always regarded this treaty as a disgrace, and now Germany was forced to sign a humiliating treaty of surrender after defeat. In order to vent its long-standing resentment against Germany, France deliberately chose the Palace of Versailles and January 18 as the opening place and time of the peace conference.
On the first day of the conference, French President Poincaré, in his opening speech, ridiculed the defeated Germany in the tone of a victor, "born of injustice, and deserved to die of shame", and also proposed a basic plan to sanction the scourge of the war and dismember Germany.
In order to completely weaken Germany, France put forward three demands: one is to build a strong Poland in the east of Germany, including Poznan and Danzig; the other is to demand that Germany must compensate 600 billion to 800 billion gold marks for war losses; the third is to completely destroy Germany's military strength and limit the number of German army and arms production.
At the Paris Peace Conference, although the great powers disagreed on almost all issues, after more than three months of fierce quarrels, an agreement was finally reached on the draft peace treaty.
The main elements of the treaty of peace with Germany were: the expropriation of all German colonies and the redrawing of Germany's borders, the loss of its most important heavy industrial areas, the loss of 1/8 of its territory, 1/10 of its population, 60 per cent of its iron ore and coal mines, and most of its overseas investment, merchant ships and naval fleets; the strict restriction of Germany's armaments, the dissolution of its general staff headquarters, the abolition of its compulsory military service system, the army of no more than 100,000 people, the navy of no more than 1.5 million people, no capital ships and submarines, no air force, no air force, no aircraft Weapons such as tanks and heavy artillery; Germany had to pay huge war reparations to the victorious powers, and the specific figure later stipulated by the Special Committee on Reparations was 132 billion gold marks.
After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles to Germany, the Entente signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Germany's ally Austria, the Treaty of Nayy with Bulgaria, the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, and the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey.
As the injured parties to the contract, the German delegation was called to Paris on April 30 and "hung" for a week before being summoned to Versailles on May 7. With regard to the signing of the German treaty, the German delegation submitted a 400-page opinion, which almost overturned the main terms of the peace treaty. At the same time, they also had private contacts with representatives of the Entente countries in many ways to stir up contradictions between them.
The Four Powers of the United States, Britain, France and Italy were very unhappy about this, warning that if Germany did not agree to sign the peace treaty before June 23, the victorious powers would re-enter war with Germany.
Under the threat of war, german Foreign Minister Miller and Justice Minister Bell signed a peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at versailles on June 28, and the First World War was officially declared over, but the unequal treaty also brought new contradictions and became the germ of the Second World War.