The historical consensus is that responsibility or guilt for the war was not related to the article. Rather, the clause was a prerequisite for the possibility of creating a legal basis for reparation payments to be made. Historians have also pointed to the unintended damage caused by the clause, leading to the anger and resentment of the German population. The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded on January 10, 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. It was the first international organization whose main task was to maintain peace in the world. Its main objectives, as set out in its Covenant, include the prevention of war through collective security and disarmament, and the settlement of international disputes through negotiation and arbitration. Other topics covered in this and related treaties included working conditions, fair treatment of indigenous peoples, trafficking in human beings and drugs, arms trafficking, global health, prisoners of war and the protection of minorities in Europe. In its greatest expansion from September 28, 1934 to February 23, 1935, it had 58 members. German domestic resistance to Article 231 would have weighed psychologically and politically on the Weimar Republic in the post-war period.
[65] [66] German politicians seeking international sympathy used the article for its propaganda value and convinced many who had not read the treaties that the article implied total war guilt. [35] German revisionist historians, who later tried to ignore the validity of the clause, found a willing audience among “revisionist” writers in France, Britain, and the United States. [67] The goal of politicians and historians was to prove that Germany was not solely guilty of causing the war; If this debt could be refuted, the legal obligation to pay reparations would disappear. [68] To this end, the federal government funded the Centre for Research on the Causes of War. This question, the question of Germany`s guilt (question of war guilt), became a major theme in Adolf Hitler`s political career. [69] The Americans, British, and French were different on the issue of reparations. The Western Front had been fought in France, and this landscape had been severely marked by fighting. The most industrialized region of northeastern France had been devastated during the German retreat. Hundreds of mines and factories were destroyed, as well as railways, bridges and villages. Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, said it was fitting that any just peace should require Germany to pay reparations for the damage it had caused. He also saw reparations as a way to ensure that Germany could no longer threaten France, and also to weaken Germany`s ability to compete with the industrialization of France. [18] The reparations would also be used for reconstruction costs in other countries such as Belgium, which are also directly affected by the war.
[19] British Prime Minister David Lloyd George rejected harsh reparations in favor of a less crippling reparations system so that the German economy could remain a viable economic power and a British trading partner. He also argued that reparations should include war pensions for disabled veterans and allowances for war widows, which would reserve a greater part of the reparations for the British Empire. [20] [21] [22] Wilson opposed these positions and insisted that no compensation be imposed on Germany. [23] Wilson`s diplomacy and his Fourteen Points essentially set the terms for the ceasefires that ended World War I. Wilson believed that it was his duty and obligation to the peoples of the world to be a leading figure in peace negotiations. Great hopes and expectations were placed in him to deliver what he had promised for the post-war period. In this way, Wilson eventually began to steer U.S. foreign policy toward interventionism, a move that was fiercely opposed in some domestic political circles. Wilson took many national progressive ideas and translated them into foreign policy (free trade, open agreements, democracy, and self-determination). One of its main objectives was the creation of a League of Nations “to give States, large and small, mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity.” Over the next four years, fighting raged in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. [4] On January 8, 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson issued a statement that became known as the Fourteen Points.
In part, this discourse called on the Central Powers to withdraw from the territories they occupied, create a Polish state, redraw Europe`s borders along ethnic (“national”) lines, and form a League of Nations. [5] [6] During the autumn of the northern hemisphere of 1918, the Central Powers began to collapse. [7] The German army suffered a decisive defeat on the Western Front, while on the Home Front, the Imperial German Navy mutinied, leading to uprisings in Germany that became known as the German Revolution. [8] [9] [10] The German government attempted to reach a peace settlement based on the Fourteen Points, claiming that Germany had capitulated on that basis. .