Title: The Treaty of Versailles and its Consequences – Jimmy Atkinson
Headings: The Treaty of Versailles and its Consequences
The Treaty of Versailles and its Consequences
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Content: Was Germany to pay for all of the damage assessed? And how was the damage assessed? Were the damages to include government costs such as war pensions? France felt that Germany should “cover the costs of restoration of invaded territories and repayment of war debts [and that] a long period of stiff repayments … would have the added advantage of keeping Germany financially and economically weak.” 19 Britain, on the other hand, was concerned with the revival of international trade and knew that if Germany was heavily in debt with the Allied Powers, she would not be able to purchase British goods in sufficient quantities. 20 Because of all of the ambiguities involving the war reparations, an exact monetary figure owed by the Germans to the Allies was never included in the Treaty of Versailles. For Germany, the terms of reparations eventually arrived at by the Reparations Committee were unacceptable. The German delegates viewed the economic sanctions as being far too harsh. The final telegraphed communication from the German National Assembly to the Allies in Versailles stated, “The government of the German Republic in no wise abandons its conviction that these conditions of peace represent injustice without example.” 21 The British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1920 The Economic Consequences of the Peace in which he argues that the German economy would be destroyed by the post-war Versailles Treaty.