Treaty of Versailles
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The treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors, exactly five years after the outbreak of the war, and it formally ended the first world war with Germany. Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France, Euppen to Belgium, North Schleswig to Denmark after a plebiscite, West Prussia and Posen to a re-created Poland, and Memel; the Saar was placed under the league of nations and its coal given to France for fifteen years. The German army was cut to 100,000 men without an air force, submarines or tanks, the Rhineland was demilitarised, and article 231 required Germany to accept responsibility for the war and to pay reparations whose amount was fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks. The Kaiser was not handed over, but the new republic signed under protest, and the government that did so was tagged with a stab-in-the-back myth. The treaty's terms fed the hyperinflation of 1923 and the resentment that Hitler exploited. The United States never ratified it, and the league that was meant to keep the peace could not enforce the settlement it had produced. France's marshal Foch called it a twenty-year truce, and he was almost exactly right.