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Will it change how you teach the Treaty of Versailles when you realise Germany didn't think it had lost the First World War?
Teachers of Twentieth Century History often treat the Treaty of Versailles as the starting point for all that unfolded afterwards in the century, partly because of the requirements of the VCAA Study Design, but also because of the importance given to it by historians. Very few historians, let alone secondary history teachers, stretch back to the Armistice of 1918 and examine it as a key cause of the unrest in Weimar Germany, unrest that was successfully exploited by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in later decades. This article explores the differences in how the Armistice was viewed by the German military and the Allies, and how this led to their conflicting expectations of the Treaty of Versailles and the lasting German resentment towards it- resentment that in turn sowed the seeds of World War II.
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The symmetry of the Armistice date makes it seem almost pre-ordained. And the signatories to the Armistice planned it that way, backdating the signing by ten minutes to deliver that symmetry.1 But all good students of history know that there was no such thing as a sudden ceasefire at that precise time, and sporadic fighting happened in the hours and days after that momentous hour. From December 1916, the German government offered to enter into peace negotiations, although correspondence between Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg and the Prussian Ambassador, Karl von Eisendecher, suggests that they did not truly expect the Allies to accept their offer.2 The war raged on for two more years, until late September 1918, when German General Ludendorff told the German government to ask for an armistice because, according to historian Bullitt Lowry, he wanted 'a respite to set up a strong defensive line, so that the Germans could negotiate peace from strength.' 3 On 5 October the German government sent what is known as the First German Note, which called for peace talks:
To avoid further bloodshed the German Government requests to bring about the immediate conclusion of a general armistice on land, on water, and in the air.4
It is...