World War I left large sections of Europe in ruins, especially in Belgium, France, and Russia. Even worse were the human costs. Overall, roughly 20 million Europeans were killed. France and Germany both lost roughly 10% of their labor force; Great Britain lost one-third of all men aged 15 to 24 (textbook, p. 772).

Economically, the continent was devastated. The war eventually cost approximately $100 trillion according to the textbook; other sources place the total anywhere from $337 billion over $4 trillion.

When the victorious Allies gathered at Paris in January 1919, only 4 nations decided the major issues:

France, represented by Premier Georges Clemenceau
Great Britain, represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George
Italy, represented by Premier Vittorio Orlando
The United States, represented by President Woodrow Wilson

Russia, now the Soviet Union, was not represented. Unlike at the Congress of Vienna, the defeated power was not given any say in the negotiations.

Wilson had proposed 14 Points for settling the war in a speech to Congress in January 1918. The Points included freedom of the seas, freedom of trade, arms limitations, and open diplomacy that excluded secret deals. The major points also called for what is known as self-determination — that nationalities determine their own sovereignty — and an international body to arbitrate between nations.

Although Wilson thought his 14 Points were a grand idea, the other Allies had little time for such idealism. Clemenceau reminded everyone that even God had given only 10 Commandments. When the draft treaty was presented to the German delegation, Clemenceau stated, “The time has come to settle accounts.” There was no doubt as to what he meant.

The Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Germans in May 1919. The Treaty:
• returned Alsace and Lorraine to France;
• gave German territory to Belgium and Lithuania — newly freed, along with Estonia and Latvia;
• returned land to Denmark taken in 1864;
• gave Poland an outlet to the sea by taking land from West Prussia, isolating East Prussia from the rest of Germany;
• stripped Germany of all its overseas colonies;
• took the Saar area of Germany and gave it to France for 15 years, after which a plebiscite would be held to determine its eventual future
• limited the German army to 100,000 men, with no heavy artillery;
• denied Germany submarines or an air force;
• demilitarized the Rhineland;
• forced the Germans to take responsibility for the war in Article 231, the War Guilt Clause; and
• pay war reparations to the Allies. The Germans received a bill for $33 billion in 1921.

Wilson lost on every point except for the founding of a League of Nations as a means of enforcing the treaty. Even then, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty by which the U.S. could join the League. Instead, the U.S. signed a separate treaty with Germany in August 1921, the Peace of Berlin.

German reaction was swift and bitter. The new German government, the Weimar Republic (named after the city in which the constitutional assembly met after the Kaiser’s abdication), was saddled with the responsibility of signing the treaty and accepting its dictates. Matthias Erzberger, the politician who accepted the role of signing the treaty on behalf of Germany, was assassinated in 1922. French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch said of the Treaty, “This is not a peace; it’s a 20-year truce.”

The issue of Austria-Hungary was settled separately. The Austrians signed the Treaty of St. Germain in September 1919. The treaty had little to do; the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated in mid-1918. Austria and Hungary became separate nations. Italy received the frontier territory of the Tyrol and Istrain Peninsula, but Orlando was furious that Italy didn’t receive more Adriatic territory. Austria also lost territory to the new nation of Czechoslovakia and to Romania. Furthermore, Austria was forbidden from uniting with Germany without the approval of the League of Nations. Austria became land-locked.

Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. Hungary lost territory to Romania; lost the area of Slovakia to Czechoslovakia; and lost Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia to Yugoslavia. Hungary’s population decreased from 19 million to 7 million, and Hungary became a land-locked nation for the first time in 800 years.

The Ottoman Empire had also disintegrated. The nation of Turkey, which formed from the Turkish regions of the Empire, lost almost all the European holdings of the Empire; only a small foothold was left on the European continent. France took control of Syria and Lebanon by League of Nations mandate. Great Britain received Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq. Both Greece and Italy took land from the Empire. The new leader of the Turks, an officer named Ataturk, transformed Turkey into a secular state.

Since Russia had signed its own treaty with Germany, the Allied powers were in no mood to compensate the Soviet Union for its losses in the war. Instead, Britain, France, and the U.S. actually tried to interfere in the Russian civil war on the side of the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks. The nations of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were granted independent status in former Russian territory.

In the final tally of World War I, only one nation truly won: the United States. While Europe struggled to recover from the war, the U.S. became the economic engine of Western Civilization.

The nations fighting the war found quickly that modern war was expensive; by 1918, the war was costing roughly $10 million an hour. Nations financed this cost by borrowing money — lots of it. Every nation had borrowed heavily against their gold reserves to pay for the war. Post-war debt payments led to massive inflation in Europe. In Germany, the price of bread in Berlin went from .63 marks a loaf in 1918 to 233 billion marks in November 1923. In January 1918, the exchange rate was 5.21 marks per U.S. dollar; in December 1923, the exchange was 4.2 trillion marks per dollar. German currency was practically worthless.

Unemployment soared in Europe when governments began demobilizing their soldiers. To avoid the problems faced in previous wars, many governments adopted unemployment compensation insurance, including Italy, Austria, and Great Britain.

Germany in particular had major problems following the War. The Weimar Republic had a progressive constitution that granted universal suffrage, proportional representation in the Reichstag, the abolition of aristocratic privileges, and other progressive institutions. The Republic was ruled by a president with a 7-year term and a chancellor that needed the support of the majority of the Reichstag.

Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic was massively unpopular on both the right and left wings of politics. The Communists on the left attempted a coup in January 1919 in the Sparticist Revolt. Then, when Germany missed a reparations payment in 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. The U.S. helped negotiate the Dawes Plan to provide loans to Germany to aid the reparations payments and to evacuate Allied troops from the Ruhr.

The Nationalists hated the Republic primarily because of the Treaty of Versailles. Also, many German ex-military personnel thought they could have won the war had the civilians not “stabbed” them in the back. To make matters worse, these soldiers had guns — lots of guns. The ex-soldiers formed paramilitary groups called the Freikorps that were extremely reactionary. The Freikorps were the group that assassinated Erzberger for signing the Treaty.

In 1920, the Freikorps supported a coup attempt by monarchists intent on restoring the Hohenzollern family; the German army refused to fire on them, and only a general strike defeated the coup. In 1923, a Freikorps league engaged in the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” another coup attempt. This attempt was led by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its leader, Adolph Hitler. The attempt was a dismal failure. Hitler was imprisoned for 5 years, in which he wrote a book called Mein Kampf. The book was read by very few people, all of whom found a hodgepodge of anti-Communism, anti-Semitism, anti-democratic, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Versailles Treaty garbage.

The Weimar Republic never gained support in the middle class because the reparations payments and ensuing inflation wrecked the economy. However, in 1924, the government gained a readjustment of the reparations payments and created a stable currency. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann negotiated with French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand to restore German ties with the French. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 settled territorial claims between the 2 nations and led to Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations in 1926. Stresemann and Briand shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.

Aristide Briand was known for one other treaty he negotiated. Briand and U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg negotiated the Kellogg-Briand Pact, also known as the Pact of Paris, in 1928. The Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy.” The pact was eventually signed by 62 nations, including all the major European powers and the U.S. The U.S. Senate approved the pact by an 85-1 vote.

Just as it seemed Europe was on the road to recovery, the U.S. stock market crashed in October 1928. The U.S. had been loaning money to Germany to pay the reparations, but these loans ceased in the chaos that followed. European banks began collapsing. Without American loans, Europe’s capital supply dried up, leading to unemployment of over 30 percent in most European nations. Great Britain abandoned the gold standard, effectively devaluating its pound sterling by nearly 30 percent; Parliament also enacted protective tariffs to protect British agriculture. Britain was not alone.

For most ordinary citizens, the answer to all these troubles wasn’t more government intervention in the economy, but new governments entirely.

Italy was first. In 1921, Benito Mussolini organized the veterans who followed him (the Blackshirts) into the Fascist Party. The Blackshirts had been strongly anti-Communist and had been breaking up Communist and trade union meetings for years. Mussolini adopted a strongly anti-democratic ideology that opposed parliamentary government and Socialist/Communist ideals as well. The Fascists believed in strong authoritarian government based on nationalism and militarism.

Mussolini and 34 supporters were elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921. Even though Mussolini won less than 10% of the vote, King Victor Emmanuel III had no choice but to appoint him dictator in 1922 after he led a march of thousands of Fascists to Rome. Mussolini then persuaded the Parliament to grant him dictatorial powers for 1 year to restore economic order. Instead, Mussolini packed the courts and the bureaucracy with his supporters. By 1924, the Fascists controlled Italy, even assassinating the leader of the Socialist Party when he protested the takeover. When other parties walked out of Parliament in protest, the Fascists in Parliament expelled them permanently.

Mussolini censored the press, banned opposition parties, appointed all local officials, and created a secret police to maintain his control. However, Mussolini was never able to break the Roman Catholic Church or the aristocratic upper class.

Mussolini implemented state planning of the economy. The plans cut unemployment through education, expansion of the military, and by employing huge numbers of unemployed for public works projects. Strikes were banned. Mussolini’s strategies and tactics were later adopted elsewhere in Europe, especially Germany.

After Hitler was released from prison, his party began working to attract support through its nationalist policies and its opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi party could not gain a foothold among urban workers; most of its support came from small farmers and the lower-middle class, the groups who had suffered the worst in the economic depressions following the War.

In 1930, however, both the Communist and Nazi parties won huge gains in the Reichstag as voters looked for solutions to the economic depression gripping Germany. Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, skillfully used television and radio to advance the Nazi cause. The Nazis also used “storm troops,” or “Brown Shirts,” groups of thugs dressed in brown shirts, to intimidate opponents.

Hitler ran for the presidency of Germany in 1932, but Paul von Hindenburg (of World War I fame) decisively beat him. (von Hindenburg was 85 years old.) The Nazi party claimed a membership of only 849,000 out of a population of 66 million.

Hitler won the office of chancellor in 1933 when conservatives in the Reichstag supported him in an effort to preserve power in the country. Hitler appointed Hermann Goering as Minister of Interior in control of the police. Hitler immediately called for new elections; the Nazis won more seats. The Nazis later burned the Reichstag building and blamed it on the Communists. Hitler suspended civil rights as a result, censoring the press and abolishing free speech.

In March 1933, the Reichstag voted Hitler dictatorial powers in an effort to deal with the economic crisis gripping the nation. Hitler immediately began consolidating his power. He and Goering created the Gestapo, the secret police force. The Nazis built the first concentration camps for political opponents at Dachau and Buchenwald; within the first 9 months of Hitler’s rule, 100,000 people were arrested and sent to the camps. The Nazis abolished the upper house of Parliament, the presidency, and all other political parties.

In June 1934, Himmler ordered the SS, his elite troops, to purge the party and kill opponents. 1,000 people were killed in the “Night of the Long Knives,” including members of the Brown Shirts.

Two months into Hitler’s rule, the government ordered the boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses and the seizure of their bank accounts. Jewish bureaucrats were purged from government; Jewish professors and teachers were banned from teaching. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 re-defined “Jew” as anyone with one Jewish grandparent; stripped Jews of citizenship; prohibited intermarriage; and restricted their occupations and living areas. Seventy-two percent of German Jews emigrated from the country, including Albert Einstein. On 9 November 1938, the SS launched “Kristallnacht” targeting Jewish businesses. More than 7,000 businesses were attacked, more than 100 Jews were killed, and 191 synagogues were burned. In the weeks that followed, more than 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to the concentration camps.

Once Hitler consolidated power, he began working to increase German industry. The unemployment rate fell from 30.1% in 1932 to 4.6% in 1937, mainly through conscription for military service, employment in armaments and public works projects, and labor camps for youth. Hitler paid for this by renouncing reparations payments, forcing businesses to make loans to the government, and confiscating Jewish wealth.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks won the civil war by 1921, reuniting the Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to the Russian Empire (now the Soviet Union). In May 1918, Lenin nationalized all large industries, using conscripted labor.

Still, the Soviet Union lagged Europe in industrial production. In 1921, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), combining Communist state ownership with capitalist private ownership and the free market. Lenin saw this as a pragmatic compromise to restart the Soviet economy. Richer peasants, known as Kulaks, prospered greatly from the NEP. Lenin also had to realize that the proletariat of the Soviet Union was far from ready for the state to wither away.

Lenin suffered a series of strokes between 1922 and 1924. Before his third stroke, Lenin had planned to remove Stalin from power, but the stroke prevented him from doing so. Lenin died in 1924, leaving a power struggle for succession between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin managed to outmaneuver Trotsky and drive him from power. Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929; he was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940.

Stalin was determined to rule the Soviet Union. He allied himself at various times with the left wings and right wings of the Communist Party, switching alliances whenever necessary. In 1928, Stalin abolished the NEP. In 1926, Stalin modified the original Cheka secret police into the NKVD under Felix Dzerzhinsky and Nikolai Yezhov. Dzerzhinsky was credited with transforming the NKVD into the instrument of terror Stalin would use to rule with an iron fist.

Stalin created a vast network of prison camps in Siberia for political opponents. Estimates of 10 to 18 million people were shipped to the camps. Stalin ended the NEP and began oppressing the kulaks; approximately 5 to 6 million peasants were killed in the campaign after the kulaks began resisting collectivization of their property. Stalin began purging his opponents with ruthless efficiency. In the Great Purge of 1936-1939, nearly 1 million people had been executed, including most of the officer corps of the Red Army and many of the Communist Party leaders. Yezhov was one of the victims, along with Nikolai Bukharin, one of the Party leaders that had opposed Stalin. All told, Stalin may have killed between 10 million and 20 million people during the decade after he succeeded Lenin.

Given these leaders — Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Stalin in the Soviet Union — it was only a matter of time before the Continent exploded again. Foch’s 20 years was over.