Why did the Treaty of Versailles Fail? (Short Animated Documentary)

The Treaty of Versailles isn't commonly known for being a roaring success. It's seen as a treaty which was either far too harsh or far too lenient on Germany and its government, or as being too hard to properly enforce or vague enough to be open to different interpretations.

And whilst thoughts on the document are varied, the end result is pretty clear. It didn't work. The Germans never accepted that they were the guilty party for World War I. Germany's disarmament was short-lived and routinely violated.

Its reparation payments were never made in full, and its territorial losses were the focus of fierce revanchism over the next two decades. As you'll be aware, 20 years after the treaty was signed, the Second World War broke out, and the peace that the treaty was meant to secure was broken. This raises an

obvious question. Why did the Treaty of Versailles fail so utterly in keeping the peace and stopping Germany from waging war again? So, going back to 1918 and the end of the First World War, Germany and the rest of the Central Powers at this point weren't doing so well. After the bright spot of knocking

Russia out of the conflict, the Germans couldn't really take advantage of no longer fighting a two-front war, and weren't able to defeat the Entente in the West. And at this point, the German army was falling apart, and casualties were mounting. Germany itself was suffering economically and was becoming

politically fractured, and the Entente, now backed up by an ever-growing number of American soldiers arriving in Europe, were launching major offensives. To take a problem and make it a calamity, in late September, the Bulgarians, who were a vital geographic link between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the north and the

Ottoman Empire in the south, surrendered before being occupied. It was at this point that most German leaders realized that the war was effectively lost, and less than 2 weeks later, they asked for an armistice and an end to the war. Now, you'd think that surrendering would be a simple matter, and would be a case of a

defeated Germany just dealing with the consequences, but fun fact, no. Apparently, there's an art to surrendering, and the Germans, it turns out, were very good at it. German High Command wanted to negotiate whilst it still had a functioning military in place. This was to, one, save the army's

reputation by making it so that the war was ended by politicians who broke before the soldiers did. And two, by asking for an armistice while Germany could offer even limited amounts of resistance would strengthen its hand in its negotiations with the Entente. And said Entente, whilst obviously allies,

weren't exactly a unified block. The four great powers all had very different ideas of what victory would look like, and to be blunt, they were mostly allies of convenience and often didn't trust one another. The Americans thought that European imperialism was a source of global destabilization and were fiercely

behind self-determination which put them at odds with the rest. The Italians wanted the lands that they had been promised for joining the Entente as well as acceptance as a global power with vested interests all over the world. A statement that London and Paris did not agree with alongside promises that they

didn't necessarily want to keep. Whereas France wanted a very neutered Germany with a tiny military and an economy so degraded that if fighting a war would be impossible. Alongside the return of Alsace-Lorraine and a whole heap of compensation too. The French also hoped for a series of independent Eastern