The Treaty of Versailles

On June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, two German delegates signed a document that ended the Great War and began the countdown to the next one. The location was chosen for maximum humiliation. Forty-eight years earlier, in that same hall, the German Empire had been proclaimed after Prussia's defeat of France in 1871. The French had long memories.

The ceremony lasted less than an hour. The German delegates, Hermann Müller and Johannes Bell, signed without speaking. No one shook their hands. Outside, the fountains of Versailles, dormant since the war began, had been turned on for the occasion. Cannons fired. Crowds cheered. The war that had killed roughly seventeen million people was officially over.

What had been agreed upon in that document would shape the next century of European history more than any battlefield victory. The peace was supposed to prevent another war. It helped cause one.