Versailles Quotes
In the history of diplomacy and peace treaty negotiations, the various national representative would meet in secret, negotiate treaties and add secret clauses. Then the treaty was finally made public for approbal or ratification in the different countries no one would be told of the secret clauses. Each side would have a written secret copy of these clauses, but the publics of the country would never know. For example, the agreements about various WWII issues that were secret have not yet been made public in the United States or England. Wilson wanted to put an end to that diplomatic ploy and wanted all the peace treaty clauses to be public with nothing secret. He also wanted the deliberations to made in public woth press access. He had little support for the idea in most European nations.
Referring to President Woodrow Wilson's signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations:
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
Their fear was that wages in Germany would be greatly depressed by the requirement for reparations. And it was the capitalists of the world that had loaned money to the powers to finance the war. Most of the reparations they feared would go to repay those loans.
His response was typical of the German intelligencia and the upper middle class at the time. They neither took the old militarists nor Hitler’s Fascist Brownshirts very seriously, even when they were seizing power. The Nazis and the militarists had attributed the harsh terms that the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was attributed to a cabal of Jews who had embedded themselves in key positions advising the American, English, and French leadership so they could dominate the world. But first, they had to weaken Germany because the Jews knew that the German leadership was aware of their plans and would be their strongest obstacle. This fantastic conspiracy theory came from the notorious forgery, The Protocol of the Enders of Zion which had been published and distributed heavily among the German right wing. Hitler and his henchmen used this existing libel, to dupe most Germans, among whom there was extensive anti-Semitism, into thinking that the Jews were responsible for most of the serious ills of Germany at the time—the terrible economy and inflation, the weakened military, the loss of the Sudetenland and their overseas colonies, the sexual immorality in Germany, the Communist agitators, the perception of most of the civilized world that the Germans were dangerous militarists who had to be contained.
