The Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I
On this day · 28 June 1919
Signed in a mirrored hall outside Paris, the peace treaty closed one war and helped seed the next.
On June 28, 1919 — five years to the day after the Sarajevo assassination that lit the fuse — German delegates signed the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The signing concluded the Paris Peace Conference and officially ended the First World War.
The terms were harsh by design. Germany lost territory, saw its army capped and its overseas colonies stripped away, and under the so-called “war guilt” clause was forced to accept responsibility for the war and pay vast reparations. The treaty also created the League of Nations, intended to prevent any repeat.
It was “designed to establish peace, prevent war, and to ensure Germany would never be a military power again.”
Many Germans regarded the settlement as a humiliating dictate rather than a negotiated peace. The resentment it bred would feed the political turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s — and the road toward a second world war.
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