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This text scrutinizes the motives, actions, and constraints that informed decision making by the various politicians who bore the principal responsibility for drafting the Treaty of Versailles.

Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen– Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations. Among the British and Churchillian errors were: • The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France • The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler • Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest • The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.

Signed on June 28, 1919 between Germany and the principal Allied powers, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Problematic from the very beginning, even its contemporaries saw the treaty as a mediocre compromise, creating a precarious order in Europe and abroad and destined to fall short of ensuring lasting peace. At the time, observers read the treaty through competing lenses: a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and, most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. A century after its signing, we can look back at how those developments evolved through the twentieth century, evaluating the treaty and its consequences with unprecedented depth of perspective. The author of several award-winning books, Michael S. Neiberg provides a lucid and authoritative account of the Treaty of Versailles, explaining the enormous challenges facing those who tried to put the world back together after the global destruction of the World War I. Rather than assessing winners and losers, this compelling book analyzes the many subtle factors that influenced the treaty and the dominant, at times ambiguous role of the “Big Four” leaders?Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clémenceau of France. The Treaty of Versailles was not solely responsible for the catastrophic war that crippled Europe and the world just two decades later, but it played a critical role. As Neiberg reminds us, to understand decolonization, World War II, the Cold War, and even the complex world we inhabit today, there is no better place to begin than with World War I and the treaty that tried, and perhaps failed, to end it.

The First World War changed the face of Europe - two empires (the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) collapsed in its wake and as a result many of the boundaries of Europe were redrawn and new states were created. The origins of many of the international crises in the late twentieth century can be traced back to decisions taken in these critical years, Yugoslavia being the most obvious example. An understanding of the peace settlements is thus crucial for any student studying international history/international relations, which is what this book offers. This book provides and accessible and concise introduction to this most important period of history.

A helpful GCSE and A Level Guide to one of 20th Century History's most pivotal events. This guide discusses in a clear and concise manner the objectives of the British, French and Germans at the Treaty of Versailles. A follow up volume: America, Japan and the Arabs at Versailles will be published soon.

In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. She demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way the three belligerents fought the war. Hull focuses on seven cases: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry, and reprisals. A Scrap of Paper reconstructs the debates over military decision-making and clarifies the role law played—where it constrained action, where it was manipulated, where it was ignored, and how it developed in combat—in each case. A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.

Written by Germany's foremost diplomatic historian of the early twentieth century, this work maps out all the numerous times that Adolf Hitler made unconditional offers of peace to all the nations of Europe--and how the major anti-German belligerents, France and Britain, turned down these offers each and every time. The author lists all of Hitler's offers in detail, complete with quotes, starting with his first offer of May 17, 1933, his second offer of December 18, 1933, his third offer of May 21, 1935, his fourth offer of March 31, 1936, his fifth offer of September 30, 1938, his sixth offer of December 6, 1938, his seventh offer of late 1939 to Poland to settle the Danzig Corridor issue peacefully, and finally, his offer of world peace on October 6, 1939, just over a month after Britain and France had declared war on Germany for invading Poland on September 1 (but not on the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland on September 17). This edition benefits from four new sections which did not appear in the original publication. These are: - The full text of Hitler's "Appeal for Peace and Sanity" speech, made before the Reichstag on July 19, 1940, following the fall of France. Although nearly half the British cabinet wanted to take up his offer, Churchill's warmongering put an end to this final offer of peace; - Hitler's Political Testament, dictated just hours before his death on April 29, 1945, wherein he spelled out once again how he had tried to avoid the war, and blamed Jewish agitators for the refusal of other nations to accept his peace offers; - Hermann Göring's final letter--from this death cell in Nuremberg--to Winston Churchill, in which he blamed the latter's warmongering on behalf of "Jewish Bolsheviks" for the conflict; and - An extract from The Forrestal Diaries, in which the US Secretary of State William Forrestal quotes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as complaining that "the world Jews" have forced England into the war. Fully reset and illustrated throughout with 22 rare photographs.