Human history’s first global conflict ended Jan. 10, 1920, when the Treaty of Versailles went into effect, officially ending World War I.
More than 9 million people were killed between 1914 and 1918 in the “war to end all wars,” a phrase commonly associated with President Woodrow Wilson, who stridently tried to avoid bringing the U.S. into a largely European conflict.
Though World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, its roots had been simmering for years. Early 20th-century political rivalries and arms races escalated into a global cauldron that would see France, Britain and Russia oppose Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
At the beginning, the U.S. declared neutrality but eventually entered in 1917 on the side of the Allied Powers. Twenty-seven nations would be drawn into the conflict, and they would deploy more than 70 million military personnel into the fighting.
Combat ended Nov. 11, 1918, with the signing of an armistice. But peace negotiations continued during the next six months and concluded with the Treaty of Versailles after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
Wilson became America’s first president to travel to Europe while still in office, and he participated in the treaty’s negotiations. The treaty — whose harsh provisions would devastate Germany politically, economically and socially — was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors of France’s Château de Versailles.
Germany was forced to pay staggering war reparations, throwing Europe into more discontent. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who was World War I’s supreme Allied commander, said the treaty “is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”
Germany’s discontent would facilitate the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, a political development that would have devastating consequences for the rest of the world in less than a generation.
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