The main conditions of the treaty included territorial, military, financial, and judicial elements. (For a full text of the treaty, see Eurodocs, World War I Archive: Versailles.)
1) Territorial: Germany had to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France and accept an allied occupation of most of its western provinces. The Saar area was given to France for fifteen years. Thereafter a plebiscite should decide its future. The rich coal mines in the Saar district, however, would belong to France, and Germany would have to buy them back if the plebiscite yielded a pro-German majority. The Rhineland and some cities on the right bank of the Rhine were occupied by French, English, American, and Belgian troops for five, ten, or fifteen years respectively. A small border area was annexed by Belgium.
In the north a plebiscite was held to decide the fate of northern Schleswig, the province with a Danish minority. The result split the province into a pro-Danish and pro-German part. In the east, Germany had to give the provinces of Western Prussia and Posen to Poland, thus offering the landlocked Polish state an outlet to the Baltic Sea. Some of Upper Silesia also went to Poland, but some areas were given the right to a plebiscite (the drawing of voting districts was arbitrary, however, giving the Poles a majority wherever possible).
The city Danzig on the Baltic Sea became a so-called free city under the mandate of the League of Nations. A small area in Silesia was given to Czechoslovakia and another strip of land in the north of East Prussia was put under Allied administration and was later seized by Lithuania. The loss of the territories in the east filled most Germans with even more indignation than the loss of the western lands, since the changes in the east often contradicted the principle of national self-determination: Some of the new Polish territories were settled predominantly by Germans, and Danzig was a German city.
A union of German Austria with Germany, although the declared wish of both peoples, was forbidden, and several million Germans living in Bohemia (in the Sudetenland) came under Czech rule, which most of them resented. (Oskar Schindler, by the way, belonged to this German minority in Czechoslovakia.)
2) Military: Germany had to disarm almost completely and was only allowed an army of 100.000 men. Germany had to demilitarize a 50-kilometer zone on the right bank of the Rhine and was forbidden to own military airplanes, submarines, tanks, heavy artillery, and poison gas. The navy was limited to a few small ships. The existing German battle fleet would have to be given to Britain along with all merchant ships (the British got the merchant ships, but Tirpitz's "proud" battle fleet scuttled itself in June 1919). An Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC) was granted large powers to supervise and control German disarmament. Germany was to be disarmed and left only with minor armed forces that could be used to repress domestic unrest but were inferior in combat even to the Polish army. The Treaty of Versailles stated, however, that German disarmament should precede disarmament all over the world. But the victors of the world war, of course, were in no hurry to disarm themselves.
3) Financial: The Entente, and the French, in particular, had always claimed that the Germans would have to pay not only for the damage done in the occupied regions but also for most of the Entente's war expenses. To justify such an enormous claim the Entente argued that Germany and its allies had started the war and were thus responsible for all of their enemies' costs and damages. The sum of reparations and the modes of payment were not specified initially since the Entente powers could not agree on how much Germany could pay and on the way they wanted to divide reparations among themselves. Germany thus had to sign a blank check and expect an astronomic sum to be paid over many decades.
4) Judicial: The Entente claimed that the German leaders had conducted the war partly in a criminal way, mainly by opting for submarine warfare. The Kaiser, who was deemed responsible for this, and about two thousand German top officers and officials including Tirpitz, Hindenburg, and Ludendorff were to be put on trial by the Entente.
These were the conditions of the treaty. The German government was not given a chance to change it substantially, and the Entente threatened to advance further onto German territory if it refused. The French actually hoped for a German refusal because that would give their army the opportunity to dissolve Germany and to take more direct control than the treaty allowed. The Germans, government and people, were horrified when they were informed about the peace terms. Not even the worst pessimists had expected that the treaty would be so harsh. A tremendous uproar occurred, but it seemed impossible to resist. Two German governments stepped down because they did not want to take responsibility for signing the treaty, but finally there was no choice but to sign.
The Germans were most infuriated at the claim that they had started the war and therefore should pay for everything. That the Entente had failed to define an absolute sum of reparations and that the criteria for what Germany should pay for were very expansive deeply worried the Germans. They had no guarantee that the other nations would disarm, too, and thus it seemed as if the Germans would be held in eternal financial and military bondage. Germans, moreover, were incensed about the prospect that their war heroes should be put on trial. The loss of territories with a large German population in the east also incensed public opinion. Many people, particularly on the right, advocated a desperate act of resistance even at the price of complete foreign occupation, hoping that foreign occupation would -- just as under Napoleon I -- produce a united German uprising. The majority in the Reichstag, however, resisted this fanciful alternative. But even if many Germans felt that they had no alternative to signing, there was almost universal consensus that the treaty was extremely unjust and needed to be changed at the first opportunity.
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