THE LAST WEEK - THE ROAD TO WAR
Chapter 7
August 30, 1939

The former Princeton University president and New Jersey governor is, with this journey, becoming the first American president to leave the country while still in office. In fact, he's breaking the law. Under a 1913 statute, American presidents are forbidden to leave the country during their term in office.

But no federal marshal seeks to enforce this law upon the glacial professor who is now commander-in-chief. Wilson is a man of firm ideals and convictions, who deals in the world in simple, black-and-white terms, as befitting a former schoolteacher and preacher's son. He was once told by a friend, seeking support on an issue, that "You know there are two sides to every question."

"Yes," Wilson answered, "Right and wrong."

That view of the world has made him the spiritual leader of the Allied cause. Ironically, it has begun to make him unpopular at home. Wilson sails to Europe intending to create world peace according to his vision. The Inquiry is along to put Wilson's views into action. Wilson argues that the United States, being a disinterested party to Europe's endless squabbles, is the only nation that can truly represent the opinions of mankind. This view is based on fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson's belief that the United States is founded on ideas, not ethnicity.

Wilson's determination to create a new world, full of democracies, is making him popular with all Europe. New nations like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Kingdom of the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes, are adopting American-style constitutions and naming major public squares after Wilson. One of the main intersections in Warsaw, for example, is Wilson Square. Ordinary Frenchmen, Britons, Belgians, Italians, and even Germans regard him as their saviour, a bespectacled David who slew the Goliath of Kaiserdom.

When Wilson steps onto French soil, thousands of Frenchmen are there to see him. The Mayor of Brest greets Wilson, saying destiny brought the president to France to release the people of Europe from their torture.

As Wilson's train clatters to Paris, families kneel by the track to pray for Wilson and the success of his mission. When Wilson rides through Paris, escorted by Republican Guards, huge crowds are jammed into improvised grandstands on the Champs Elysees, cheering him. Women weep as they scream his name, flowers are hurled by the ton, and American journalist William Bolitho writes, "No one ever had such cheers. I, who heard them in the streets of Paris, can never forget them in my life."

Even where Wilson doesn't go, the effect is terrific. In Vienna, Red Cross workers tell their patients, mutilated soldiers, that there will be no Christmas presents.

"Wilson is coming," they answer, "Everything will be all right."

Children in France write essays about Wilson, saying he has no beard so there will be more of his face to kiss. Another writes, "I wish that President Wilson may never die." Egyptians call him the new Muslim Mahdi, and call for a revolt against the English so that the Americans and Wilson will take over their country.

Herbert Hoover, setting up the postwar reconstruction and anti-hunger programs, says "no such evangel of peace had appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount."

But Wilson misreads the cheering crowds. He believes he is acting as their tribune, to impose a world order based on law and mutual respect, where nations settle dispute through arbitration - with America as the arbitrator - and war is unthinkable. A League of Nations, designed and defined by Wilson in a form similar to the rules for boys' clubs he developed as a child, will act as the world's Senate, addressing and solving all international questions in a peaceful, honorable, and just manner. The League will be a worldwide form of Common Law, gaining with experience, but always acting in humanity's best interests.

He's wrong. The crowds in each country all see Wilson as the man who will further their own nation's particular ambitions: Britain to regain her lost prosperity, France to regain her lost lands and ensure Germany's humbling, Italy's to gain slices of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Representatives of newly freed and still-enslaved nations and ethnic groups also see Wilson as the man who will impose new borders upon Europe and Asia. They believe he will create independent homelands for a vast array of ethnicities: the Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, Armenians, even representatives of tracts of Russia in the hands of Bolshevik or White forces.

Unfortunately for these people, Wilson has no such intentions. He can't grant all of these wishes even if he could - too many of the ethnic rivalries are demanding the same swatches of land, like Bohemia and the Sudetenland. And he has no desire to restore the power and grandeur of the battered European powers.

Wilson wants to end the use of the ocean as a battlefield, making it open to commerce in peace and war. That would end Britannia's domination of the world's waves. Nor does Wilson want to grant Clemenceau's desire for revanche. Wilson still seeks "peace without victory." These ideas are bitterly opposed by Britain and France.

More importantly, Wilson lacks a popular mandate from home to impose his schoolmaster's vision of a logical and fair world. In November, Wilson urges his fellow Americans to support the war and the peace by returning a Democratic majority to Congress.

This blatantly partisan appeal has the usual impact on the American people: they shove it in his face. Wilson sails to France facing Republican majorities in the House and Senate, led by the intractable Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., Idaho's William Borah, and California's Hiram Johnson. All distrust foreign entanglements as much as they dislike the Kaiser and his authoritarian state.

Borah is absolutely opposed to the United States joining a League of Nations, convinced that it would put American troops at the disposal of British admirals and generals. Lodge is more canny: he will support the League, but only if Wilson yields to his 14 "reservations," which include keeping America out of a League-led army.

Wilson does not yield, arguing that if the United States can make exceptions to the League, all nations can, and it will be rendered powerless.

Wilson, who sees political issues as simple problems, reacts by refusing to take any leading Republicans with him. The sole Republican is the amiable lightweight Henry White, a former US Ambassador to France.

Already the American people are beginning to show a backlash towards Wilson and his high-minded and high-handed manner. To make matters worse, the war has also created xenophobia in America, as official and private vigilantes are attacking any opposition or criticism to the nation and the war.

The xenophobia has manifested itself in many ways. At the top is an attack on all things German and Germanic. American propaganda efforts, backed by the new movie industry, paint the German people and their leaders as bloodstained monsters in the most lurid terms, depicting the Kaiser and his Generalstab as genocidal maniacs who have butchered POWs, raped nuns, and blasted towns off the map. While there have been plenty of such incidents in the war, the American and British propaganda efforts overstate them, and in some cases, create fictions, like the non-existent German factory that reportedly turns human bodies into glue.

The American people react to this dose of harshness in predictable fashion. German-Americans are fired from jobs, imprisoned, investigated, harassed, and chased out of towns. Streets with German names are changed in a burst of super-patriotism, often to those of American heroes or battles. In Newark, New Jersey, Hamburg Place becomes Wilson Avenue, Bismarck Place becomes Marne Street, and Berlin Street becomes Rome Street. In New York City, the statue of "Germania" is hauled down from the Custom House at Bowling Green, and its Iron Cross shield replaced with one that bears the word "Belgium."

Americans ban the playing of the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. They change the name of sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage," and German measles become "Liberty Measles." And baseball star "Heinie" Zimmerman quickly becomes Henry Zimmerman.

These excesses take on more frightening forms when American officials hound union leaders, socialists, conscientious objectors, and anyone regarded by authority as being unpatriotic. Organizers for the International Workers of the World and other unions find themselves jailed as traitors and saboteurs, on flimsy or fabricated evidence.

The excesses take on more bizarre forms when anti-liquor groups turn the wartime expedient of banning alcohol sales into the permanent form of Prohibition.

The xenophobia leads to an increased nativism and distrust of any foreigners. The Americans have had enough of the world, despite their short leading role on its stage. They would rather turn their attention to Charlie Chaplin's new movies or baseball's defending world champion Boston Red Sox, who have just polished off the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, four games to two, behind pitcher Babe Ruth's record 27 consecutive scoreless innings.

On this fragile latticework, Wilson plans to build his structure of lasting peace. At his Paris mansion at 28 Rue de Monceau, Wilson begins his work when the Peace Conference opens on January 18, 1919. Representatives of 27 nations gather to build the new world.

At Pasewalk in Germany, at the end of November, Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler gets his discharge from hospital, declared "fit for military service," but actually complaining of blurry vision and headaches. He is ordered to a replacement battalion of the List Regiment in Munich, and passes through Berlin en route to Bavaria.

He finds Berlin as chaotic as before. Soldatenrate and Spartacists, feeling betrayed by the continuing blockade and Ebert's government, launches strikes, threatens coups, and demands back pay. By telephone 988, Groener and his clever aide, Major Kurt Von Schleicher, order Ebert to deny the demands. Ebert in turn begs the Army to put down the incipient revolts, which it does, sending cavalrymen into palaces and buildings occupied by revolutionaries, using machine-guns and bayonets to blast the rebellious sailors holed up in the Kaiser's stables. The disgusted Spartacists resign from Ebert's Cabinet, adding to the tension.

It takes the energy and warm words of the wily Gustav Noske, one of Ebert's cabinet members, to end the naval mutinies. He goes up to Kiel and the other major ports, where he addresses grievances - most notably food. While the officers eat a rich cuisine in their wardrooms, the ordinary sailors get potato stew. Noske requires everyone to eat the same food. He also promises the sailors a voice in government

Hitler, unaware of these moves in Kiel, is not as impressed. When he reaches Munich, he is outraged by what he finds. Playwright and drama critic Kurt Eisner's Bavarian State government is trying its best to address the crisis: eight-hour days; legalized union membership; old-age pensions and unemployment benefits; an end to press censorship, but poverty and starvation still dominate the Munich scene.

Hitler and other frontkampfer, quartered in the Turkenstrasse barracks, are disgusted with the filthy conditions and lack of food. Hitler himself is sent 60 miles east to spend the Christmas season guarding a POW camp full of Russians, who are still in captivity because the Reich cannot spare the rolling stock to send them back to a Russia that seems uninterested in them.

While Hitler stands twitching in his sentry-box on Christmas Eve, shivering and listening to Russian soldiers sing Christmas carols, Munich and Berlin face anarchy on the eve of national elections.

On January 3, 1919, Ebert fires his chief of police. The Spartacists call for revolution. Three days later, 200,000 armed workers, brandishing red flags and machine-guns, march down the Unter den Linden. An angry mob surrounds the Reichskanzlei. Ebert appoints Noske his "Commissar for Defense," and the government slips out by the back entrance. The leading Bolsheviks convene to figure out what to do next. As usual, they can't agree on much. Liebknecht orders his loyalists to march on important government buildings the next day.

Next morning, Red flags and militants occupy strategic railway stations, government buildings, and the Botzow Brewery (doubtless an objective of strategic importance). Petty Officer Lemmgen and 300 armed sailors from the People's Naval Division march into the Ministry of War to seize it on behalf of the Revolutionary Council. Lt. Bruno Hamburger, the duty officer, challenges Lemmgen's authority and credentials.

Lemmgen presents a typed text that reads, "Comrades and Workers! The Ebert-Scheidemann government have made themselves impossible…The undersigned Revolutionary Council has provisionally assumed governmental power."

Hamburger studies the document and barks, "But where are the signatures?" The document doesn't have any. He shoves it back. "Before I can comply with this order, you'll have to go back and get it signed. Otherwise any little shorthand typist could declare the government deposed."

Lemmgen salutes, about-faces, and heads back to the Revolutionary Council to get those signatures. On the way, he learns that the People's Naval Division is no longer backing Leibknecht, and has declared itself neutral. Nobody takes over the Ministry of War, so it continues to support Ebert. That gives Ebert and his "bloodhound," Noske, time to organize troops from the loyal 214th Infantry Division, armed with steel helmets, machine-guns, artillery, and a fully dressed band, to march back into Berlin. As they watch the troops march off, Noske tells Ebert, "No need to worry any more, Fritz. Everything will be all right now."

Ebert and Noske also play their other trump card, something new and menacing in Germany, the first of the "Freikorps." These bands of private armies, led by ex-officers, the pregenitors of Hitler's storm troopers, are anti-Bolshevik and anti-democratic mercenaries, willing to "cleanse" Berlin for a price. Their members are angry frontkampfer who feel betrayed by the Kaiser and the industrial schlotbarone as well as by the left-wingers and socialists. Their world and values are shaped by the trenches, and 560 of them cheerfully storm into Berlin, backed by the Potsdam NCO school and its field guns.

The Freikorps have many adherents. One of them is a 16-year-old, smooth-faced young man with a hawk nose and blond hair named Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich. He serves as a messenger in the Maercker Freikorps and then sees action in the Halle Freikorps. A skilled violinist, he battles taunts of having Jewish ancestry. Another is a stocky, red-faced former Army captain, thrice wounded in battle, half his nose shot away, named Ernst Rohm. Like Heydrich, Rohm will later join the Nazi Party. Like Heydrich, Rohm bears a secret that will speed his demise. In Rohm's case, it is that of homosexuality, at a time when such behavior is still classified as a mental illness.

Other Freikorps officers include Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who will become Germany's "model anti-partisan fighter," and Martin Bormann, who as a member of the Mecklenburg Freikorps is connected with several murders. One of Bormann's colleagues in murder is Rossbach Freikorps member Rudolf Hoess, a passionless and obedient perfectionist who will later command the Auschwitz extermination camp. Another Rossbach member: Kurt Daleuge, a former Berlin engineering apprentice. Their escape from the law is aided by a colorless lawyer named Wilhelm Frick. Another Freikorps member is a Munich student named Fritz Kuhn, who will immigrate to the United States and become head of the German-American Bund in the late 1930s.

Freikorps members include some of the Nazi party's future elite: Hans Frank, who will rule occupied Poland, and Arthur Greiser, who will rule Warthegau, the pieces of Poland Hitler annexes in 1939. Wilhelm von Leeb and Wilhelm List, both future field marshals, and Karl Kauffman, the future Gauleiter of Hamburg, are Freikorps members too. A wounded Generalstab staff artillery officer named Wilhelm Keitel, fighter pilot Erhard Milch, and Walther Darre, born in Argentina, educated at Heidelberg and King's College, Wimbledon, now writing that the Nordic race are the true creators of European culture, are all Freikorps members.

Sepp Dietrich, a butcher's son who will lead SS panzers in the Battle of the Bulge, is in the Oberland Freikorps, while Karl Wolff, who will send 300,000 Jews to Treblinka and later negotiate Germany's surrender in Italy, is a lieutenant in the Hessian Freikorps. Hugo Sperrle commands an air detachment of Freikorps.

There are Freikorps outside of Germany. Karl-Hermann Frank, who will liquidate Lidice, is the fanatical boss of a Sudeten Freikorps in Czechoslovakia. Austrian engineering student Otto Skorzeny marches in the Vienna Freikorps, proudly showing his college dueling scar.

The Freikorps attacks the offices of the Spartacist newspaper, Vorwarts, and blast it with artillery. That breaks the Spartacist spirit and leadership. The Freikorps haul off 390 Reds, including women, to the Dragoon Guards' barracks, where the troops and Freikorps torment them with whips, rifle butts, and hobnailed boots. Ebert and Noske do nothing to stop this Army-led bullying.

On January 15th, at Noske's orders, the Freikorps capture Liebknecht and Luxembourg, hauling them to the Eden Hotel, the Cavalry Guards' Tac HQ. Captain Waldemar Pabst, one of Noske's "dynamic" staff officers, tells the Freikorps to murder both. They club Luxembourg outside the hotel, and shoot her in the car. Liebknecht is kept alive, driven to the Tiergarten, and told to get out and walk. He does. An officer shoots him in the head, "while trying to escape." Both bodies are dumped into a nearby canal.

Pabst lives on without punishment in Germany until his death in 1970.

Noske reacts to this butchery the next day by issuing an order in Prussian style that the soldiers and Freikorps are to shoot if attacked of threatened with attack. They are also ordered to shoot "if a prisoner escapes, or attempts to escape." The Generalstab responds via Telephone 988, giving their approval.

It is the beginning of a wave of violence across the battered Reich. In the next two years, political assassins (Femen), commit at least 354 murders.

But the German left-wing rebellion continues throughout the Reich. There is street fighting in Dusseldorf, which kills 14 people. Communists rob the city treasury of 125,000 Marks. Insurgents attack coal mines, banks, and newspaper offices. In Nuremberg they capture the Army offices, in Mannheim the theaters and Law Courts.

The riots and violence rage on, without organization or coherency, but they don't stop the election on Sunday, January 20. Some 30 million Germans out of 35 million eligible to vote pick 423 deputies to the new Reichstag. The two centrist parties gain 40 percent of the vote each.

With gunfire continuing in the Berlin's central district, the "Zitadelle," the newly-elected Reichstag deputies prudently decamp from Berlin to the small town of Weimar, birthplace of Liszt, Schiller, and Goethe, where Ebert plays Faust to Groener's Mephistopheles. The Assembly meets on February 6, and five days later produces a government and Constitution that calls for a figurehead president who serves seven years, considerable human rights, and a Chancellor has head of government. However, Section 48 gives the Reich President a loophole: he can declare Martial Law and supersede the Constitution in case of emergency.

Ebert is named President, with Noske as Minister of Defense. These choices guarantee that Groener will continue to call the shots, and the government's real power will not be based on law, justice, or morality, but its control of the increasing numbers of Freikorps bands, paid by the Army, loyal ultimately only to their commanders.

But while Ebert and Noske build their fake democracy, Wilson and his colleagues struggle to build a truly democratic world at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, a vast stone pile. Around a horseshoe-shaped table, covered with green baize, the great leaders sit in gilt chairs amid damask draperies.

Representatives of the four top Allied powers and 28 other Allied and Associated Nations must decide the fates of 400 million Europeans, 10 million former subjects of the Turkish Empire, and 12 million more people in former German colonies across Africa and the Pacific.

The conference opens on January 18, the anniversary of the proclamation of the German empire, with Clemenceau declaring that France's security needs and reparations claims will be decided first - then the League of Nations. That includes dividing up the German Empire.

A major absentee is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Allied powers are refusing to recognize the Bolshevik state as long as the Russian Civil War rages, and White armies may grasp Moscow's spires from Lenin and Trotsky.

Also absent are the Germans, Austrians, Turks, Hungarians, and Bulgarians. The defeated Central Powers and their successor states will have to accept the peace as a fait accompli.

From the very start, Wilson's great dream of "Open covenants openly arrived at" disintegrates under the weight of complexity. The Allies have to create 58 commissions to deal with a variety of issues. They also create a Council of Ten, with two members of each of the principal allied powers - Britain, France, United States, Italy, and Japan - as the ruling body of the conference. They meet privately, without keeping minutes.

France's Georges Clemenceau is the conference's chairman, and this hard-bitten politician answers Wilson's idealistic rhetoric with harsh realism. "God gave us Ten Commandments and we broke them," snarls the Tiger of France. "Wilson gave us his Fourteen Points and we shall see." Clemenceau is committed to ensuring that Germany can never again invade France. Despite British and American protests, the French insist on maintaining the blockade, to ensure German weakness and compliance with the peace terms.

Britain's David Lloyd George, known at home as a feisty womanizer and social reformer, is standing for re-election on a platform of "Hang the Kaiser" and "Squeeze the German orange until the pips squeak." Britain has no intention of yielding her empire or the world's oceans.

Italy's gentle and courteous Vittorio Orlando, whose English is virtually nil, clutches solemn promises from England and France that Italy's reward for joining the Allied cause will be territorial gains in the Balkans.

Wilson, on the other hand, lacking interest in territorial or financial gain, is determined to find exact and impartial solutions. The world should be run in a manner in which solutions are sought according to ethical principles, rather than national security.

He says to his staff, "Tell me what's right and I'll fight for it." However, Wilson is vague on how that will be achieved. The staff isn't sure, either. Wilson winds up receiving vast delegations of national movements, armed with maps, treaties, charts, demographic data, and emotional arguments.

The conference starts off with the debate on the Covenant of the League of Nations, Wilson's own term. From the start Wilson has to give ground. The Covenant will not supersede the cornerstone of American foreign policy, the Monroe Doctrine. It waffles on racial equality. Instead of ending colonialism, it converts former German and Turkish holdings into colonial "mandates" under League of Nations supervision.

When Italy demands a chunk of Dalmatia, Wilson demands that Italy place world peace over national interest. Orlando politely stomps off home. Japan demands chunks of German-held China, even though China is an Allied power that has sent 175,000 laborers to dig trenches in France, under German shelling. Wilson, facing Japanese and Italian withdrawal from the League, acquiesces, irritating the Chinese.

Soon enough the debates and divisions of vast tracts of the world are taking on an almost casual nature. The leaders carve up the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a separate Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (calling that nation the unwieldy Kingdom of the Croats, Serbians, Bosnians, and Slovenes).

One thing the Allies manage to agree upon is that Soviet Russia must be dealt with. Lloyd George and Wilson hope for a truce to end the Russian Civil War. Clemenceau, in his skullcap, fears Bolshevik revolution, having seen his own Army mutiny in 1917. They offer truce talks to the warring sides. Lenin is evasive. The Whites refuse.

When this plan fails, Winston Churchill, now Secretary of State for War and Air, dashes over to France to suggest a 10-day ultimatum to the Reds, followed by intervention by the Allied troops already in Russia. Wilson is cool. Frustrated, Churchill has dinner with the young American Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Probably Roosevelt doesn't think too much about Churchill's rhetoric: his wife Eleanor has just discovered his love letters to Lucy Rutherford, and has threatened divorce. To patch the marriage up, Eleanor has joined FDR on this trip. Instead she finds the atmosphere of adultery and scandal hard to bear. FDR and Churchill do not impress each other.

Neither do the Allied leaders. Wilson has to go home twice to tend to domestic business, where the cost of living is jumping, as does Lloyd George. Clemenceau takes a bullet from a French anarchist but returns to action in 10 days, snarling defiance. In April, all three leaders threaten to go home for good.

The exhaustion takes its toll on Wilson, who on April 3, suddenly has to return to his residence, suffering stomach, back, and head pain, and a temperature of 103. Historians and doctors still argue over the ailment: stroke, influenza, or respiratory disease. Already Wilson suffers from neuralgia, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, and strokes, both diagnosed and undiagnosed. Easily tired and stressed out, he normally works only five hours a day. In Paris, he is working 14, trying to resolve the arguments.

The big debate is over Germany's fate: Clemenceau wants it weakened, Lloyd George does not want German power turned over to France. Clemenceau accuses Lloyd George of being an enemy of France. "Surely," Lloyd George retorts. "That is our traditional policy."

If the victorious powers cannot agree on anything, neither can the defeated Germans. Despite the gleaming new Weimar Constitution, chaos reigns in the defeated Reich. The blockade ends in April, and American engineer Herbert Hoover mobilizes fleets of trucks to feed Germany and all Europe, earning him the title of "world's greatest humanitarian." But it's not enough.

Insurgent Communists stage riots and rebellions in cities, mines, and factories. As 1919 wears on, real power is not vested in the new National Constituent Assembly, but in the Army and the Freikorps it finances, whose 40,000 men are loyal to their own leaders and carefully screened to make sure they are anti-democratic and anti-Bolshevik.

One place in the Reich does not see chaos: the boardroom of Krupp's Hauptverwaltungsgebaude, their massive headquarters in Essen. There, Gustav and his aides convert the factories that built 100-ton artillery and massive battleships to the production of motor scooters, cash registers, adding machines, movie cameras, typewriters, tableware (an old Krupp standby), water sprinklers, and surgical instruments. Krupp also gains an even more important contract: to replace the rolling stock of the Prussian State Railways. Gustav Krupp's new advertising campaign is "Wir machen alles!" ("We make all.")

He proves the point when a Kruppianer gives Gustav a plan to use the firm's stainless steel to make false teeth, needed to replace those of wounded Frontkampfer. Gustav is amazed. He opens a false teeth line and gives the Kruppianer a bonus.

Even so, the Krupp line of typewriters and motor scooters are flops: Die Firma loses 38 million marks in 1919 alone, on top of pre-existing 278 million mark debt. The new trains pay the bills, but Krupp needs to make guns to survive.

Meanwhile, theater critic Kurt Eisner and his band of radicals still tenuously rule Bavaria. His policies, which center mostly around the Bavarian theater's offerings, annoy his coalition partners, and violence breaks out.

Amid the chaos, Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler gets yanked out of his sentry box at Traunstein when the last Russian POWs go home, and is re-assigned to the 2nd Infantry Regiment barracks in Schwabing.

With Eisner unable to maintain law and order, he calls for elections. Eisner's party loses. Eisner walks to the Bavarian Diet on February 21 to offer his resignation, and a Nationalist extremist, Count Anton Arco-Valley, banned from the Thule Society for having a Jewish mother, shoots Eisner in a Munich street, ending the theater critic's political career and life.

An all-socialist government headed by former teacher Adolf Hoffmann takes over and declares martial law.

Two weeks later, reacting to Lenin's creation of the Communist International, or Comintern, but ignoring their own Communist Party, Berlin's radicals descend on the city center to riot and loot. They seize 30 police stations and the cops are unable to cope. Next day, 1,500 members of Workers' Councils call for a general strike, immobilizing the Reichhauptstadt's public transport and electricity, but leaving the dance halls and cabarets open. The revolutionaries set up barricades and machine guns. There are weapons aplenty in the defeated Reich: KAR 98K rifles go for two marks on the streets.

Noske uses his dictatorial powers under Article 48 to send 30,000 Freikorps men into Berlin on March 5, backed by cannon and aircraft. Noske warns that anyone "who bears arms against government troops will be shot on the spot." Freikorps men line prisoners up against walls and shoot them without trial.

After four days, 1,500 dead, 10,000 wounded, the rebellion is crushed. Freikorps men keep order on Berlin's streets. Elsewhere violence continues. American reporter Ben Hecht of the Chicago Daily News Syndicate cables home: "Germany is having a nervous breakdown. There is nothing sane to report."

On March 22, Hungary explodes when a Communist group headed by Bela Kun, an unknown 25-year-old Jew, takes over Budapest. European statesmen and workers alike are appalled that 25 of Bela Kun's 32 commissars are Jews. Bela Kun doesn't last the year - he has to order copies of Izvestia from Moscow to figure out what to do - but the specter of Reds ruling St. Stephen's Castle frightens Germany.

On April 4, Bavarian radicals trudge through a record 20 inches of snow to place poet Ernst Toller at the head of the Bavarian state in a relatively bloodless coup.

Toller's crew proves at least comic: the Housing Commissar decrees the living room in all homes must be above the kitchen and bedroom. Franz Lipp, a former mental patient whose neat beard qualifies him to be the state's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, declares war on Wurttemburg and Switzerland "because these dogs have not at once loaned me 60 locomotives."

On Palm Sunday, April 13, Hoffmann launches a Putsch to reclaim his office. Men of the 2nd Regiment want to go over to the Reds, but Hitler jumps on a chair and shouts at them, "Those who say we should remain neutral are right! After all, we're no pack of Revolutionary Guards for a gang of vagrant Jews!" The 2nd Regiment stays neutral.

Red Guards behind a Russian Jew from St. Petersburg, Eugen Levine, face Hoffmann's 8,000 loyalists at a city 10 miles from Munich, named Dachau. Levine promises to run Bavaria in the Russian way, but he doesn't know what that is. However, he musters 15,000 Red Guards, replete with artillery and machine-guns to defend his new Soviet.

Toller and Levine set Hoffmann's forces to flight, so Hoffmann has to call Berlin for help. They obligingly send down the right-wing Freikorps, which surround the city. Encircled Reds shoot their internal opponents in Munich, horrifying the citizens. When the Freikorps march in behind bands on May, the citizens cheer and rip up the red banners in favor of the old Bavarian blue-and-white flags. Freikorps men stomp through Munich, wearing helmets decorated with their logo, a swastika, killing almost at random.

More than a thousand "Reds," including 30 members of the Catholic apprentices' St. Joseph Society, quietly hoisting beer in the corner of a tavern, are shot or bayoneted in the streets. The apprentices are mistaken for a "Soviet."

The Freikorps leave the bodies behind in the streets, creating a health menace, and overwhelmed city officials have to dump them into shallow ditches as mass graves.

Germany's new face is a hard-bitten, cynical, Frontkampfer, who feels betrayed by Kaiser, church, democrats, Bolsheviks, and Jews. One of those Frontkampfer watching the slaughter in Munich is Adolf Hitler, who regards the chaos and bloodletting as the work of his endless enemy, the Jew.

In stark contrast to the gunfire and bayoneting in German streets is the politely-concealed acrimony at the conferences in Paris, where diplomats and statesmen are doing more damage to European peace and hopes for democracy than any Freikorps rifle.

As April wears on, the peace is hammered out. An ailing Wilson has to give way on many issues. He discovers that America's traditional view of Britain as an enemy and France as a friend is obsolete. Britain and America now share common interests and traditions, while the French are proving aggressive and intransigent. Wilson is amazed. So are many Americans, who remember Lafayette and King George III.

Clemenceau loses his demand to turn the Rhineland into a separate buffer state, but all agree to its demilitarization. Alsace and Lorraine return to France. Chunks of Silesia go to the new Polish state. Allied forces will occupy the Rhineland for five to 15 years. Germany is forbidden to station troops in this important region. This will, in theory, prevent feldgrau legions from marching into France and Belgium again.

Japan agrees to join the League of Nations and drop its "racial equality" demands in return for China's Shantung Province, a former German concession.

Germany's Army is cut down to 100,000 men, consisting of 96,000 enlisted (other ranks) and 4,000 officers. Enlisted men must serve 12 years, officers 25, to prevent swift promotion and creation of a large reserve army. Conscription, military aircraft, tanks, submarines, poison gas, are all forbidden. So is manufacture of war material. The German Navy is cut down to a tiny fleet, whose largest ship is no more than 10,000 tons. The existing ships, interned at the Royal Navy's base at Scapa Flow with her crews aboard, will be divided up amongst the Allied powers.

Yet this, while humiliating to Germany, actually works to the Reich's advantage: unburdened by a requirement to build armaments, her schlotbarone can turn their factories to producing peaceful and profitable consumer goods, aiding their long-term economic recovery.

The treaty also carves up the German Empire into a group of League of Nations mandates, run by victorious powers. France gains Syria and Lebanon from Turkey, Britain Iraq and Palestine. The British have already committed themselves to turning over a chunk of the latter into a Jewish "national home."

South Africa gains German Southwest Africa (today Namibia), Britain and France divide Cameroon and Togoland, Australia receives German New Guinea, run out of a plantation station named Lae, and the island of New Britain next to it, which includes a superb natural harbor named Rabaul. New Zealand wins German Samoa.

And the Japanese gain permanent control of the islands they seized in 1914: the Marianas, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, which include such unknown islands as Palau, Peleliu, Truk, Saipan, Tinian, and Eniwetok. Only phosphate merchants and missionaries seem interested in these island outposts. They are soon replaced by Japanese naval officers and engineers, who admire Truk's vast harbor.

The Saar and the German port city of Danzig become separate entities under the League of Nations, with their own commissioners. Danzig itself stands at the end of a Polish "Corridor" driven through German Pomerania to link the new nation with the sea.

The map of Europe is also re-drawn with astonishing alacrity. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gains validity with the division of its two central nations. With the throne of Hungary up for grabs, one of the last admirals of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Navy, the equally imperious and anti-Communist Niklos Horthy, is appointed Lieutenant of the Realm (similar to Regent), replacing the failed Bela Kun regime.

Horthy soon takes full power for himself, suppressing all opposition, wearing his braided admiral's uniform at any occasion. The result is that Hungary becomes a kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral without a navy or a seacoast.

The mapmakers are busy in Central Europe, creating Poland and Czechoslovakia. With an eye towards defensible frontiers, Czechoslovakia includes the mountainous Sudetenland on the German border, with its 1 million German-speaking residents and easily-held passes. The kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro also vanish from the map, replaced by the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes," which changes its name to "Yugoslavia." Made of six different nationalities who hate each other's existence, Yugoslavia is divided from the start by race, religion, culture, and history. By 1929, the affable King Alexander I is forced to rule his nation as a royal dictatorship, like Rumania and Bulgaria, and even Greece.

The kickers in this treaty include the issues of war guilt and reparations.

The Allies hurl Germany's own diplomacy in its face. At the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans ordered the new Soviet Union to yield a third of Russia's agricultural land, more than half its industries, and six billion marks. Britain and France want Germany to pay the entire cost of the war, while Wilson only wants Germany responsible for the damages it created directly - despoiling France and Belgium, for example.

In the end, nobody can fix a value upon reparations, so the Allied powers dump the whole question on a separate reparations commission. In the interim, the Reich will have to pony up $5 billion in gold by May 1921. By then, it is hoped, the reparations commission will have determined the Reich's bill. The demand for reparations is a source of fury to Germans of all politics, as the bill ultimately comes to 1,000 million pounds. In reality, the Americans and British float Germany a 1,500 million pound loan to cover the bill.

Probably the most important portion of the immense Treaty of Versailles - whose text covers everything from armaments production to the elimination of German customs officials in Liberia - is Clause 231, drafted by a young American diplomat named John Foster Dulles. Germany, on behalf of its allies, must accept "responsibility…for causing all the loss and damage" sustained by the Allies. To the German public, that means Germany is to blame for the war. For the Generalstab, Noske, Ebert, German politicians, and Obergefreiter Hitler, it means the Reich's future leaders have a tool by which they can whip up the public for the next war - to eliminate Germany's shame.

Worse, Germany's new democratic government, which must accede to and enforce these provisions, no longer commands the loyalty - if it did - of even its paid servants: judges, police officers, prosecutors, military men. From the corridors of the Reichstag to the gutters of Munich, the Weimar government and its leadership are seen as puppets of Versailles, doing Clemenceau's work. Many of Weimar's judges, officials, bureaucrats, police, and military men are the same men who held these offices under the Kaiser. They have little use for noisy and fractious democracy, particularly one that appears imposed by Auslander.

Before the Germans get to see the Treaty of Versailles on May 7, Herbert Hoover, a member of The Inquiry, receives one of the first copies. He reads it in dismay and heads out into Paris's streets in the dawn, where he meets up with South Africa's General Jan Christiaan Smuts and British economist John Maynard Keynes. All three agree that the treaty is, as Keynes calls it, "a rotten peace." Keynes is so angry, he resigns from the British team.

He's not the only person outraged by the treaty. Wilson, his vision worn down by fatigue and demands, can only take solace in knowing that the League of Nations is still there, and believes that this rational organization, led by Americans, will enforce the peace and revise some of the harsher demands. Wilson tells an aide, "If I were a German, I think I should never sign it."

The American Inquiry isn't too thrilled, either. William Bullitt, a future US Ambassador to Russia and France, says, "This isn't a treaty of peace. I can see at least 11 wars in it." Meeting with fellow American diplomats Adolf Berle, Christian Herter, and a young historian named Samuel Eliot Morison, Bullitt proposes that the young men on the US team resign in protest.

Of the 30 who discuss such a move, 12 actually do, including Bullitt, Berle, and Morison, who call the treaty a flagrant contradiction to "both the interests of the United States and the ideals and principles for the vindication of which the United States was supposed to be waging war." Morison, who is working on Russian issues, also objects to US support for the Whites in the Russian civil war.

Everyone is exhausted. The world's leaders cannot hang about Paris any more. In Paris, French troops are threatening mutiny. In the United States, an anarchist's bomb has just blown up the home of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Felix Frankfurter writes later, "Paris was just like a session of Congress. The delegates would do any old thing to close up shop."

Lloyd George, no friend of Germany, also opposes the harsh terms, believing they will merely drive Germany into Bolshevism. "Our peace ought to be dictated by men who act in the spirit of judges sitting in a cause which does not personally engage their emotion or interests, and not in a spirit of a savage vendetta, which is not satisfied without mutilation and the infliction of pain and humiliation," he says.

Lloyd George opposes the reparations proposals and the occupation clauses. But Clemenceau icily retorts that the British are a "maritime people who have not known invasion." Lloyd George says he is seeking to create a peace for all time, not a mere 30 years.

Lloyd George is being optimistic. Foch, also no friend of Germany, is more accurate when he reportedly says, on seeing the terms, "This is no peace. This is an armistice for 20 years."

The fact that the victors themselves regard the treaty they are imposing on Hitler as unfair has an unintended blowback. When Germany starts violating the treaty with armaments production and the occupation of the Rhineland, leading British and French politicians will allow these aggressive moves, saying that Versailles was unfair, and the Germans are merely regaining justice.

The Treaty of Versailles is a vast, unwieldy document - 75,000 words - and sections of it contradict each other. Even its authors do not believe in enforcing its draconian demands. The treaty slams Germany with an enormous reparations bill, and denies her the means with which to pay it. Germany must yield 10 percent of her population from one-eighth of her metropolitan area, 10 percent of her industry, and 15 percent of her arable land.

Yet despite these losses, Germany, whose lands have been unsullied by the war's bombs, shells, and poison gas, remains the strongest economic power in Europe. Germany's population of 70 million is growing, while France's population of 40 million remains static. France's northeastern industrial region is a war-scarred moonscape, her treasury bankrupt. So is Britain, which has lost an entire generation. Russia is racked by internal strife, Austria-Hungary chopped up, and the United States turning isolationist. Germany's enemies and rivals are all weakened.

The treaty damages Germany immensely, but no one is eager to enforce its punitive provisions. As writer David Fromkin notes decades later, "It hurt Germany enough to provoke her to start another war, but not enough to keep her from winning it."

Also angered are some of those nations who hoped to gain from the Treaty. Belgium goes not gain chunks of German East Africa, which go to Britain. Portugal is similarly unrewarded.

Angriest of all may be a 25-year-old Vietnamese man living in Paris, Nguyen Ai Quoc, a former kitchen hand at the Carlton Hotel in London. He demands to see President Wilson and submit his paper, which seeks the "right of self-determination" for the Vietnamese. The French call the proposal "a bomb." Nguyen Ai Quoc's pals regard it as a "thunderbolt," seeking for Vietnam the rights Wilson is offering the world. Wilson refuses to view Nguyen Ai Quoc's ideas. The Vietnamese activist storms out in anger, and heads off, oddly enough, to live and work in the United States.

Americans will know the angry young man 50 years later under the name he will give himself as Vietnam's leading revolutionary and their fiercest foe: Ho Chi Minh.

On May 7, shortly after Hoover, Smuts, and Keynes have their morning chat, German Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau receives the Treaty of Versailles from the Allied powers. Among the newly-invited German delegation is a short, dapper, monocled general, Hans Von Seeckt, who has been named the new head of the German Reichswehr. He will be tasked with developing this force, and he will create the most professional army in Europe - in only a few years.

Brockdorff-Rantzau has just arrived in Paris, his train having been sent deliberately slowly through portions of France blasted by Krupp shells. He and his 160-man team cannot miss the ruined villages and desolate fields that are the war's great legacy. Once in Paris, the Germans are quartered in the unheated Hotel des Reservoirs behind barbed wire.

Nor, when the Germans arrive in Paris, do they miss the irony: they are to sign the treaty that will humiliate the Reich in the gleaming Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where, in 1871, Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck proclaimed the German Empire over France's prostrate corpse.

Brockdorff-Rantzau, in his striped pants, represents the link between the old Germany of plumed Kaisertreu aristocrats and generals and the new Germany, dominated by hopeful politicians and battle-hardened fanatics. Among Brockdorff-Rantzau's ancestors is a Marshal of France.

Now, on a day of cloudless skies, at a luxury hotel in Versailles, this descendant of French constables faces France's Tiger. As a clock chimes 3 p.m., Clemenceau stands and presents the treaty. "You have asked us for peace. We are disposed to give it to you."

Clemenceau says no discussion is permitted. The Germans have 15 days to deliver their objections in writing. Too nervous to rise, Brockdorff-Rantzau presents his answer seated, which comes over to the Allied leaders as calculated insolence. Wilson snarls to Lloyd George, "Isn't it just like them?"

Brockdorff-Rantzau denounces the Allied blockade, and says, "It is demanded that we confess ourselves guilty. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie." Then he heads to his hotel to read the 230-page treaty with its 440 articles and pass it on to Berlin.

Britain's Daily Mail snarls back, "After this no one will treat the Huns as civilized or repentant."

All Germany is stunned. "The unbelievable has happened," gasps Konstantin Fehrenbach, President of the National Assembly. "Our enemies have presented us with a treaty which surpasses the worst fears of our greatest pessimists." Ebert calls the treaty terms "unbearable." Brockdorff-Rantzau calls them intolerable.

Throughout the Reich, Germans hold mass meetings to protest the treaty. Even theaters and dance halls, which have stayed open during the fighting, close in mourning.

In Paris, the Germans prepare their answer to Clemenceau. The German objections total 443 pages, twice the treaty's length. The deadline to sign the treaty is June 28, the anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination that started the war, but the Germans turn in their response on May 29.

The German response agrees to their own disarmament, but demands the Allied powers do the same and abolish conscription themselves. The Germans also demand a plebiscite before yielding Alsace-Lorraine, a cut on reparations, and repudiation of "war guilt" pending a neutral inquiry into the question of responsibility for the war.

Lloyd George is not impressed. "I could not accept the German point of view without giving away the whole of our case for entering the war," he says. He points out that Germany and its allies invaded independent and neutral nations like Serbia and Belgium.

The Allied answer is firm: "Throughout the war, as before the war, the German people and their representatives supported the war, voted the credits, subscribed to the war loans, obeyed every order, however savage, of their government. They shared the responsibility for the policy of their government, for at any moment, had they willed it, they could have reversed it. Had that policy succeeded they would have acclaimed it with the same enthusiasm with which they welcomed the outbreak of the war. They cannot now pretend, having changed their rulers after the war was lost, that it is justice that they should escape the consequence of their deeds."

Meanwhile, the world reacts to the treaty. Walter Lippmann, writing in an issue of The New Republic headlined "This is Not Peace," warns that the treaty will lead to many wars. But the US must join the League of Nations. Lloyd George and Smuts worry about the treaty. It is so harsh, the Germans might refuse to sign, and Britain, having demobilized, would be in no position to resume hostilities. Wilson's peace commissioners tell the president they might not sign the treaty themselves.

Wilson is too tired for further debate. The flaws will be sorted out by the League of Nations, he says. "The time to consider all these questions was when we were writing the treaty," he says.

The Germans have the greatest objections to the treaty. On June 19, the German cabinet resigns rather than sign it.

On June 21, the German High Seas Fleet, interned in Scapa Flow, scuttles itself rather than be divided up in accordance with the treaty provisions. Admiral Ludwig Von Reuter hoists "Paragraph 11, confirm" from his flagship, the light cruiser Emden, and 74 German warships ranging from mighty battleships to torpedo boats send themselves to the bottom of the British harbor. Scottish schoolchildren on the tug Flying Kestrel, enjoying a harbor cruise, are stunned to see vast dreadnoughts blow off steam and turn turtle in front of them. Among the German officers who scuttles his destroyer is Sub-Lt. Friedrich Ruge, who manages to keep his guitar and later become an admiral on Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's staff in 1944 and a conspirator against Hitler.

In Versailles, everyone learns of the mass scuttling just as Brockdorff-Rantzau gives the Reich's answer: Germany will sign the treaty with the exception of the "war guilt" clause. The Allies are enraged by the double defiance. They give the Germans 24 hours to sign the treaty as is, take it or leave it. The Germans ask for 48 hours. Lloyd George calls the German fleet's scuttling "a breach of faith." Request refused.

In Berlin, the caretaker government and President Ebert face the telegrams by summoning Hindenburg and Groener. Can the Army fight, if war resumes? Hindenburg, unable to admit defeat, leaves the room and Groener tells Ebert the situation in the west is "hopeless."

On June 22, Social Democrat Gustav Bauer forms a new government with Erzberger as Vice-Chancellor and Noske as Minister of Defense. The wily Noske ponders using his control of the Freikorps and phone link to Groener to launch a military coup and refuse to sign the treaty. But at the last minute, the National Assembly votes overwhelmingly to sign, hoping it will end the civil warfare and starvation stalking the Reich.

With four hours remaining to the Allied deadline, the German government agrees to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The German government issues a final protest: ports to the gaunt, formal, somber, taciturn, idealistic President Woodrow Wilson, who is making history simply by making this voyage.