ABSTRACT
The fifty-two feverish days between the presentation of the draft treaty to Germany on May 7 and the signing of the final terms of peace on June 28 give, in retrospect, a micro-cosmic view of the ‘German problem’ between the First and the Second World Wars. Lloyd George had stood firmly by the original decision to institute a special system for the Saar, while pressing strongly for the type of concession which eventually emerged. Formidable criticism of the draft treaty was developing within the British delegation. Smuts wrote Wilson about his intense dislike of the terms which, he warned, would not bring peace. The Danzig settlement was harshly condemned as standing ‘in the sharpest opposition to all the assurances given in the statements of President Wilson’. Clemenceau feared the implications of the British proposals in terms of French opinion, of inter-Allied unity, and of the success or failure of the vital negotiations with the Germans.
