II. The Emergence Of The German Threat

Abstract

On 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent in Western Europe; an armistice had brought an end to the First World War. In London, Big Bens chimes heralded an end to four years of war, and people danced in the streets of Britain and France. The eventual results of the peace negotiations, as laid down in the Treaties of Paris, the best known of which is the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, were the products of a compromise between the three allied leaders. International politics in the early 1920s centred around Franco-German relations. After the war, the dissatisfied were to unite mainly in two large and related political movements, fascism and National Socialism. The image of a peaceful Germany, established after the German-Polish non-aggression treaty, suffered serious damage from Hitlers attempts to stage a National Socialist coup in Vienna. Keywords: fascism; First World War; German threat; National Socialism; treaty of Versailles