#may 1919

Carlotta Monterey

By Maurice Goldberg

Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s Foreign Minister for much of the first half of 1919, pictured the year before.

May 7 1919, Versailles--The Germans had been summoned to the peace conference in late April.  They had hoped, as had originally been anticipated by all parties, that the last few months had been the Allies preparing their peace terms, and now would come the time for the actual peace negotiations.  The German delegation brought with it crates upon crates of material to back up these negotiations that they were never to have.

On May 7, the German delegation was brought to the Trianon Palace Hotel.  Clemenceau told them: “The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of oura account.  You asked us for peace.  We are disposed to grant it to you,” before outlining the major features of the peace deal: Germany would lose her colonies, parts of Silesia, and the Polish Corridor.  Danzig would become a free city, the Saar would be effectively a French protectorate, the Rhineland would be occupied for over a decade, Germany would owe a large reparations bill, the League of Nations would not include Germany among her initial members, and that the war had been “imposed upon [the Allies] by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

The head of the German delegation, German Foreign Minister Brockdorff-Rantzau, gave an angry speech during which he insisted on remaining seated; it did not help that his interpreters did a poor job of translating his words.  In particular, he rankled at “the demand...that we shall acknowledge that we alone are guilty of having caused the war....Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.”  His words misrepresented the treaty (which never used the word “guilt”), and had almost certainly been prepared before he had even seen the text of the treaty. Lloyd George snapped an ivory letter-opener in two during the speech; Wilson called it “the most tactless speech I have ever heard.  The Germans really are a stupid people. They always do the wrong thing.”  Balfour was more generous, saying merely that “I make it a rule never to stare at people when they are in obvious distress.”

The mood among the German delegation, and back in Germany, was that of shock and anger, especially at the Americans, whom they had hoped would spare them.  In the final weeks before the terms of the treaty were published, an American observer noted: 

The Germans have little left but Hope.  But having only that I think they have clung to it--the Hope that the Americans would do something, the Hope that the final terms would not be so severe as the Armistice indicated and so on.  Subconsciously, I think the Germans have been more optimistic than they realized....When they see the terms in cold print, there will be intense bitterness, hate and desperation.

May 1919: men of the Volkswehr Regiment Regensburg (badge, inset) resting after the liberation of Munich. Top left, having a snack on top of the wagon, is Leutnant Rudolf Hess.

Baron Adolph de Meyer, Rose Dolores, Vogue, May 1919.

Caption: Eager-eyed from under her bridal veil, she gazes in the fortune-telling crystal, hoping to see her dreams there in the clear yet mystery-filled glass. Fastening the draping veil of rose point lace are jeweled wings of platinum set solidly with diamonds and only Cartier could have devised the flexible setting. 

Sotheby's

The Royal Horse Artillery in action against Afghan forces, pictured later in the month.

May 6 1919, Peshawar--Habibullah Khan, who had successfully kept his nation neutral during the war, was assassinated in February 1919.  A power struggle ensued among his relatives, including his brother Nasrullah (who had been pro-German during the war) and his son Amanullah.  By April, Amanullah had won, but his hold on power was insecure.  In an attempt to unify the country against an external enemy and to placate anti-British elements that had favored his uncle, Amanullah planned to invade India.  The recent unrest in India, heightened by the massacre in Amritsar, raised hopes that the local population would assist them--the Afghans planned for an uprising in Peshawar on May 8.

Student leaders of the protests in Beijing, pictured on May 7 after being released from custody.

May 4 1919, Beijing--News that the Allies had decided to effectively hand over Tsingtao to the Japanese, contrary to the Wilsonian ideal of self-determination, reached China in early May.  It provoked an immediate reaction from the students at Peking University; one recalled:

When the news of the Paris Peace Conference finally reached us we were greatly shocked.  We at once awoke to the fact that foreign nations were still selfish and militaristic and that they were all great liars.  I remember the night of May 2nd and very few of us slept. A group of my friends and I talked almost the whole night.  We came to the conclusion that a greater world war would be coming sooner or later, and that this great war would be fought in the East.  We had nothing to do with our government, that we knew very well, and at the same time we could no longer depend upon the principles of any so-called great leader like Woodrow Wilson, for example.  Looking at our people and at the pitiful ignorant masses, we couldn’t help but feel that we must struggle.

On May 4, several thousand students congregated on Tienanmen Square.  Many carried placards with slogans like “Give Us Back Tsingtao” or “Do Away With the Twenty-One Demands” or “China Belongs to the Chinese.” In the afternoon, they moved towards the foreign legations; unable to find anyone thought to be in the pay of the Japanese, they instead assaulted the Chinese ambassador to Japan.

Attempts by the Chinese government to crack down on the protests were unsuccessful, and only encouraged more protests, both in Beijing and elsewhere around the country.  It also quickly soured relations between the government in Beijing and rival factions in the south, which quickly embraced nationalist sentiments to co-opt the May Fourth Movement.  Public opinion and intellectual life also turned decidedly away from the West that had betrayed them; some of the leaders of the movement founded the Chinese Communist Party two years later.

Baltic German forces on a bridge over the Daugava in Riga.

May 22 1919, Riga--Rüdiger von der Goltz had set up his own puppet government in western Latvia in April, and it remained in power despite Allied objections.  In May, he decided he was ready to take the rest of Latvia from the Reds, who had held Riga since the start of the year.  He received some encouragement from the government in Berlin; Foreign Minister Brockdorff-Rantzau hoped that victories over the Reds would prove useful in convincing the Allies that a crippled Germany would not be in their best interests.  Officially, the offensive was to be a Latvian one; however, most of the troops involved were Baltic Germans or Freikorps units from Germany, and Latvian-speaking forces would only play a subsidiary role.

The Germans attacked at dawn on May 22, taking the Reds by surprise.  By noon, they had reached the Daugava, and in the afternoon they crossed the river with four machine guns and took Riga.  Five months of Red rule had not been kind to the city, and even the Germans were welcome amid food shortages and political terror.  Of course, the Germans then proceeded to carry out a white terror of their own, shooting many suspected Bolsheviks in the coming days.

Red forces put up stiffer resistance south of the city, backed by an armored train, but they too were forced to retreat beyond the Daugava by the end of the day.

May 31 1919, Paris--The problem of new Yugoslav-Austrian border continued to vex the Peace Conference.  The Italians, continuing their adamantly anti-Yugoslav stance, wanted all of the Klagenfurt area to remain in Austrian hands.  The Yugoslavs began to worry that the Big Three would side with the Italians on the issue to avoid having to make concessions elsewhere, in Turkey or on the Adriatic coast, and their negotiators began to soften their position.  On the ground, however, Slovene and Serbian forces launched another offensive on May 29.  The Allies demanded an immediate ceasefire, but this took well over a week to implement, by which time the Yugoslavs had secured most of the disputed area.