19191776 Club
Germany signs the Versailles treaty in the Hall of Mirrors; its delegates call it a Diktat
The same room where the German Empire was proclaimed after defeating France in 1871 is the site chosen to close the war, as Berlin signs terms it had no hand in writing.
The fighting had stopped eight months earlier, but the armistice of November 1918 left the real terms of peace unresolved — and Germany under a continuing Allied blockade while negotiators met in Paris. On June 28, 1919, German delegates signed the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, the same room where the German Empire had been proclaimed after its victory over France in 1871. The ceremony was the punctuation mark on a document Germany had no hand in drafting — a "Diktat," in the word its new government used when it accepted the terms under protest…
