On June 28, 1919 — five years to the day after the assassination at Sarajevo — the German delegation signed the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the French royal palace. The treaty stripped Germany of territory and colonies, limited its army to a hundred thousand men, demanded reparations eventually fixed at 132 billion gold marks, and required Germany to accept the war guilt clause (Article 231) as a moral basis for the financial obligation. The treaty was almost universally hated in Germany — and the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who had been there as a Treasury official, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace arguing the settlement guaranteed another war.
The Versailles failure had multiple causes layered on each other. The demands were too harsh to leave Germany reconciled to the postwar order; too lenient to render Germany incapable of revisionism. The reparations regime was economically incoherent: Germany could only pay by exporting, but Allied tariffs blocked that. The territorial losses (Alsace-Lorraine to France, Polish Corridor cutting East Prussia from Germany, Sudeten Germans inside Czechoslovakia) created irredentist grievances Hitler later used. The League of Nations — Wilson's attempt at a permanent international order — was structurally crippled by the U.S. Senate's failure to ratify, and by the absence of Germany and the Soviet Union from membership. By the early 1920s, German nationalists had a coherent narrative: the war was lost by treason at home, the peace was a humiliation, the Republic that signed it was illegitimate. The Dolchstoßlegende — the stab-in-the-back myth — became the foundation of the Nazi worldview.
Bretton Woods (1944) and the postwar order were designed in conscious anti-Versailles — the U.S. would lead, Germany and Japan would be reintegrated rather than punished, international institutions would be backed by the great powers rather than abandoned by them. The current debates about how to end the Russia-Ukraine war, manage a defeated revisionist power, and prevent the next war are all running on the Versailles-versus-Bretton-Woods framework.