The onset of war destroyed a large part of Franz Urbig's life's work. The globalisation of world trade which up till 1914 had underpinned more than three decades of rapidly growing prosperity - especially for western Europe and the United States - was thrown into reverse for more than a generation. In 1919 he accepted the politicians' invitation to attend the Paris Peace Conference in his capacity as an internationally acknowledged German expert on finance and trade. At the conference he made the case that no country - not even the United States of America - would be capable of sustaining the financial burdens which the victors proposed to impose on the new German republic. However, in the spirit of mutual hatred engendered by four years of bitter fighting and the accompanying war-time propaganda to which populations had been subjected on the home front, it became clear that the reparations demanded by the French leadership would not be significantly scaled back by the hoped for pressure from the British and Americans, notwithstanding the concerns eloquently expressed by at least one respected member of the British delegation. Urbig resigned his mandate as a member of the German delegation, with the parting advice that the conditions proposed (and subsequently imposed) by the war's military victors could never provide the basis for a lasting peace. He was again a member of the German delegation at the Spa Conference of 1920, but the Supreme War Council delegates were, as before, not minded to attend to the concerns of the German government representatives.