page_title: Treaty of Versailles
section_title: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1918
hierarchical_section_title: Treaty of Versailles / Background / Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 1918
caption_attribution_description: Taken from the campaign series, made public by the US-Army under www.dean.usma.edu The picture is public domain. Map showing the territorial results of the armistice between Bolshevist Russia and the Central Powers.
context_page_description: The Treaty of Versailles was the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War I to an end. The Treaty ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919 in Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had directly led to the war. The other Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties. Although the armistice, signed on 11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the League of Nations on 21 October 1919.
  Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required "Germany [to] accept the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" during the war. This article, Article 231, later became known as the War Guilt clause. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make ample territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion gold marks.
context_section_description: After the Central Powers launched Operation Faustschlag on the Eastern Front, the new Soviet Government of Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany on 3 March 1918. This treaty ended the war between Russia and the Central powers and annexed 1,300,000 square miles (3,400,000 km²) of territory and 62 million people. This loss equated to a third of the Russian population, a quarter of its territory, around a third of the country's arable land, three-quarters of its coal and iron, a third of its factories (totalling 54 percent of the nation's industrial capacity), and a quarter of its railroads.
caption: The borders of Eastern Europe, as drawn up by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
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