The silver coins distributed to children living in the shadow of London’s great German Hospital earned Anton von Horst no favours in an enemy country in 1916, two years into a war in which almost five million people would die, while the wounded comprised almost twice that amount. Subsequently transferred to Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, where 24,500 internees were wearily marooned during the last years of the war, Baron Horst was one of a considerable number of Germans who were only released six months after the signing of the armistice agreement on 11 November 1918.*
Hindsight suggests that Germany’s fate was sealed on 6 April 1917, the day that Woodrow Wilson brought America into the war. Nevertheless, on 4 June 1918, when American reinforcements were pouring into France at a rate of 10,000 men a day, Prince Heinrich of Pless could still stand on a French hillside at the side of a splendidly uniformed Wilhelm II and join him in anticipating the destruction of Paris, ‘so that not one stone will be left on the other, simply wiped off the face of the earth . . .’1 In point of fact, as the Prince informed his dismayed wife back in Germany, everything, at the end of a long war, was going ‘marvellously well’.
Prince Heinrich’s brother, Fritz Hochberg, was also eagerly anticipating a swift conclusion to hostilities, although the Count had no idea of who would win. What, really, did it matter, so long as release was at hand? Writing to his beloved English sister-in-law during that same month, Fritz told Daisy of his own peaceful fantasy: ‘we’ll take the next boat and sail for our beloved little island’.2 In fact, neither of the Hochberg brothers ever saw England again.
Daisy – ignoring the orders given both by her husband and by the Emperor himself to try to stay quiet and out of sight – was working too hard on her own humane projects to humour the unrealistic notions of the Pless family. In October 1918, determined to make a contribution wherever she could, the intrepid Princess set off on a long journey, via Belgrade, to establish a new convalescent home for wounded soldiers at Constanza, in Romania.
Daisy’s timing was terrible. Europe, towards the end of the war, was in a state of meltdown. Rebel troops had blown up the one bridge leading to Constanza; the only option was to abandon her brave project and turn back. A twenty-hour return journey to Belgrade got the exhausted Princess there just in time to be rushed onto the last steamer leaving for Budapest. Arriving on 18 October, Daisy found the city in a state of uproar. Confronted by rioters, bonfires and bombs, she locked herself into a hotel room to sit events out until – on the very day that Germany’s own home revolution began at Kiel – the exhausted and terrified Princess finally abandoned all hope for her plans.
On 4 November, Daisy Pless joined the hordes of refugees who were streaming across Europe, through countries that trembled on the verge of disintegration, fleeing back into a nation that was simultaneously facing defeat in France and revolution at home, as the German sailors led the call for an end to imperial rule. Eleven days later, having been warned to stay away from Pless and Fürstenstein because of local riots, Daisy reached Berchtesgaden. Here, in a resort that had long been favoured by the German aristocracy, the Princess found that her pretty alpine villa had been taken over by members of the new revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Daisy, approving of this turn of events, promptly set about providing them with cigarettes and beer. ‘They are very very nice to me,’ she confided to her journal on 15 November and added that she supported the rights of these gallant soldiers, last protectors of a threatened nation: ‘as I see things clearly coming, they are our only defence against Bolshevism’.
All in all, while initially unnerved, Daisy Pless believed that the new and fiercely nationalistic Germany deserved support. Her awareness of the hardships suffered by the miners at Pless and Fürstenstein had come early on in a privileged marriage. The news that these same workers and their comrades now sought to establish their rights troubled the Princess far less than the news that Patsy Cornwallis-West, now widowed and frail, was calling for her daughter to come back home and nurse her. The British government forbade any such course of action. Regarded as a traitor to her husband’s country because of her friendly behaviour to English POWs, Daisy’s thoughtfulness for the wounded soldiers of Germany now cast her, in her own land, as one of the enemy. There could be, in 1918, no question of making a return to England.
Hansel Pless had scarcely set eyes on Daisy since 1916, the year in which he set off, as a proud sixteen-year-old, to fight for his father’s country. Following Germany’s victory over Russia and the subsequent signing, in March 1918, of the ferocious reparations treaty of Brest-Litovsk,* the young officer was transferred from Galicia on the Eastern Front to France, where, so Hansel later recalled, life in dugouts had been made a daily nightmare by the attacks of the French and the Americans. (Loyal throughout his life to his mother’s country, the Prince refused to allocate any responsibility for his discomfort to British troops.)
Hansel was sharing a dugout near Sedan with his most recent commander, Count Eulenburg, when the news came through on 9 November that the German Emperor had been forced to abdicate.
Eulenburg, whose father, Philipp, had been one of the Emperor’s closest friends and advisors, stood high among Hansel Pless’s canon of military heroes. The Count was a man adored by his troops, a stickler for etiquette who, while crossing a burning bridge, once stopped to reprimand a frightened soldier for failing to deliver the correct salute. Gravely wounded on seven occasions, he himself had never complained. But now, informed of the Emperor’s degradation, Eulenburg shed public tears and then called for one last round of applause from his men. ‘I’ve never heard them cheer louder,’ Hansel remembered.3 Two days later, under Eulenburg’s command and in spite of the announcement that armistice had been agreed, his weary troops made a final – and futile – attempt to recover their lost position, just outside Sedan.
Eulenburg’s behaviour was not unusual. So many promises had been made and broken. To the men at the front in November 1918, an armistice announcement amounted to no more than the latest piece of worthless propaganda.
News of the spreading revolution reached Hansel while he was still at Sedan and suffering from the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’, the deadly influenza that choked more people to death in a year than died during the entire terrible process of the war.* Recovered, Hansel became part of that German Army who were now summoned home to act as heroes and patriots, defenders of a country in which ‘Deutschland über alles’, when sung at Weimar in December 1918, would signify victory, not over the Allies, but over the dreaded spectre of the Bolsheviks.
The rebellion had begun early the previous month, at the Emperor’s favourite sailing harbour. Ordered to carry out a suicidal attack upon the British Navy in the last weeks of a lost war, the sailors of ration-starved and battered Kiel rebelled. By the afternoon of 4 November, the town was controlled by 40,000 mutineers. Four days later, the revolutionaries’ call for peace and a new democratic government had spread to Hanover, Brunswick, Frankfurt and Munich. At the very same time that the armistice was agreed and signed at Compiègne, in France, internal preparations were being made to sweep away the last vestiges of imperial Germany. Would Germany follow imperial Russia’s fate? Would the sailors and the powerful anti-war movement known as the Spartacus League (it became the Communist Party, or KPD, in December 1918) seize the reins?
One thing was clear: at the very moment of defeat, Germany’s army faced a new challenge which could, if shrewdly handled, become a life-saving salvager of national morale. In this scenario, there had been no defeat; Germany had simply elected to return home to face battle with a greater enemy. ‘Our field-grey heroes return to the Heimat undefeated . . .’ ran the official press release.
Similar words would be used by Friedrich Ebert, the short and plain-faced socialist moderate who had been singled out by Wilhelm II’s last chancellor (his nephew, Max von Baden) as the man best suited to take the Emperor’s place and yet uphold the rule of sanity. ‘I salute you,’ Ebert declared to the soldiers, ‘you, who return unvanquished from the field of battle.’4
Germany, as her new leader-in-waiting was eager to stress, might have lost two million men on the battlefields, but she had never been occupied and she had not been crushed. A greater cause had brought her valiant armies home. Challenging the world mattered less than protecting the threatened Fatherland from destruction by her own people.
For Hansel Pless, the return offered a chance to demonstrate how well he had learned the duty of a German officer to serve his country and his leader. Proud still in his old age, he recalled how, during the march to Potsdam, a mob of revolutionaries had called for his blood: ‘“Tear his epaulettes off and kill the bastard!”’ Turning towards them, Hansel prepared to defend himself. There was no need. ‘They were quite a crowd, but when they saw a Cavalry Officer with an Iron Cross, aged just eighteen, and quite ready to kill them if they attacked, they all shut up.’5
Hansel had been taught to offer his allegiance to the throne. Harry Kessler had earned his title as ‘the Red Count’ from his left-leaning sympathies. Nevertheless, back from acting as an unofficial German cultural attaché in Switzerland and doing his bit for the November Revolution as a part-time ‘Red’ policeman, the dapper Kessler was shaken by the size of the crowds and the violence of the riots that he witnessed in Berlin on 9 November, the day of the Emperor’s abdication.
Count Kessler had no time for the notion that Germany remained undefeated. It was his country’s loss to the Allies that made this, for him, ‘one of the most memorable and dreadful days in German history’. Nevertheless, he shrank from the sight of the rebels who booed the returning troops of gaunt-faced soldiers who wore their wreaths of flowers as if ‘festooned in melancholy’. Neither could he see why the mob needed to destroy the personal correspondence of the imperial family, while plundering the palace of the absent Wilhelm.6
A tweed-suited, softly spoken, aristocratic aesthete whose swiftly blinking eyes – they were sometimes compared to camera shutters – missed nothing that passed under their scrutiny, Harry Kessler was a divided man. He admitted that he disliked the hooliganism of the men whose politics he wanted to endorse. Such fastidious reservations, however, would only have caused Kessler doubly to deplore a young Hansel Pless for taking part (under orders that could not be disobeyed by an army officer) in the dawn attack on the headquarters of the left-wing newspaper Forwards (Vorwärts). The attack was followed by the arrest and covert murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the revolutionary leaders of Spartacus.
Friedrich Ebert, meanwhile, indicated his implicit approval of the killings by refusing to allow the assassins to be court-martialled. For Ebert, who had initially opposed the Emperor’s abdication, what mattered most was to broadcast the fact that a newborn and wholesomely republican country would stand firm against the threat of Bolshevism. Republican Germany must never suffer Russia’s recent fate.
Tisa Schulenburg was not among the little band of girls attending the select Stift Heiligengrabe boarding school who shed tears over the Emperor’s departure.7 Gleefully defiant of their nun-like uniforms, Tisa and her own coterie of rebels decked out their hair with scarlet ribbons, put on an anti-monarchist play and announced that they would no longer curtsey to their teachers. Back home at Tressow (as she later remembered with a twinge of guilt), Tisa marched around singing, ‘Smear the guillotine with the aristocracy’s fat’, purely for the pleasure of terrifying her mother’s old-fashioned lady’s maid. Countess Schulenburg, doubtless to her daughter’s disappointment, did not oppose Tisa’s displays of republicanism. Known in the neighbourhood of Tressow as ‘Red Maria’on account of her strong and active social conscience, the Countess was treated with respect by local insurgents. This was a woman who, while she fed her own family on a strict wartime diet of bread and turnip soup, had chopped up old Schulenburg uniforms (an act of desecration equivalent to Mrs Woodrow Wilson ripping up the Stars and Stripes), in order to make jackets for the thread-bare and starving villagers. Such acts had not been forgotten. The officially delivered command for just one Schulenburg family shotgun to be removed from the Tressow premises was no more than a token gesture by the well-disposed local authorities. Meanwhile, when grand visitors bewailed the loss of their homes and possessions to the villainous Bolsheviks, Tisa shared with her mother the secret sense that justice was being done.
Tisa’s father was less eager than his daughter to embrace the birth of a republic. General Schulenburg had been with the Emperor at Spa on 9 November. Speaking as a man who believed with passion in his country and his duty, the General had begged Wilhelm to follow his chancellor’s recommendation to step down, but not to flee.
Wilhelm gravely shook General Schulenburg’s hand and pledged his firm commitment. The risk of suffering the fate of his cousin Nicky, the Tsar, proved, however, too terrifying for Willy to contemplate at a time of crisis. Within hours of that commitment, and accompanied by a train of fifty-seven carriages loaded with his personal effects – they included every film that had ever shown Willy on camera – the dethroned Emperor slipped across the border, fleeing into Holland.
Schulenburg, years later, paying a single reluctant visit to the Emperor’s Dutch manorhouse at Doorn, was rewarded with a memento: a block of wood upon the surface of which Wilhelm had neatly carved not Schulenburg’s name, but Willy’s own.
Tisa Schulenburg’s experiences of harsh rationing at Tressow were duplicated all across Germany. Starvation conditions were savagely extended through the decision to keep Britain’s naval blockade in place until full reparations from Germany had been agreed.
In January 1919, an Eton-educated member of Margot Asquith’s extensive and largely Germanophile family was despatched on a mission to Berlin. Officially, young Ernest Tennant was supposed to be ascertaining whether the armistice conditions were being observed. Unofficially, he smuggled in as much as he could carry in the way of fodder (dried beef and soup tins) to feed the needy. Prepared for disturbing scenes, Tennant found himself horrified. ‘What I saw in Berlin in January 1919, especially the starvation of small children, had a considerable influence on my later life,’ he recalled in 1957, ‘because it made me think that another war with Germany was quite impossible and that now we should endeavour to be friends.’ Eventually, this view would lead Tennant to become one of Hitler’s most ardent advocates; back in 1920, a well-founded concern for Germany’s fate inspired him to plead with the Economic Council that help should be extended to a suffering nation.8
Hilda Deichmann owed her own post-war visit to rations-starved Germany to the timely return to England, late in 1918, of her brother Maurice, covered in glory for his success in the rallying of troops from the British dominions to assist in the war.
Maurice de Bunsen stepped ashore just as Hilda, together with her third and youngest daughter, was being despatched to an internment camp as an enemy alien. Maurice, acting with his usual quiet dexterity, obtained permission for Hilda and young Marie Therese to intern themselves more agreeably at Bendeleben, the beautiful Thuringian estate that Wilhelm von Krause had dutifully abandoned in 1914, to fight for his country.
The journey from Holland to Thuringia was, of necessity, a slow one. Few trains were in service and Hilda was disconcerted to see that flimsy sheets of paper had been tacked across the glassless windows of the carriages. She was shocked far more than this by the sombre spectacle, wherever she looked, of the lines of frail-boned, gaunt-faced children begging for food; of the shuffling rows of men, their faces pinched to skulls; of shabby old officials, mere skeletons within the bulk of their once splendid pre-war uniforms. Staying at an immense hotel at Hanover, she paid a quite staggering sum for the privilege. The reason was soon apparent: there were no other guests.
In May 1919, Germany was still in a state not far removed from civil war. Hilda witnessed no violence during her journey; nevertheless, arriving at Bendeleben, where a single maid and a lone housekeeper were on hand to welcome her, the Baronness soon learned how life had altered since the days before the war. The farms stood in ruins; the horses were gone; the pastures were derelict and the cattle were dead. The farm-workers, while desperate to earn some money, were too weak and underfed to perform any active tasks; the local Communist leader, although quite unthreatening when he paid his formal visit, had no solutions to offer. Visiting a few of her formerly grand neighbours to glean news and helpful ideas, Hilda found the elderly Grafins down on their hands and knees, their skinny bodies garbed in threadbare clothes, scrubbing floors. When Wilhelm, gaunt and prematurely grey-haired, finally returned from his long imprisonment in 1920 and married Princess Lieven, Hilda was relieved to discover that the Princess’s sturdy teenage daughter had only one dream: to spend her days working on a farm. Such a wish, as Hilda dryly observed, was one fancy that was not difficult to grant at Bendeleben.9
Conscious, everywhere she looked, of poverty and hunger, and of the contribution that was still being made to that misery by Britain’s naval blockade, Hilda Deichmann was astonished by the lack of hostility shown towards herself as an evidently well-off woman whose German, although fluent, was spoken with a strong British accent.
Likewise, the British Army, who began their post-war occupation of the towns along the Rhine in 1919, as stipulated in the armistice agreement. An army of 13,000 soldiers, few of whom spoke German, had taken up residence; yet the artist William Rothenstein, briefly billeted in Bonn early in 1919, detected no evidence of resentment or aggression. On the contrary; the grateful and surprised British soldiers were regularly offered gifts and invited to join the Rhinelanders at their family meals. Violet Markham, whose officer husband was stationed on the Rhine from 1919–20, confirmed Rothenstein’s impression. Tom Delmer, last met as a schoolboy chanting victory songs in a Berlin classroom and subsequently taken to England in 1917, was overjoyed to exchange grim, soot-blackened London and a school where he had been mocked for his tubbiness and a foreign accent for Cologne, a cheerful riverside city where the defeated citizens welcomed his German-speaking family like long-lost friends.
In England, doors that had slammed shut in August 1914 were beginning to creak ajar. At Covent Garden, Beecham put The Meistersingers and Tristan and Isolde back on the programme in 1919 and drew packed houses. On 8 March 1919, a mere six months after the armistice had been signed, Geoffrey ‘Robin’ Dawson, a former editor of The Times, attended a large party being given for the King and Queen at Londonderry House and found Prince and Princess Lichnowsky there among the guests. Lady Londonderry herself was known to be as ardent a Germanophile as Margot Asquith, the former prime minister’s wife; what startled Robin Dawson more was the fact that King George himself had approved the addition of two German visitors to the guest list.
Overtures of friendship were cautiously being made. Nevertheless, the naval blockade remained in place, purposefully contributing to Germany’s hardship until reparations were signed into the Treaty of Versailles. The date for that signing was set, with meticulous care, for 28 June 1919, precisely five years from the day on which the shooting of an unpopular minor royal had led to the outbreak of war. The setting for the signature – the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles – was selected with equal care. France, still smarting from the vicious reparations that had been imposed after her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, wanted Germany to savour that ashy taste on precisely the same spot that Prussia had triumphantly proclaimed Wilhelm I as the German emperor.
The choice of location was vindictive, and many felt that the French demands for compensation from a ruined neighbour were excessive. (Certain American delegates were heard to remark, during the course of heated pre-treaty negotiations, that they wished they had fought for Germany.) But it was an Englishman, Philip Kerr, who wrote the fateful memorandum from which – as Article 231 – the issue of Germany’s responsibility emerged into the spotlight. Germany might feel, within herself, that she had not been vanquished. Article 231 (subsequently known as the war guilt clause) left no doubt that Germany was to be identified as both the perpetrator and the loser of the war. Great though her present suffering might be, Germany alone had brought it upon herself. She must pay the price.
Philip Kerr would spend the rest of his life reproaching himself for having contributed to the economic destruction of a Germany that desperately needed encouragement and support. Kerr, a brilliant and high-principled man who had come to Paris as the Prime Minister’s put-upon private secretary, was too hard on himself. The daily sharing of a cluttered and over-heated suite of rooms with Lloyd George, alongside the Prime Minister’s unofficial mistress and his daughter, Megan, was not the ideal working scenario for a quiet but highly strung man whose nerves began to creep into the shrillness of his voice. Kerr was responsible for a memorandum, but not for the terms of the treaty. And the Treaty of Versailles, however guilty Kerr and others felt about it afterwards, was no harsher in its demands than those that Germany herself had issued to France in 1871 and to Soviet Russia (at Brest-Litovsk) in 1918.
The treaty’s conditions were undeniably tough. They were made far worse because the new and socially conscientious republic could not bring itself to impose further miseries upon a suffering nation. The bulk of the German Navy had been scuttled at Scapa Flow instead of handing it over to Britain (with a possibility of continued employment for the sailors who now had none). Seven-eighths of the German Army had been dismissed in compliance with the treaty’s demands. Friedrich Ebert, the fledgling republic’s first president, was in no position, therefore, to keep his well-meant promise of offering work to all willing and able-bodied German citizens.
The problem of unemployment was less immediately apparent to a country in the throes of financial crisis than the question of reparations payment that was raised at the Treaty of Versailles and ratified in 1921. The bill for war amounted to an eye-watering ten million pounds (later reduced to a mere £6,600,000).
Nor was that all. Rolling stock, train engines and all forms of military transport were to be immediately surrendered to France, while the restoration to France of Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine launched a crippling attack on German industry, principally located in Lorraine. The immense coalfield of the Saar was to be ceded to France for fifteen years, after which a plebiscite would decide its future. The Rhineland was to be occupied not only by the British Tommies, but by 25,000 soldiers imported from the French colonies. Far more problematically, the newly independent state of Poland was to be given a route through German territory to the port of Danzig (Dansk), now nominally under international control. East Prussia found itself suddenly marooned and portless, while the coal-rich estates of such mighty Silesian magnates as Prince Hans Heinrich of Pless were placed within the grasp of Polish control.
Philip Kerr, writing to an anxious Violet Markham in 1920, told her that the treaty’s conditions were far too stringent.10 Lloyd George himself seems to have felt an occasional qualm and showed it when he argued, without success, for Upper Silesia’s right to choose whether to be governed by Poland’s new republic.*
Philip Kerr had been thinking about Anglo-German rivalry since 1909, when he was sharing a London flat with Robert Brand, an All Souls fellow who, like Kerr, had belonged to Alfred Milner’s South African Kindergarten of ardent imperialists.
Prevented by a nervous breakdown and acute rheumatism from taking part in the war, Kerr was nursed back to health by Nancy Astor, the formidably self-willed American wife of Waldorf, owner of Cliveden. Converted from Catholicism to Christian Science by Nancy at a time when his faith prevented him from marrying the Protestant Lady Minna Cecil, Kerr’s contribution to the war had been purely cerebral: some eighteen articles in which he addressed the causes and likely effects of the war. Robert Brand, meanwhile, having been despatched to Washington in 1917 as a liaison officer for the supply of US munitions, married Nancy Astor’s divorced sister, the former Phyllis Langhorne from Virginia.
Newly arrived in Paris in the spring of 1919, and preparing to discuss the future of Germany, a country he had never yet visited, Kerr found himself once again in the company of Bob Brand, representing the interests of Lazard’s Bank and acting as an advisor to Lord Robert Cecil, head of the Economic Council. Brand’s own farsighted opinion was that little benefit could be gained from ruining a potentially valuable business associate. That view was shared and expressed with a forceful eloquence to which Brand never aspired (Bob Brand’s writings were as thoughtfully dull as his personality was charming) by a younger and far more articulate colleague. John Maynard Keynes’s book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, would offer a first and devastating critique of the Treaty of Versailles, laying the majority of the responsibility for its failings upon a vengeful Clemenceau and an ageing, increasingly incompetent Woodrow Wilson.
John Maynard Keynes was thirty-six years old when he came to Paris in 1919. Born into an English family that had always looked to Germany as a model for enlightenment, he shared Robert Brand’s view that the way forward was to help build a defeated Germany up, not to inflict further damage upon an already devastated nation.
The cause of Keynes’s most immediate concern was the spectre of famine. The German people were starving; 270,000 tons of American food was being withheld from them. The French were objecting to its release because the cost of purchase would reduce the amount that could be taken from Germany for reparations payments. Keynes thought this was unjust. So, among the row of silent gentlemen ranked on the opposite side of the debate (Germany was granted no voice in the discussions), did Dr Carl Melchior, a financier from the Hamburg branch of Warburg’s Bank.
In 1920, the year after his return from Paris, Keynes wrote a remarkable tribute to Melchior, a small, thin man who dressed – unlike Keynes himself – with immaculate formality in a dark suit above which a high white shirt collar rose to frame a pensive, intelligent face. Melchior alone appeared to Keynes to lend an aura of poignant dignity to Germany’s defeat. Privately (the essay about Melchior did not appear in print until three years after Keynes’s death), the British economist wrote that his feeling for the German banker had come close to love.
Talking ardently together, the two men sought and found a compromise. Germany should have her provisions; the payment for them (the suggestion came from Keynes) would be the surrender of what remained of Germany’s interned – and currently redundant – fleet. Melchior approved. ‘We pressed hands, and I hurried quietly on into the street.’11
Keynes, disgusted by the scenes and the atmosphere to which he had been a witness during his five-month stay in Paris, resigned from the British Treasury on 5 June and went home. Shielded from worldly intrusion at Charleston, the Sussex home that Clive and Vanessa Bell shared with Duncan Grant, Keynes began to express, at a rate of a thousand well-picked words a day, his pessimistic view of what would be the likely outcome of imposing harsh conditions upon a large, nationalistic and financially straitened Germany. ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe,’ Keynes warned in the book that would make his name, ‘vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.’12
Harry Kessler, witnessing the ratification of the peace in Paris on 10 January 1920, echoed the British economist’s despondency that day in his journal: ‘A terrible era begins for Europe, like the gathering of clouds before a storm.’
Germany’s Foreign Minister let his thoughts be known by a premeditated gesture of disgust. Leaning over the document that he was required to sign, he laid upon it, in silent protest, a single pair of mourning gloves.
Footnotes
* Repatriated in 1919, Horst rejoined his family in Germany, set up a hop-producing business and, in 1933, briskly joined the newly elected Nazi party.
* The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave Germany one-half of Russian industry, nine-tenths of her coal mines, six billion marks’ worth of financial reparations and one-third of her people (constituting all German-speaking members of the Russian population). The treaty provides a disturbing hint of what Germany would have sought from the Allies had she emerged victorious.
* Between twenty and forty million people were killed in 1918–19 by the most devastating epidemic that the world has yet experienced.
* A plebiscite vote that was supposedly rigged both by the French and the Poles brought no easy answers to an area on which Poland, under Marshal Pitsudski (the hero of the Ukranian-Polish defeat of advancing Soviet troops in 1920), imposed ruinous demands. By 1924, the Pless mines were under Polish management teams; the stamp of the White Eagle on the furniture soon clarified any doubts about who now owned the contents of Fürstenstein and Pless.