The Germans handed in voluminous notes. They contended that the territorial provisions violated President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and declared that it would be a physical impossibility for Germany to fulfil the economic clauses. Their experts wrote out an argument to show that the failure to name a definite sum would jeopardize the authority of the new German Government, would mean economic slavery for the vanquished, and would involve all central Europe in ruin. They pointed out that the tentative sums demanded exceeded the convertible wealth of Germany, and that if the treaty were signed, with such obligations forced upon them, default would be inevitable. They presented a brief on the question of the responsibilty of the war, which they were asked to acknowledge, pleading that such a matter should be left to experts, with all the documents before them from the official archives of the several countries involved. They asserted that it would be impossible to force upon the German people international control of waterways and other means of transportation without reciprocity. They asked that alleged violations of the laws of war should be tried before a neutral tribunal, and asserted that they had a list of Allied war criminals against whom they could submit evidence as damning as the Allies could submit against German officers and soldiers.
At the end of May they made counter-proposals, agreeing to disarmament clauses, to the reduction of their army to one hundred thousand men, and also to the abolition of their navy. They agreed that Dantzig should be a free port, but rejected some of the territorial clauses and the penal stipulations. They refused to confess their sole responsibility for the war. They asked for plebiscites in territories taken from them by the treaty. They agreed to pay for reparations a total sum not exceeding 100,000,000,000 gold marks.
The Allies answered the German notes, one by one, in writing. No honest effort was made to justify in detail the terms to which the Germans objected by bringing arguments to refute the German arguments. The attitude of the Allies, in every answer, was that the Germans forgot that they had lost the war, a war for which they were solely responsible and which had brought upon the world endless misery. They were reminded of the fact that they had done more wrong than the most unfavorable terms could atone for, and that the damages due to their invasions of other countries and their diabolical destruction of cities, factories, and mines had put them beyond the pale of civilization. They ought to be glad that the terms were not harder. The terms could easily have been made harder. In none of the Allied replies was attention paid to the German claim that there had been a pre-armistice agreement, and that the Allies were using exactly opposite principles in deciding different points, invoking self-determination to justify detaching territory from Germany where there were alien majorities, and assigning historic and strategic reasons where the majorities were German. In the replies nothing was said about the unfairness of unilateral transport advantages in time of peace.