Tuesday 4 July 2006

Do you know when WWI ended?

World War 1 did not end on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 as the history books have taught us.

It officially ended 92 years later!

On 28 September 2010, The Daily Telegraph told us this:

"The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies. The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead...

France, which had been ravaged by the war, pushed hardest for the steepest possible fiscal punishment for Germany. The principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in June 1919 in protest at the scale of the demands...

When the Wall Street Crash came in 1929, the Weimar Republic spiralled into debt. Four years later, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany."
There's a lot they don't teach you in school, isn't there?

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