Original subtitles

On the 8th of November, 1918 three men met in a railway

carriage in the woods in northern France.

They were there to negotiate the end of the First World War.

This is a dark day with tension, as this is the greatest war

the world has seen, thus far.

Their meeting lasted three days.

At stake were hundreds of thousands of lives.

Leading historians from each country have taken us inside the minds

of those involved.

Foch keeps saying to the British, "My country was devastated.

"Yours wasn't."

Too much bonhomie is not going to get you very far in this.

People of 70 million can suffer, but we will not die.

You will not get rid of us.

The results of the meeting would echo down through the 20th century,

often with terrible consequences.

Now, exactly 100 years later, this is the story of that meeting.

This is the story of the Armistice of 1918.

In 1918, German military headquarters were in Spa,

in occupied Belgium.

It was from here, at 12 noon on November the 7th,

that the Germans set off for the negotiations

to end the First World War.

Leading the delegation was a mild-mannered former

schoolteacher turned politician, Matthias Erzberger.

Matthias Erzberger is courageous and selfless.

He is a man of conviction, and not a game player.

He looks like a kindly man.

I think of him as a good German.

To get to the negotiating table, Erzberger had to take

a 200 mile road trip and cross enemy lines.

On the way, his car crashed and he had to change vehicles.

It felt like a bad omen.

At La Capelle he reached the front line...

..where he had to hand himself over to the French.

Here, before the negotiations had even begun, the French

made their first psychological move.

They took him on a detour, a guided tour of the horrors

of the Western Front.

The war had been raging for four years...

..with soldiers dying at the rate of a thousand a day.

who were in Berlin for the war,

had never seen what the Front looked like.

The destruction that he witnesses is really extremely harrowing.

He writes it was worse than being on his son's deathbed,

his young son's deathbed, who died of the Spanish flu

just some three weeks before.

Seeing first-hand the devastation that German troops had actually

caused in Belgium and France, I think, for him,

would have been very shocking.

At 3am, Erzberger boarded a train with blacked out windows.

Four hours later, he pulled into an empty railroad

siding deep in the forest of Compiegne.

Waiting for him were two men who could not have been more

different from the German.

Britain had sent Rosslyn Wemyss...

..who joined the military at just 13, and grew up to be the commander

of the most powerful Navy in the world.

Rosslyn Wemyss is the right man in the right place in 1918.

Wemyss was knighted for his actions in Gallipoli.

He was well connected and politically astute.

He has a capacity, it seems to me, to bring out the best in other

people, as well as in himself.

For over 100 years, Britain had ruled the waves,

and Wemyss's main interest was keeping it that way.

For Britain, one of the key concerns is the need for a lead

after the war over Germany

to ensure the security of the Empire, which would underpin,

as he would see it, Britain's prosperity.

France sent Marshal Ferdinand Foch, in charge of the Allied armies.

A short man with a fondness for cheap cigars,

his only son was killed by the Germans in 1914.

But he only grieved for half an hour

before getting back to work.

General Foch is a professional.

Cold.

Proud. It's all about fighting for the Fatherland.

Allons-y. Let's go.

Let's attack.

Foch keeps saying to the British, "I have a bleeding country.

"My country was devastated. Yours wasn't.

"My country is bleeding.

"I know because I am bleeding, because I am wounded."

So, Foch wanted one thing more than anything else...

..to make sure that Germany was never able to invade France again.

Of the three of them, Erzberger was, by far,

in the most desperate position.

For years, the Western Front had been locked in stalemate.

Millions had died.

But the front line had only moved a few miles in either direction.

Then, in early 1918, German stormtroopers smashed

through Allied lines.

But they went too far, too fast, and supply lines couldn't keep up.

With the help of American troops, the Allies launched

a decisive counter attack.

Soon German troops were deserting in droves and there was unrest

in the streets of Berlin.

And in just two hours, the Armistice negotiations would begin.

Erzberger arrives at the Armistice negotiations,

not exactly in the best physical and psychological frame of mind

to undertake these momentous negotiations.

Foch shows up, looking like a statue of himself.

Perfectly shaved, his moustache perfectly groomed.

Foch appears in Erzberger's account as very aloof,

very cool. And Erzberger is unimpressed with Foch's manners.

Also, not terribly won over by Wemyss.

He was, essentially, like a fish out of water, I guess,

being a civilian in this military environment.

These are the enemy.

You do need to be pretty firm, pretty strong.

And too much bonhomie is not going to get you very far in this.

Each group facing the other across a table, divided crucially

by the table, not united by the table.

This is not a dinner party where people are leaning across.

They are looking at each other pretty stony-faced,

with a sense of tension, as this is the greatest war that the world

has seen, thus far.

Erzberger expects there to be a handshake.

There is no handshake.

There are no friendly formalities.

The very fact that Foch doesn't want to shake hands

with the Germans indicates that, in his eyes, the horror of the war

goes far beyond the normal rules or conventions of chivalry.

And he wants to show the Germans that this war

has gone far too far.

That something was broken in civilisation, or in humankind.

Erzberger's first move was a humanitarian one.

He requested a ceasefire whilst negotiations took place.

Foch refused.

Erzberger's next move was to point to a peace proposal,

laid out by the American President, Woodrow Wilson.

The proposal set out a new world order

and was known as the Fourteen Points.

Its aim was to place all countries on an equal footing,

and spread the American values of democracy and peace.

Wilson's Fourteen Points were his dream.

He was a constitutional historian,

the only American president with a PhD.

He was a learned man. He understood these issues.

Arrogance, perhaps.

Vision, certainly.

Humility, not really.

Erzberger assumes that this will be a matter of negotiation to agree

an Armistice along the lines of Wilson's suggestions.

He has lots of ideas of how he

thinks he might use the Fourteen Points

as a vehicle for trying to arrange a favourable peace for Germany.

The proposals by Wilson are very nice and very interesting,

but they miss the point.

The point is ending the war and breaking the German might.

Quickly, Foch and Wemyss disabuse them of the notion

that the Fourteen Points will be the basis of the Armistice talks.

Erzberger's memoirs give a sense of the confusion, I think,

and surprise also that he clearly felt, given the position he now

finds himself in.

Foch and Wemyss put forward their own terms.

First, they wanted the German weapons.

Those are very high numbers.

They are there to crush the Germans,

to make the German Army unable to fight.

Then they wanted their Navy.

Wemyss is making sure that the ships are delivered to the British

so they cannot be used again.

That's end of story.

Erzberger would have been aware that this will be considered

an absolute outrage by everyone in Germany.

And they certainly did not want to hand their beautiful fleet

The German Navy will be reduced to a point of ineffectiveness.

And the Allies wanted land.

The long disputed areas of Alsace and Lorraine,

5,000 square miles of fertile territory that both France

and Germany believed was theirs.

They also demanded to occupy a piece of Germany, the Rhineland.

The first reason is technical and military.

It's a bridgehead to the German territory.

That's the first thing.

The second reason is psychological.

For four years, the Germans have been occupying France.

Foch, by sending his troops over to Germany,

wants to show the Germans that, from then on,

they are occupied themselves.

And they wanted money.

Germany must pay reparations for all the damage done in the war.

The notion that the defeated power should pay for defeat has been well

established in European practice before 1918.

The point is there that if you lose a war, you pay.

I think what Erzberger worries about more than anything else

is that if Germany does not agree to the Armistice conditions,

it would be occupied. It would be divided by the Allies,

it would be completely destroyed.

I think it dawns on him then that this really is

the end of the road.

Erzberger focused on the thing that mattered most to the German people -

the naval blockade of their country.

In place since 1914, a blockade of its ports

was preventing food and supplies from reaching the German people.

Erzberger pleads with them. He says,

"Look, Germans are starving."

But there is no pity in that railway carriage

for starving Germans at that point.

Wemyss doesn't give indication that he is concerned

about the German civilian population.

In continuing the blockade, Foch and Wemyss's aim was strategic.

The Allies wanted a way to maintain the upper hand over Germany,

even if it meant hundreds of thousands of civilians

would starve to death.

The blockade is hostile, there is no doubt about that.

And it's designed to be hostile.

What Foch and Wemyss are trying to do is to continue to exert

pressure in order to make sure that they get the right outcome

at the peace settlement.

For Wemyss, the moment to get Germany is at the Armistice.

This is the moment.

The continuation of the blockade was a major blow for Erzberger.

Foch sees some German delegate crying, but what is the weight

of some tears of a German politician in front of him,

compared to the 1.5 million dead people in France?

What does it weigh compared to the 15% of the French territory

that was devastated by the German army? Nothing.

When all the conditions had been read out,

Erzberger was asked if he would agree to the Armistice terms

on behalf of Germany.

For Erzberger, this is a really difficult position to be in because,

of course, he is also a patriotic German.

He does not want to put his name to something that is going

to be so hateful to many, many Germans.

Because this really spells defeat for Germany.

Erzberger had been presented with tougher terms than he could

possibly have imagined.

Then Foch and Wemyss told him he had just 72 hours to decide.

Erzberger had to give them an answer by the 11th hour

of the 11th day, of the 11th month.

But he didn't have the authority to just sign away

the future of his country.

The terms were too long to encrypt and radio back.

So a document had to be sent all the way to German High

Command, at Spa,

a journey of over 200 miles back across the Western Front.

Erzberger tries to negotiate on this with Foch and says,

"Look, we're going to struggle to make his deadline."

And Foch is nonplussed, really, and says, "That's your problem."

Foch is inflexible about the deadline

because it's part of the game.

It's part of showing the enemy that he sets the rules.

It's an agonising wait, during which time Erzberger

has a lot of time to reflect on how he had got to that point.

The clever son of a tailor, Erzberger was a self-made man.

The journey that he had, to being the Imperial German representative

at these Armistice negotiations, is actually quite staggering.

He really, in a sense, pulled himself by his boot strings.

Erzberger knew that back in Germany there were many people

who weren't going to take these terms well.

People like the strategic mastermind of the German army,

General Erich Ludendorff.

I see in Ludendorff a man who is convinced that the normal

state is war,

that peace is abnormal -

it is only time between two wars -

a social Darwinist who believes in the benefit

of wars over humanity.

Ludendorff detested politicians like Erzberger,

yet was, in part, responsible for sending him to Compiegne.

When Ludendorff realised that Germany was losing the war,

he didn't want the military to have to carry the can.

Ludendorff was seeking for a scapegoat, for putting

the blame of a defeat on shoulders that, so far,

had no say in this war.

Now the people who had, as he phrased it,

"boiled the soup," they should eat it.

He was clearly using these people to say,

"They who brought us into the mess should now

"actually get us out of it."

That's why Erzberger had been sent to negotiate.

The messenger had been delayed by the chaos of the Western Front,

where the German army was being pushed back,

but was putting up a fight.

He spent hours struggling to find a route through no man's land

to German territory.

GUNFIRE

Erzberger is just desperate for news, desperate

for an authorisation or some sort of guidance as to what he should do.

He needed that answer back.

By this point, Erzberger will have been just exhausted.

Not knowing how these negotiations will eventually pan out,

I think he must have been, basically,

just at the end of his tether.

Wemyss has every reason to be nervous

about whether these terms will stick.

There is a real possibility that the Germans

might actually not sign the Armistice.

If the terms are too Draconian, then why shouldn't they dig in,

to get ready to continue the conflict into 1919?

So Wemyss has good reason to be concerned.

Awaiting news in London was the man who sent Wemyss to Compiegne,

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Lloyd George is a bit of a chancer, a gambler,

I'd say. And he was ruthless.

He grew up without much money. He didn't go to university.

He was this figure who had come from the ranks, and I think

he was someone who felt that he was a man of destiny,

you know, his hour had come.

Lloyd George saw the Armistice as a chance to crown

his political career,

to win the war for Britain and keep him at No 10.

He was a politician to his fingertips.

He gets elected to the House of Commons at 27,

and he's there for 55 years.

I think he was a humane, compassionate man.

And he felt that we needed to stop the war, because people were dying

and it seemed like a futile exercise.

David Lloyd George is very much seen as the man who can get the war

to a successful conclusion.

A conclusion that was up to Wemyss to deliver.

Extraordinarily, just as the messenger was stuck

on the Western Front, events in Germany were unfolding

at an incredible pace.

That day, riots turned to revolution.

Armed protesters took to the streets of Berlin.

Furious at lives lost in a futile war,

they were threatening to shoot up the city unless heads rolled.

Ludendorff was a frightened man.

He immediately left Berlin, went into hiding.

A huge mob descended on the Reichstag

and demanded that politicians got rid of the Kaiser

and brought the war to an end.

Parliament contacted German High Command at Spa.

Either the Kaiser abdicated within minutes, or Berlin would fall

to the revolution.

Commander of the Army, General Paul von Hindenburg,

with tears in his eyes, met with Kaiser Wilhelm.

At 3pm, the Kaiser abdicated.

Germany was now a republic.

So, remarkably, when the messenger finally arrived with the Armistice

terms, it was no longer clear who was in charge.

10th of November. In just 24 hours, the deadline

given to Erzberger would pass.

For Wemyss, the worry in Compiegne when the news of the revolution

comes through is that there will be no government,

and with no government, Germany will not be able to agree terms.

It won't have a recognised authority and legal authority do that.

With no response from Germany, Wemyss's fears

seemed to be confirmed.

At 6:30pm, Foch sent a message to Erzberger,

reminding him that time was almost up.

The very fact that the Kaiser is abdicating, as far as Foch

is concerned, means the German army is not able to resist strong attack

from the Allies.

Foch saw opportunity.

He had hundreds of thousands of men and 600 tanks awaiting the order

to attack the German line.

For him, it will be a cup of tea.

Foch knows that, first, the German Army is at the end

of its capacities, and second, that there is a revolution in Germany.

So Foch is convinced that the Germans will yield,

and will accept each and every condition.

Wemyss, too, was thinking strategically.

So far the war had not presented him with a decisive naval victory

like Nelson's at Trafalgar.

Wemyss feels frustrated that there has been no Battle of Trafalgar.

And says, you know, "We will deliver Trafalgar.

"We will deliver the outcome at the Armistice."

Lloyd George also wanted to use the Armistice

to reassert Britain's role at sea

and help secure its empire.

The British strategy was Britannia rules the waves.

So it made sense to essentially de-fang Germany, to remove

all the naval infrastructure they'd built up, to prevent them

from starting a war, starting that kind of arms race again.

At 9pm, a message arrived for Erzberger.

It was from German High Command.

General Hindenburg told Erzberger to try and get concessions

from the Allies. But if he couldn't, sign anyway.

For Erzberger, the highest military leader in the land

does not feel we can continue fighting.

So he's not being told, "Do what you can,

"but otherwise we'll carry on."

There's a clear message - "Try and get the best outcome you can."

This Armistice gives clear conditions which are difficult

to swallow, and Erzberger was under no illusions,

even at the time, that this "walk of the cross," as he called it

in his memoirs, would be his cross to bear.

11th of November, 1918.

The war continued with unremitting savagery.

2,738 soldiers lost their lives on this last day

of the First World War.

Shortly after two in the morning,

with just hours left before the deadline, negotiations finally

began in earnest.

Erzberger only had a few short hours left to fight his corner...

..with the fate of his nation on his shoulders.

By this point, Erzberger has been essentially on the road

for four days. So he will have had a little bit of sleep,

on and off. Certainly not in a position to argue as forcefully,

and well as he might have, under better circumstances.

As far as Erzberger is concerned, it's very much a case

of damage limitation.

Erzberger picked his fights carefully.

He had three priorities.

Foch had demanded the German army hand over 30,000 machine guns.

But Hindenburg told Erzberger the Army needed weapons to quell

the revolution that was still threatening to tear

the country apart.

Erzberger tries very hard in these negotiations,

these very uneven negotiations, to make little tweaks,

at least, to the conditions of the Armistice.

Foch was now so sure of victory, he agreed to reduce the number

of machine guns by 5,000.

Foch also agreed to Erzberger's request to decrease the Allied

occupation east of the Rhine by 30km.

Erzberger had at least secured some concessions.

He's proud of that.

His memoirs reflect this, the fact that he, you know,

"I managed at least to get them to reduce the zone of occupation

"by a few kilometres.

"Or to reduce the amount of military hardware we have to hand over."

He lists all this. These were my achievements.

Next, Erzberger turned to the naval demands.

Wemyss had insisted that the German Navy hand over 160

of its prized submarines.

Erzberger knows that this was perhaps the most unpalatable

for the military and naval elites in Germany,

because the Navy, at that point, had not been defeated in war

and it was just a complete surrender

that essentially hands Britain the German Navy on a plate.

Right up until the end, there is a fear that the German Navy

will come out and be a real threat to Britain through

the submarine campaign.

And certainly, in Wemyss's mind, as he reported,

there is no scope for negotiation. It is take it or leave it.

Wemyss had asked for 160 submarines because he hoped that would account

for most if not all of them.

He was told Germany didn't have that many.

So he said he would take whatever they had.

At the stroke of a pen, Wemyss secured the entire

U-boat fleet and his decisive naval victory.

Wemyss has a sense of... A sort of,

I suppose, both impishness and celebration,

when he realises that by getting his figures wrong,

he's actually got the right result.

You know, there's no attempt to pretend he had greater knowledge

than he did. No attempt to say that this was the result

of superior wisdom.

But it is a reflection, of course, of his determination

to make sure that this is the outcome.

Then Erzberger made his most important request.

He pleaded with them to lift the naval blockade

that was killing innocent German civilians.

But Foch and Wemyss refused.

At 5:15am, the terms of the Armistice were finally agreed.

Not wanting to delay the end of the war a moment longer,

incredibly, only the last page of the agreement was typed out

for the men to sign.

You might think that Wemyss, having had no sleep,

would have felt exhausted, emotionally drained,

ready to go to bed. It's not what he says.

What he says is, "This is wonderful."

This, you know, "We've got there." This is a moment of success,

a moment of real achievement.

For Foch, after four years of total war,

of a horrible war, what he feels is victory. This is victory.

Erzberger signed on behalf of Germany.

I think Erzberger is in no doubt that signing the Armistice

will expose him to a tirade of hatred from those who felt

that Germans should have continued to fight.

As he signs that document, I'm sure he must have realised

how fateful that action was, for Germany,

and for himself, personally.

Erzberger says to Foch, "People of 70 million can suffer,

"but we will not die. You will not get rid of us."

So a final act of defiance, perhaps.

To which Foch simply replies, "Tres bien."

Very well.

Foch and Wemyss posed for this photograph on the steps

of the carriage.

Erzberger wasn't asked to be in it.

The train left Compiegne and headed for Paris.

Aboard, a complete copy of the Armistice was finally typed out,

starting with the time hostilities would cease.

Every unit along the Western Front was ordered to stop shooting

at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, of 1918.

CHEERING

War was replaced by peace...

..despair, by hope.

News of the Armistice travelled quickly around the globe.

The people of Paris, who just a few months earlier

were almost in reach of the German guns, breathed

a collective sigh of relief.

French Prime Minister Clemenceau had been supportive of

his army, urging them to fight on, even during the darkest moments

of the war.

Now, at the outbreak of peace, crowds rushed to embrace him.

Clemenceau was really happy. For the first time in his life,

he was almost speechless, and it was a feeling

of victory for France. And there's a success of his policy.

In London, thousands poured onto the streets

in a spontaneous celebration.

The Royal family waved from the balcony.

Then the tidal wave of joy moved to Downing Street,

where David Lloyd George was waiting.

For Lloyd George, it was a moment of great exaltation.

It was probably the finest moment in his career.

The appalling slaughter had come to an end.

And it was a great moment for the country.

We'd defeated the German Empire and the British Empire stood,

really, at the head of the world.

In America, it was party time.

An impromptu ticker tape parade attracted thousands in New York.

Wilson's reaction was one of exhilaration.

He'd made the United States into a carrier of the message

that the world order could be changed.

This may not have been the Armistice that Wilson proposed,

but it was peace nonetheless.

The Allies weren't the only ones celebrating.

Even for the Germans, the end of such a bloody conflict

was initially met with relief.

Around the time the guns fell silent, Erzberger arrived

at Spa to report back to German High Command.

Erzberger is congratulated by Hindenburg for having done such

a good job. And others in the delegation also point out

that he fought like a lion, says one of the men who was there,

to try and get the best deal possible for Germany.

So there is a sense that his efforts are appreciated.

Erzberger's memoirs make the point, they knew

it was the only thing they could have done.

For those actually in the trenches, the end of the war

brought a complex mix of emotions.

The silence was... I can only describe it as terrible.

Everything dropped away from me.

I thought, "Now, what do I do now? There's no objective.

"There's nothing in front of us. I've just got to wait."

You were scared stiff.

In the trench, you were all right.

If you kept down, snipers couldn't get you.

Those that didn't come back,

that's the people that should be honoured.

Those that didn't.

They gave their life, and that is it.

As the world began to dust itself off after four years of war,

the main architects of the Armistice,

Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson, travelled to Paris to turn

its sketched out clauses into the terms for a permanent peace...

..later known as the Treaty of Versailles.

The terms Erzberger had agreed to at Compiegne had been quickly set

in motion, and the consequences were already starting to unfold.

Britain's Admiral Wemyss had demanded that the Germans make

the largest surrender in naval history.

After the Armistice, the entire German Fleet had sailed

across the North Sea to Britain, to hand itself over

to the Royal Navy.

Wemyss did regard what he'd achieved as a naval victory,

and was anxious to present it as that.

The German Navy is handed over, to all intents and purposes,

lock, stock and barrel, to Britain.

For some of Germany's sailors, the humiliation was unbearable.

So they decided to sink their own ships.

The entire German Navy was lost just off the north coast of Scotland.

The sinking of the German Navy, from all accounts we have,

was an extremely traumatic event.

The naval officers were absolutely devastated at this happening.

And they blamed Erzberger personally for signing the Armistice,

for handing over the Navy to Britain.

Europe, after the war, was broke.

In France, Clemenceau started to take stock

of what was left of his nation.

France was the country which most suffered from the devastations

and destructions of houses, of fields, of factories.

So the question of reparation was a crucial question

for all French people.

And the main motto in France would be, "Germans will pay."

In Britain, too, tens of thousands of wounded soldiers and war widows

desperately needed financial support.

The country's in a big amount of debt.

It's borrowed huge amounts of money to finance the war.

Lloyd George says, "Let the Germans pay for all the damage

"and destruction they brought."

Lloyd George says, "They will pay to the utmost farthing.

"The Germans will pay to the utmost farthing."

He's swept up by his own rhetoric.

However, if Britain and France had troubles,

it was nothing compared to Germany.

The reparations they had to pay, combined with the naval blockade,

led to a humanitarian disaster.

At least 300,000 men, women and children died

as a result of malnutrition.

For Erzberger, the fact that he hadn't been able

to take out the continuation of the blockade would have worried him,

because hundreds of thousands of German women and children

continued to starve.

The backlash against the Armistice steadily grew.

And the war lord, General Erich Ludendorff,

started to rewrite history.

He now claimed that the German army was not defeated in the war.

And that Erzberger betrayed the trust of his country

when he signed the Armistice.

The accusation that Erzberger had stabbed Germany in the back

obviously was upsetting for him, because he had acted in the best way

he thought he could to save Germany.

Erzberger becomes one of the most hated men of the new Republic.

There are countless articles written against him,

books published against him.

He is absolutely vilified, and aware of it.

Knowing that Germany had borne the brunt of the Armistice terms,

Wilson tried to ensure, at Versailles,

that some concessions were made, such is the French occupation

of the Rhineland being declared temporary.

But the Allies did impose a final, additional clause.

Article 231, the notorious War Guilt Clause.

Germany had to accept sole responsibility

for the outbreak of war.

And that was something that, basically, nobody in Germany

was willing to accept. Erzberger included.

The reparations on their own will have been a pill

that could have been swallowed, but combining it with this

allocation of blame and of guilt caused an uproar in Germany.

Despite the uproar, threatened with the resumption of hostilities,

the Germans had little option but to sign.

There were fierce critics on the Allied side too.

Foch saw the Versailles Treaty not as a peace treaty,

which would settle things for ever.

And I quote here, "Merely an Armistice for 20 years."

For Foch, it was the worst solution ever.

In his eyes, it is obvious that Germany is still existing,

and the conditions of the peace treaty being far too harsh.

The Germans of course will want to take revenge.

Of course.

Revenge too was a concern for Erzberger.

Erzberger knew that his life was endangered.

There had been several attempts on his life.

A hand grenade thrown into his office in the Reichstag,

and he was shot outside the courtroom and injured.

His friends are worried for him.

He is advised to learn to shoot a gun, to defend himself,

which he refuses to do.

GUNSHOT

When Erzberger is assassinated, he is still a young man

with a young daughter of seven years old.

Erzberger's assassins were former German naval officers

who were still bitter about being forced to hand over their ships

by the Armistice.

It seems very tragic, Erzberger's fate.

Because he does seem to be somebody who puts his convictions

before his own personal advantage.

Erzberger's very much a person who did the right thing.

And he did it really selflessly.

Meanwhile, General Erich Ludendorff returned to public life,

throwing his weight behind a new political movement.

In the 1920s and '30s, the resentment created

by the harsh conditions imposed on Germany proved fertile ground

for the far right.

HITLER SHOUTS IN GERMAN

CROWD: Heil! Heil!

Hitler, a Lance Corporal during the First World War,

claimed to have wept when he heard the Armistice had been signed.

Once in power, he systematically dismantled the peace settlement.

In France, the train on which the Armistice was signed

had been treasured as a monument to German defeat.

They added a statue of Foch and a memorial

featuring a slain German Eagle.

In June 1940, as Europe descended into the Second World War,

Hitler took a very public revenge.

The Fuhrer, with his generals, passes along in front of the guard

of honour, and salutes.

He demanded that the French surrender to him here,

in the very carriage where Erzberger, Foch and Wemyss

met in 1918.

With their leader, General Huntziger,

the French delegation arrives.

After reading out the preamble and the German conditions,

the Fuhrer leaves Compiegne.

that the end of the First World War, the suffering and humiliation

the Germans felt, was a cause of the next world war.

Those who had fought in the trenches had a clear message.

I don't think ever there should be any wars.

I don't believe in them.

Although I was a soldier, I don't believe in them.

Not after what I've seen, anyway.

The age between 17, and 23 or 24,

and you had to be fighting in a war.

There's no doubt about it, that the cream, the cream age

were killed. It was unnecessary.

What for?

It's painful.

I've got three mates buried somewhere.

I don't know where.

It's too many.