1920

The year in brief

In 1920 the peace conference wound up and its decisions came into force. In January its council met for the last time with Clemenceau. In June Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon and lost two-thirds of the kingdom’s lands, and in August the sultan’s government accepted at Sèvres a peace that partitioned the Ottoman Empire, which Mustafa Kemal’s movement rejected. In Germany the Kapp Putsch collapsed after four days of general strike, and in Munich the DAP took the name NSDAP. For Poland it was the year the war with the Bolsheviks was decided: in the summer the Red Army stood outside Warsaw, and after Tukhachevsky’s defeat in the Battle of Warsaw the tide turned in Poland’s favour. On 9 October General Żeligowski’s division took Wilno, and on 15 November the Free City of Danzig was proclaimed under the protection of the League of Nations.