The US separate peace treaties with Germany and Austria

On 25 August 1921 in Berlin the American commissioner in Germany, Ellis Loring Dresel, and the German foreign minister, Friedrich Rosen, signed a short, three-article treaty restoring friendly relations between the United States and Germany. The day before, 24 August, a very similar document had been signed in Vienna by the Austrian chancellor, Johann Schober, and the American commissioner, Arthur Hugh Frazier. Popular summaries often group the two treaties under 25 August. In fact the Austrian treaty was a day older, and four days later a similar peace was concluded with Hungary in Budapest. For the Americans this formally ended the First World War, almost three years after the armistice. The content of the treaties captures the essence of American policy after Wilson: the United States kept all the advantages conferred on it by the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain, but refused any obligations towards the new order in Europe, above all towards the League of Nations.

A war that would not end

The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 and on Austria-Hungary on 7 December 1917. President Woodrow Wilson negotiated the peace treaties in Paris in person and signed them, but the Treaty of Versailles, and with it the Covenant of the League, met resistance in the Senate from the Republican majority led by Henry Cabot Lodge. On 19 November 1919, and again on 19 March 1920, it fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for ratification. The Senate never voted on the Treaty of Saint-Germain at all. When the peace conference ended in January 1920 and the other victors put the treaties into effect, the United States was still formally at war with Germany and with the states that had emerged from the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy. In May 1920 Wilson vetoed a congressional resolution declaring the war over, hoping that the election would settle the dispute over the League.

The election of 2 November 1920 settled it against him. The Democratic candidate James Cox and his running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were defeated by the Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who promised a “return to normalcy”. Harding took office on 4 March 1921, and on 12 April, in a message to Congress, declared that the United States would not join the League and called for a peace independent of it. Senator Philander Knox, a former secretary of state, introduced a resolution the next day, and Stephen Porter prepared a similar one in the House of Representatives. The joint Knox–Porter Resolution passed Congress on 1 July, and on 2 July 1921 Harding signed it at the estate of Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen in Raritan, New Jersey, where the document had been brought to him from Washington while he was playing golf. According to the anecdote, once he had signed he went back to finish his round.

The resolution declared the state of war with Germany and Austria-Hungary at an end, but reserved to the United States and its citizens all the rights, reparations and advantages arising from the armistice, from its participation in the war and from the treaties it had not ratified. German and Austro-Hungarian property seized during the war was to remain in American hands until Berlin and Vienna had satisfied the claims of American citizens.

The treaties of Berlin and Vienna

The State Department, headed by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, drafted treaties in which the other side was to recognise these reservations. Germany offered no resistance. In May 1921 Joseph Wirth’s government had accepted the Allies’ London Ultimatum, which fixed reparations at 132 billion gold marks, and it was looking to Washington as a counterweight to France. Minister Rosen, an orientalist and former imperial diplomat, received Dresel’s first soundings favourably. Peace with America meant the return of American diplomats, merchants and capital, and the United States, absent from the Reparation Commission, might prove more lenient towards Germany than Paris.

The treaty with Germany consisted of a preamble quoting the Knox–Porter Resolution and three articles. Germany granted the United States all the rights and advantages reserved in the resolution, including those that the Treaty of Versailles provided for the United States even though it had not ratified it. Article II listed the parts of the Treaty of Versailles from which the Americans would benefit: the provisions on the German colonies, the military clauses, those on prisoners of war, the reparation part opening with the famous Article 231, and the financial, economic, aerial navigation, ports and railways, guarantees and miscellaneous provisions. At the same time the United States was not bound by the Covenant of the League of Nations or by any decision of the League, its Council or its Assembly without Washington’s express consent. Nor did it assume any obligations regarding Germany’s new borders or the International Labour Organization. It was entitled, but not obliged, to sit on the Reparation Commission. The Austrian treaty was built the same way and referred to the corresponding parts of the Treaty of Saint-Germain.

Austria, poor and dependent on foreign aid, accepted the peace gladly. Chancellor Schober, the head of the Vienna police, who since June 1921 had led a government of civil servants, needed every friendly power he could find. Since 1919 American food aid had saved Viennese children from starvation.

The day after the Berlin treaty was signed, on 26 August 1921, nationalist assassins from the Organisation Consul shot dead Matthias Erzberger in the Black Forest; in November 1918 he had signed the Armistice of Compiègne. The coincidence of dates captures the mood of that summer: in Germany anyone who put his name to a peace with the victors was a traitor in the eyes of the far right, and the NSDAP, in its programme of February 1920, demanded the repeal of the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain.

Ratification

The Senate took up the treaties in the autumn. On 18 October 1921 it consented to the ratification of the treaty with Germany by 66 votes to 20, and the same day to that of the treaty with Austria, also by 66 to 20, with the reservation that the United States would take part in no commission provided for by the treaty without a separate act of Congress. Those voting against included both the irreconcilable opponents of Versailles, such as Senators William Borah and Robert La Follette, for whom accepting benefits from the Treaty of Versailles betrayed the ideals for which Americans had fought, and some Democrats loyal to Wilson. Harding ratified the treaties on 21 October. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Vienna on 8 November and in Berlin on 11 November 1921, the third anniversary of the armistice. On that day the treaties came into force.

Peace without obligations

Diplomatic relations were restored at once. In December 1921 Dresel presented his credentials in Berlin as chargé d’affaires, and in 1922 an ambassador arrived in Germany. An agreement of 10 August 1922 set up a German–American Mixed Claims Commission, which spent years examining American claims, among them those for the sinking of the Lusitania and for the Black Tom sabotage. A similar commission with Austria and Hungary was set up in 1924. The last soldiers of the American occupation force in the Rhineland left Koblenz in January 1923. To commemorate the peace, in December 1921 the Mint began striking a silver dollar bearing the word “Peace”.

For the road to the Second World War, what mattered most was what the treaties left out. The most powerful country in the world announced that it wished to enjoy the benefits of the Versailles order but had no intention of guarding it. It did not join the League of Nations, it guaranteed no borders, and the American security guarantee to France promised in Paris collapsed together with the Treaty of Versailles. France, left on its own, occupied the Ruhr in 1923, and the rest of the 1920s was spent searching for the protection the United States would not give. Yet America did not disappear from Europe. Its bankers and diplomats helped shape the Dawes and Young Plans, and American loans financed Germany’s reconstruction and its reparation payments until the Great Depression cut them off in 1929–1931.

In the 1930s the isolationism expressed in the treaties of 1921 took the form of the Neutrality Acts, intended to keep the United States from being drawn into another war. They did not. Austria, with which Washington made peace in August 1921, vanished from the map in March 1938, swallowed by the Reich, and the United States closed its legation in Vienna. Germany, with which friendly relations had been restored on 25 August 1921, itself declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This time the Americans made no separate peace. After 1945 they stayed in Europe as an occupying power in Germany and Austria, and later as the guarantor of a new order – the kind of order they had refused to guard in 1921.