In a remarkably short time after 1918, many Germans also came to think that they had not really lost the war. Its armies during the war had inflicted stunning defeats on Germany’s foes, especially in the east, and little of German soil had been occupied by Allied troops either during the war or in defeat. The military elite mounted a successful campaign in the 1920s to attribute the final German collapse to a “stab in the back” by enemies at home, particularly socialists, liberals and Jews.

This perception was absurd: Germany’s armies lost badly on the battlefields in the summer of 1918; its people were on the brink of starvation because of the British naval blockade; its Austrian, Turkish and Bulgarian allies had crumbled; and its military had begged the government to make peace before it was too late. The armistice signed on Nov. 11 was clearly a surrender; Germany gave up its Navy and its submarines and its heavy field equipment, from tanks to artillery. But as things went from bad to worse such facts were easily distorted or ignored, especially in the late 1920s as Weimar faltered and Hitler rose.

This is not to say that the reparations were a good idea. They were economically unsound and a political mistake with serious consequences. John Maynard Keynes, a member of the British delegation in Paris, rightly argued that the Allies should have forgotten about reparations altogether. (It would have helped if America had written off the war loans it had made to Britain and France, but it was not prepared to do that.)

Still, one has to consider the political atmosphere in 1919. No French or Belgian politician could have openly agreed with Keynes; and even if Lloyd George had wanted to, he had to placate the hard-line Tories in his coalition government. The north of France and virtually the whole of Belgium had been occupied for four years by German soldiers who had driven off livestock, plundered factories and mines, and taken citizens to Germany for forced labor. The areas along the front lines, on the French-Belgian border, were wastelands. And we now have compelling evidence that German forces deliberately carried out a scorched-earth policy; they flooded mines, blew up bridges and stripped bare factories as they retreated.

As one French newspaper asked in 1919, why should the French taxpayer pay to fix the damage the invaders had done? The French remembered too, if nobody else did, that it was the Germans who had declared war on France in 1914, not the other way round.

Ending wars is not easy, and before we condemn the whole idea of reparations as misguided and dangerous, we should think about more recent penalties for aggression. Iraq, for example, is still paying reparations to Kuwait for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of 1990.

More significantly, Germany was obliged to pay reparations after 1945, and in that case there was no negotiation at all: Germany was utterly defeated and the Allies simply helped themselves. The Soviet Union in particular extracted whatever it could and in the most brutal fashion. There was little outcry in Germany because of the total extent of the defeat and, equally important, it was impossible for Germans to argue that they were being unfairly blamed for the war.