Ebook: The Kings Depart: German Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles 1918-19

The Kings Depart is the definitive story of a brief, pivotal moment in human history when the course and shape of the twentieth century might have been altered. Author Richard M. Watt begins with the defeat of the Kaiser in 1918 and the convention of the Versailles conference, where Europe was to be remade. This was the time when the victorious Allies might have imposed democracy on Europe by means of a peace with justice.
Watt's gripping narrative quickly becomes tragedy as diplomacy and politics fail at every turn. He tells of victorious Allies too greedy and short-sighted to impose equitable peace on a defeated Germany, of Woodrow Wilson's tortured betrayal of his own idealism, and of a German people caught up in the realities of revolution, anarchy, and violence--waiting for the inevitable rise of a leader to exact vengeance on Europe--a Fuhrer. What began with the church bells of victory and hopes ends a year later in the first appearance of Adolf Hitler as a political power.