Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The vindictive peace treaty, imposed by the Allied powers on their defeated enemies, succeeded only, as both ‘Abdu’l Bahá and Shoghi Effendi have pointed out, in planting the seeds of another, far more terrible conflict. The ruinous reparations demanded of the vanquished—and the injustice that required them to accept the full guilt for a war for which all parties had been, to one degree or another, responsible—were among the factors that would prepare demoralized peoples in Europe to embrace totalitarian promises of relief which they might not otherwise have contemplated." [Century of Light, p. 33] "The most striking change in Europe, measured in territorial-juridical terms, was the emergence of a cluster of nation-states—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—in place of lands which were formerly part of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern empires. . . . In addition, Germany also lost its extensive colonial empire to Britain, the self-governing dominions, and France—just as Turkey found its Near East territories turned into British and French mandates, distantly supervised by the new League of Nations." [Kennedy: Great Powers, p. 275-85]