During the peace deliberations at Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allies claimed for themselves the right of drawing up a balance sheet on the record of the German Reich as a colonial power. The tribunal, of course, was hardly objective or impartial. Four and a half years of bitter warfare and the concomitant propaganda had preordained the decision eventually reached. As has recently been noted, “The Germans lost their colonies on the fields of Liege and in the blackened ruins of Louvain. Huns could not be trusted with the sacred task of civilizing other peoples.” With few dissenting voices the Versailles peacemakers concurred in the opinion expressed several years before the war by a German Reichstag member that the entire history of the German colonial empire is a long, sorry spectacle of embezzlement, deception, debauched cruelties, sexual abuses, frightful mistreatment of the natives of the colonies—things which form no pages of glory.