It was a purely technical point. It was not to assign "war guilt" but to stipulate liability as a legal basis for imposing reparations. You can't make someone pay compensatory damages if they aren't at fault. https://twitter.com/_Jason_Dean_/status/1358905536650092548

The Allies actually meant Article 231 to *limit* German liability. The Germans were only liable for paying reparations for damage to civilian populations and property. The Treaty of Versailles did not impose liability for military costs, or punitive damages.

This is explicit in Article 232:

German payments were meant to be compensatory reparations, not punitive indemnities of the kind imposed by Napoleon on Prussia in the Treaty of Tilsit, or by Prussia on France in 1871.

Germany devastated the industrial heartland of France in four years of war and occupation, while suffering no damage to its own territory. Demanding reparations was hardly unfair.

The Allied Reparations Commission established 132 billion gold marks as Germany's liability. 50 billion of this debt was real. For the other 82 billion, see if you can spot the trick:

"They shall be issued by the commission as and when it is satisfied that the payments which Germany is required to make in pursuance of this schedule are sufficient to provide for the payment of interest and sinking fund on such bonds."

I.e., never. Series C was fake.

As we know, the Germans never paid even the 50 billion gold marks of their real obligation. They didn't raise taxes to pay for the war, and the decided to hyperinflate their economy to destruction rather than raise taxes after to pay for reparations.

However much you hate taxes, or Paul Ryan hates taxes, Germans of the 1910s and 1920s hated taxes a lot more.

Germany didn't have this happen to it during the war.

The colored areas here, which were damaged by the war, were nearly exactly the boundaries of the triangle where most French heavy industry was.

Parts of the red zone are uninhabitable to this day.

One small way the French got lucky was that their chief iron ore fields in Lorraine, around Longwy, were so close to the border (in the blue, undamaged area) that the Germans walked right over them, and they were always well behind the front.