For the few civilian foreigners who, like Joan Fry and Harry Franck, were travelling east of the Rhine during the summer of 1919, the shock and despair felt by ordinary people in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (signed on 28 June) was impossible to ignore. Firm in the belief that they had been honourably defeated and confident that President Wilson would guarantee them fair treatment, most Germans were quite unprepared for the humiliation it imposed on their country.
