At 11:00 AM on 11 November 1918 — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — an armistice between the Allied nations and Germany came into force, silencing the guns of the Western Front after four years of industrialised slaughter.
The war had claimed an estimated 20 million lives — military and civilian — and wounded 21 million more. It shattered four empires: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian. The map of Europe and the Middle East was redrawn; new nations emerged from the rubble of old ones.
The peace settlement at Versailles in 1919 imposed crushing reparations and territorial losses on Germany. The humiliation and economic devastation that followed planted seeds of resentment that Hitler exploited on his rise to power. The armistice's end had, in the words of Marshal Foch, merely produced a twenty-year ceasefire. World War II began in 1939.