If German nationalists during the Weimar Republic could have overheard what Woodrow Wilson told the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, two weeks before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, it would have confirmed what they had believed all along: it was Wilson s deepseated hatred of Germany that had led him deliberately to deceive and betray the German people by promising them a “peace without victory” and imposing upon them a treaty of infamy. This verdict, born of the furious passions of the immediate postwar years, became one of the hallmarks of a spate of popular and pseudoscholarly books and articles in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, but even as late an account as Howard J. Elcock's Portrait of a Decision has maintained that Wilson's driving force at Paris was his profound hatred of Germany that was akin to Georges Clemenceau's but was irrational and inexplicable in its origin.