Everybody knows that Germany had to sign the treaty after their impending defeat which reduced the territorry of the German Empire, forced the Empire to pay reparations and limited the size of the German army to 100,000 men. My question is the following: Are there articles in the treaty that still affect Germany? Germany nowadays has on one hand an army with 250,000 men, but finished the reparation payments in the 90s.
Greetings! A curious question to ask, if I may be so bold. This response won't be a long one, and with good reason. In a sentence: The Treaty of Versailles is no longer in effect. The Articles of that Peace Treaty which took effect in 1919 are no longer in effect today.
Why? By the time the Second World War had begun in 1939 Nazi Germany had practically "ripped it up" if you will by violating the major clauses of the Treaty. It's army was far larger than the 100,000 allotted to it, it had a navy with submarines and heavy surface ships, the Luftwaffe was a major air force by 1936 even, and territorially Germany had already occupied the Rhineland and united with Austria in the Anschluss. The terms of the ToV were, despite technically still lingering, only words on a sheet of outdated and (in Nazi Germany) despised paper.
After the Second World War, the Potsdam Conference dictated the new wave of German reparations, and even then these were not the "dollar figures" that had come in Paris in 1919. Instead, the Allies demanded (to varying degrees and with varying conditions) that Germany give up economic-industrial assets and (for the Soviets) forced labour in reparation for instigating the conflict. It was in 1990 that the Two Plus Four Agreement, which politically enabled the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, that Britain, America, France, and the USSR released (and in the case of the Soviets returned to) Germany from her reparations which had been incurred 45 years earlier.
Hope this brief overview helps with your question, and feel free to ask anything else on the Treaty of Versailles' impact before 1939!
Sources:
Farquharson, J. E. "Anglo-American Policy on German Reparations from Yalta to Potsdam." The English Historical Review 112, no. 448 (1997): 904-26. Accessed January 27, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/576698.
Parker, R.A.C. The Second World War: A Short History. Oxford University Press, 2001.