Germany WW1

9 Key excerpts on "Germany WW1"

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  A History of Modern Germany

  1871 to Present

  • Dietrich Orlow(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Three World War I

  1914–1918

  Few events have changed the course of human history as profoundly as World War I, the event the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the “mother of all catastrophes.” Directly or indirectly, the hostilities affected all Germans as well as most Europeans and many Americans. By the time the war ended in November 1918, much of the old order in Germany and Europe had disappeared. Two revolutions in Russia ended the rule of the czars, and Austria-Hungary disintegrated into several new nation-states. In Germany Prusso-German authoritarianism was overthrown, and the country lost its status as a great power. William II abdicated and went into exile in Holland. He remained there until his death in 1941 and never visited Germany again.

  The human costs of the war were staggering. World War I was the first modern “total” war. Increasingly sophisticated (and destructive) armaments and mechanized warfare were not only very wasteful of human resources on the battlefield but also required mobilization of economic and human resources on the “home front” to an unprecedented degree. The results were enormous casualty figures and major societal dislocations. Germany suffered more than 6 million dead, wounded, and missing soldiers. An additional 750,000 people are estimated to have died from war- related malnutrition and diseases.

  The Debate over the Outbreak of the War

  The literature on the outbreak of the war or, more precisely, who or what caused the global conflict fills an even larger library than the debates over the Sonderweg. True, in the peace treaty that ended the First World War, Germany was forced to acknowledge its sole responsibility for unleashing the conflict, but most Germans vehemently rejected this “war-guilt clause.” During the 1920s many scholars in the Allied countries joined the German critics. They, too, argued that the outbreak of the war was more complicated than the simplistic “Germany is guilty” judgment.

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  Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

  How Encirclement Causes Major Wars

  • Andrea Bartoletti(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 4 Germany and World War I

  Since unification in 1871, Germany faced the possibility of a two-front war: as one scholar wrote, “modern Germany was born encircled.”1 Germany’s (encircled great power) attempt to “escape the deadly embrace” of France and Russia (surrounding great powers) caused the outbreak of World War I.

  Germany’s main strategy to eliminate its two-front-war problem was to prevent the creation of a Franco-Russian alliance and, after it was formed, to provoke its split through the use of coercive diplomacy. The key factor in altering German willingness to risk a two-front war was Russia’s decision to ramp up the construction of strategic railroads in Poland after the end of the Balkan Wars. Due to significant pressure by France and to the diplomatic debacles in the Balkans, Russia significantly increased its ability to launch a simultaneous invasion with France by reducing the time needed to mobilize its army from weeks to a few days (actualized encirclement).

  The shift in Russia’s ability to move its troops to the eastern border of Germany explains the decision to initiate and escalate the July crisis. Germany’s declaration of war on Russia led to a cascade of military interventions by the other European great powers based on the rival-based network of alliances: Austria-Hungary joined Germany to counter Russia (immediate rival), France supported Russia to contain their mutual immediate rival (Germany), and Great Britain intervened on the side of France and Russia to oppose Germany (immediate rival). In the end, German attempt to prevent actualized encirclement led to a self-fulfilling prophecy that plunged Europe into a major war.

  This chapter highlights several components of my theory on the origins of major wars. Unlike the great powers in the other chapters, Germany’s unique geographic position did not allow the creation of buffer zones through territorial annexation without risking a two-front war. German leaders had to resort to other measures, such as coercive diplomacy, to undermine the operational ability of the surrounding great powers to launch a simultaneous war. Moreover, similar dynamics of escalation that characterized the First Balkan War to the July crisis stress the fundamental role played by Russia’s construction of strategic railroads in Poland. Finally, the motivations of the other great powers to intervene in the dyadic conflict cover several ways in which states try to prevent their own immediate rival from increasing its invasion ability (loss of ally by military defeat or defection and annexation of territory along their borders).

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To emphasize the greatness of this Great War, note that the Allies – all of the Allies, that is – mobilized a grand total of 42,188,810 men, while the comparable total for the Central Powers was 22,850,000. The strategic history of the two world wars shows the iron authority of a rule which determined how large or modest the relative human cost of Industrial Age mass warfare would be to a particular country. In both wars, unsurprisingly, casualties were suffered in direct proportion to the duration and intensity of exposure to lethal risk. In the Great War the British Empire suffered approximately 908,371 battle deaths, contrasted with 397,762 (for Britain alone) in World War II. The difference is easily explained. Between 1914 and 1918, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) waged continuous land warfare against the main body of the enemy's forces in the principal theatre of war. From 1939 to 1945, the BEF met the main body of the German Army for only three disastrous weeks, in May 1940. The more fighting a country's armed forces were obliged to do, the greater were their casualties. This is as obvious as it is strategically significant. In both world wars, someone had to wage a lot of warfare if Germany were to be beaten, which meant someone had to suffer enormous casualties. In 1914–18, Britain, for the first and only time in its history, bore close to a full human burden of continental warfare against the most potent killing machine of the era, the Imperial German Army.

  Key points

  1. World War I was the most significant event of the twentieth century.
  2. Every great power believed that it had strong reasons for fighting.
  3. Germany went to war for defensive reasons, out of fear, not because of over-confidence or in order to advance an agenda of aggression (though victory must have yielded Berlin continental hegemony).
  4. The character, especially the duration, of the war mortgaged the subsequent peace, but World War II was not the inevitable eventual consequence of World War I.

  Questions

  1. Do you agree that World War I continues to be seriously misunderstood?
  2. Why did the great powers go to war in 1914?
  3. Did Germany wage what it regarded as a defensive, preventive war?
  4. Was the casualty count far higher than it could have been if the generals had been more competent?

  Further reading

  I. F. W. Beckett, The Great War, 1914–1918 (Harlow: Longman, 2001).

  J. Black, The Great War and the Making of the Modern World (London: Continuum, 2011).

  C. Falls, The Great War, 1914–1918 (New York: Perigee Books, 1959).

  R. F. Hamilton and H. H. Herwig, Decisions for War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  —— (eds), War Planning, 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2010).

  J. Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998).

  A. Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War

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  The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany

  • Matthew Jefferies, Matthew Jefferies(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The belief that the First World War was not caused by Germany must inevitably lead to the conclusion that the Versailles Treaty was unjust, and with that, those ‘Weimar demands’ become justified. As a result, Germany’s role in the origins of both wars could now be up for revision.

  Conclusion

  Despite both crude and subtle propaganda efforts on the part of the Central Powers during the war, in 1919 the victorious allies were largely in agreement that Germany and its allies were to blame for its outbreak. However, their harsh war-guilt allegations were soon softened by a more conciliatory interpretation in the light of new potential threats to the interwar order, and an apologetic interpretation which allocated responsibility for the outbreak of war to the alliance system and international rivalries became firmly established in the 1920s and 1930s, continuing unchallenged into the post-war years.75 In Germany, the re-opening of the debate during the Fischer Controversy of the 1960s caused consternation among historians and the general public of a nature that is today difficult to comprehend. It has taken many years for passions to run less high, enabling historians to discuss their still divergent opinions without resorting to insult and defamation. Throughout the long debate on the origins of the First World War, historians’ views have been shaped by the current political context and climate in which they were formulated, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century, this still holds true.76 A younger generation of Germans is keen for Germany once again to play a more decisive role in international politics. However, this would require that it should finally put to rest some of its uncomfortable past. No longer being considered responsible for the outbreak of the First World War is a welcome move in that direction.

  Of course, it is not just Germany’s role that is being re-evaluated. Where previously historians were perhaps quick to judge Austria-Hungary’s reaction to the assassination as exaggerated and belligerent, they are today more willing to concede that a sovereign nation that found itself exposed to terrorist attacks may have felt obliged to defend itself against the threat that emanated from Serbian terrorists who sought to undermine the Dual Monarchy.77 As Sam Williamson concludes: ‘Sarajevo was the most successful terrorist act of all time. The effects of July 1914 continue to reverberate across our contemporary world and nowhere more than in the Middle East.’78

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  Modern European History, 1871-2000

  A Documentary Reader

  • David Welch(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  July 1914. The Long Debate, 1918—1990 (1991).

  There is also a vast literature on the general history of the war: A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War: An Illustrated History (1966) – a moving photographic record of the conflict; B.H. Liddell-Hart, History of the First World War (1970). M. Ferro, The Great War (1963) is a short but brilliant introduction. See also J. Terraine, The Western Front, 1914–18 (1964). For works which place the military aspects of the war in a broader context see K. Robbins, The First World War (Oxford, 1984); B. Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870–1970 (1984); G. Hardach, The First World War (1977); and more recently J. Keegan, The First World War (1998). The fateful first days of the conflict are evocatively captured in R. Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (1979) and B. Tuchman, August 1914. The First Month of the First World War (1994).

  The nature of ‘total war’ and the impact of technology is discussed in E. Kehr, Economic Interests, Militarism and Foreign Policy (1977); G. Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World War (1984); J. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell (1976); A.E. Ashworth, The Trench Warfare (1980); E. Leeds, No Man’s Land (1979); while A. Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916 (1964); L. Macdonald, They Called it Passchendaele (1983); M. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (1971) and The Kaiser’s Battle (1983) (on Germany’s 1918 offensive) give full treatment of individual battles, as doesj. Keegan, The Face of Battle (1979).

  The impact of the war on individual societies can be found in D. Welch, German Society, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–18: The Sins of Omission (1999); J. Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918 (1985); A. Rosenberg, Imperial Germany: The Birth of the German Republic (1931); A. Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965); J. Winter, The Great War and the British People (1985); B. Waites, A Class Society at War, England 1914–1918

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  The Global Economy

  A Concise History

  • Franco Amatori, Andrea Colli, Franco Amatori, Andrea Colli(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  THE GREAT WAR: THE END OF A WORLD    

  SUMMARY : 10.1. Interpretation of the war: discontinuity and social revolution. – 10.2. Total war: industrial planning and mobilization. – 10.3. The geopolitical and economic consequences . – Bibliography.

  10.1. Interpretation of the war: discontinuity and social revolution

  The First World War ended a period of peace and progress that had lasted almost uninterrupted since 1870. The conflict weakened Europe, which lost its political and economic supremacy for good, and it also shaped world geopolitics until 1989. International trade was seriously damaged, and the international monetary system ceased regulating the relations between currencies.

  The First World War was defined as “great” not just because of the numbers of countries or troops involved, the scale of destruction and death it caused or the duration of the conflict itself, but also because it was revolutionary and levelling, cutting across all social classes. It was a kind of incubator for the transformations that were to occur in the 20th century. The war modified politics, society, culture and the economy, marking the end of positivism and liberal individualism. It led to the development of a new collectivist concept of the state, which guaranteed new rights for its citizens, redefining and reshaping the relations between political power and capitalism. The state broadened its prerogatives of intervention, vigilance and control, not only in economic affairs but also in social issues. In the period between the two wars, the state also implemented population and public health policies, entering into the most private spheres of individual and family life to compensate for the generation gap caused by the loss of so many young people in war.

  The 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic was written immediately after Germany’s defeat, and was an ideal representation of the classless society born in the trenches. It was the archetype of an original conception of the national community, providing an ideal model for the new 20th century democracies. It enshrined a new concept of the citizen-state relationship, making the state responsible for satisfying citizens’ essential needs (work, education and health). It redesigned the connections between collective and individual rights and exalted the dignity of intellectual and manual work. It revolutionised the relations between capital and labour, income and profit, income and labour, to the benefit of the community.

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  Why War? Ideology, Theory, and History

  • Keith L. Nelson, Spencer C. Olin(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  To set the scene for scrutinizing the several interpretations of World War I we must briefly trace the course of the historical debate about that subject. This will enable the reader to put each of the historians and his commentary within an essentially familiar context. It will also allow one to compare and contrast the traditional view of the writing in question with our own.

  To be sure, to survey the historiography of World War I is no easy task. Seldom has as much been written about any historical topic. Seldom have attitudes and beliefs regarding the causation of an event changed as rapidly or as continually as with that war; hardly a decade has passed that has not witnessed a significant shift in the dominant interpretation.

  There were plenty of grounds for disagreement from the beginning, of course. Not only did the partisans of the belligerent powers dispute most bitterly about the leaders and the peoples who were responsible for the great catastrophe, but within each nation there was also an alienated (and largely unheard) minority which upheld a view or views at odds with that of the controlling majority. In a very real sense all of the interpretations which historians have offered since the war were foreshadowed by explanations developed by participants at the time. And since the three ideological traditions which we have identified were present, to a greater or lesser extent, in each of the warring countries, this fact should perhaps occasion no great surprise.

  Still, the vast majority of the Allied (and especially the American) peoples quickly accepted the notion that Germany and Austria-Hungary had initiated hostilities, and held fast to this idea for several years after the conflict. The hysteria and hatred of the war era were such that few found cause to quarrel with the conclusions of the study commission of the Paris Peace Conference (1919) that “the war was premeditated by the Central Powers …, and was the result of acts deliberately committed in order to make it unavoidable.”1 As late as 1922 there were relatively few Allied misgivings about the fact that Germany had been forced in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles to accept responsibility for the loss and damage suffered in consequence of a “war imposed by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”2

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  Modern European History 1871-2000

  A Documentary Reader

  • David Welch(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World War (1984); J.Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell (1976); A.E.Ashworth, The Trench Warfare (1980); E.Leeds, No Man’s Land (1979); while A.Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916 (1964); L. Macdonald, They Called it Passchendaele (1983); M.Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (1971) and The Kaiser’s Battle (1983) (on Germany’s 1918 offensive) give full treatment of individual battles, as does J.Keegan, The Face of Battle (1979).

  The impact of the war on individual societies can be found in D.Welch, German Society, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–18: The Sins of Omission (1999); J. Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918 (1985); A.Rosenberg, Imperial Germany: The Birth of the German Republic (1931); A.Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965); J.Winter, The Great War and the British People (1985); B.Waites, A Class Society at War, England 1914–1918 (1987); A.J.May, The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy (2 vols, 1966); L.Kochan, Russia in Revolution, 1890–1918 (1966); J.J.Becker, The Great War and the French People (1983); N.Stone, The Eastern Front (1978). General coverage of such issues is provided by A. Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (1974). A seductive but somewhat ‘flawed’ analysis can be found in N.Fergusan, The Pity of War (1998).

  The revolutionary effects of the war are discussed in G.L.Bertrand (ed.,) Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922 (Montreal, 1977) and F.L.Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (1972). For Germany, see A.J.Ryder, The German Revolution (1966) and D.Geary, ‘Radicalism and the Worker: Metalworkers and Revolution, 1914–1923’, in R.J.Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (1978). A first-rate compilation of recent scholarship on cultural trends can be found in J.Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (1997). An excellent analysis of the use made by the British government of propaganda can be found in M.Sanders and P. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, 1914–18

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  Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

  • John Mueller(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  As discussed in the previous chapter, a substantial, antiwar movement had been organized for the first time in history in the decades before World War I. It was growing, but it was still very much a minority movement and largely drowned out by those who held war to be a method for resolving international disputes that was natural, inevitable, honorable, thrilling, manly, invigorating, necessary, and often progressive, glorious, and desirable. But although the antiwar people were often ridiculed, their gadfly arguments were persistent and unavoidable, and the existence of the movement probably helped Europeans and Americans to look at the institution of war in a new way when the massive conflict of 1914–18 entered their experience.

  World War I served, therefore, essentially as a catalyst. It was not the first horrible war in history, but because of the efforts of the prewar antiwar movement it was the first in which people were widely capable of recognizing and being thoroughly repulsed by those horrors and in which they were substantially aware that viable alternatives existed.

  THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION

  Although the idea that war ought to be abolished had received considerable notice before World War I, it appears that the ascendance of the idea was greatly aided by two key, and somewhat interlinked, phenomena relating to the victors. First, permanent peace became a central British war aim from the start of the war, and second, the promise of a war to end war became important to entice the Americans into the conflict.

  Most of the belligerents—France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary—were fighting for motives that were rather old-fashioned and easily understood: they were locked into mortal combat over issues of turf and continental hegemony. The British, on the other hand, were fighting to a large degree for more ephemeral reasons. Although such tangible issues as their naval arms race with Germany and strategic calculations about the military balance on the Continent were hardly irrelevant, Britain’s entrance into the war was triggered when Germany brutally invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg. It was this circumstance, more than any other, that impelled the remarkable public outcry in Britain against Germany as the war broke out in August 1914. As David Lloyd George recalls, the war “leapt into popularity” with “the threatened invasion of Belgium,” which “set the nation on fire from sea to sea.”18

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