World War I Causes and Effects

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.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was on an official visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina, a
territory that Austria had formally annexed six years earlier. The itinerary of the
archduke and his wife that day included an inspection of an army regiment and
a reception by the mayor of Sarajevo, the capital of the province. As they were
leaving the town hall after the reception, the royal couple, seated in an open car,
was assassinated by a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Prinšip. This act of

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terrorism stood at the beginning of a chain of events that would eventually lead
to World War I, although initially few expected such an outcome. Political
assassinations were regrettably common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Europe. In 1881 Czar Alexander II was killed by a bomb Russian
terrorist had placed under his carriage. In 1898 Franz Ferdinand’s aunt, Empress
Elizabeth, was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. The motives of Prinšip and
his six accomplices were also familiar then and now. The assassin and his
fellow conspirators, young students and Self-proclaimed intellectuals, belonged
to an organization called Young Bosnia. The avowed aim of the group was to
liberate Bosnia-Herzegovina from Austrian rule so that, along with Serbia and
other South Slav states, it would become part of a new and larger country,
Yugoslavia. The assassination became a crisis rather than just a tragedy when
Austria saw its vital interests threatened. Interrogations of Prinšip and his
accomplices (all of the conspirators were quickly captured by Austrian police)
convinced the Austrian authorities that Young Bosnia was far more than a club
of misguided youths. The Austrian officials learned that the terrorists had been
provided with weapons, passports, and safe conduct routes from Serbia into
Bosnia by a secret Serbian terrorist and political organization, the Black Hand.
It was also known that the leader of the Black Hand was the chief of the
intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrievic´.
From this information the Austrian authorities deduced (wrongly) that the
Serbian government must have known of Prinšip’s plans and that the
assassination was in fact a case of state-sponsored terrorism.

Austria-Hungary refused to believe Serbia’s protestations of shock and

innocence; the Habsburg government was determined to strike back. The only
question was how, or, more precisely, whether retaliation should take the form
of diplomatic or military measures. For some years prior to 1914 a so-called war
party in the Austro-Hungarian government had been advocating a preventive

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military strike against Serbia. This group, led by the chief of the Austro-
Hungarian general staff, General Franz Count Conrad von Hötzendorff, was not
only convinced that Serbia was attempting to destroy the Austro-Hungarian
Empire but that Serbia was little more than a tool of Russia in this effort.
Consequently, Hötzendorff and his allies argued that only Serbia’s military
defeat by Austria would convince Russia and Serbia to end their efforts at
undermining the political and territorial integrity of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.

Austria’s decision to involve the Germans was made on July 3. Two days later,
a high-level Austrian delegation went to Berlin to request Germany’s support
for whatever Austria determined was necessary to “punish” Serbia. In
submitting their case to the Germans, the Austrians did not indicate what
specific action they had in mind, although military action was clearly not ruled
out. William II met personally with the head of the Austrian delegation, Count
Hoyos, and gave him assurance that the emperor and his government would
back the Austrians in any actions they might take. Without consulting either the
chancellor or the military chief of staff, William II had issued a “blank check”
to the Austrians. There were a number of reasons for William’s overly hasty and
unnecessary decision to sign the “blank check.” The emperor was an impulsive
man, inordinately proud of his ability to reach quick and “instinctively correct”
judgments. The monarch also felt there should be no doubts that Germany
would stand by its one remaining ally.

When Austria dispatched an ultimatum to Serbia, did the tragedy of Sarajevo

become a full-scale international crisis. The Serbian answer to Austria’s
ultimatum was a model of accommodation. Serbia rejected only one of the ten
demands made by Austria. Nevertheless, the Viennese government determined
that the Serbs’ reply was unsatisfactory, and on July 28 Austria-Hungary
declared war on Serbia.

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Military Development

The German strategy in World War I; it was intended as an adaptation of the

plans that had succeeded so well during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871.
Russian War of 1870–1871. For land warfare Germany originally had only one
strategic concept, the so-called Schlieffen Plan. Named for its originator, the
chief of the Prussian general staff in the 1890s, General Alfred von Schlieffen,
it was designed to meet the worst-case contingency of a two-front war in which
Germany had to wage military operations simultaneously against the French in
the west and the Russians in the east. The German military strategists in 1914
were determined to use Germany’s advantages in staff organization and speed
of troop deployment to offset the Russians’ superior numerical strength while
offensive moves were designed to outwit the French defensive strategists. It was
well known that the Russians, who were hampered by an inadequate
transportation system, required far longer to move their troops to the front than
was true for the Western powers and Germany. Consequently, Schlieffen’s
concept envisioned immediate and massive offensive operations against France,
which would result in the defeat of Germany’s western neighbour six weeks
after war had been declared. Once France had been eliminated from the conflict,
the Germans would move the bulk of their forces to the eastern front just in time
to face and defeat the lumbering Russians as they drew near the borders of East
Prussia.

French military planners, for their part, interpreted the lessons of 1871 to mean
that France needed to strengthen the defenses on its eastern border. As a result,
the French after 1871 built a string of fortifications across the traditional
invasion routes from Germany, thereby effectively precluding a repetition of the
German operations that had succeeded in 1871. To bypass the French defenses,
the German strategy stipulated an alternate invasion route. Instead of

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confronting the French directly, the German armies would march through
Belgium. The French armies, seeing themselves outflanked, would then have to
withdraw major units from their original defensive positions, enabling the
Germans to overrun the French fortifications. But the strategy’s military
advantage also contained a political fatal flaw. In blithely contemplating
marching through Belgium, the German military leaders felt that military
considerations had to take priority over the political and diplomatic
repercussions of violating Belgian neutrality: Since 1839 that country’s
neutrality had been guaranteed by all of the Great Powers, including Prussia and
later Germany.

The outbreak of the war triggered the immediate implementation of Germany’s

offensive strategy; within three weeks some 2 million German soldiers were
ready for battle. The German land forces were divided into eight armies. After
mobilization, seven advanced against France and Belgium while one guarded
the borders in the east. German troops did cross the Belgian frontier according
to schedule, but contrary to what Germany expected, Belgium refused the
Reich’s request for unhindered passage. Instead, the Belgians put up stiff
resistance, actually halting the German advance for a few days. Still, Belgium
was obviously no military match for Germany. At the end of August, the
German armies advanced from Belgium into northern France, inflicting severe
losses on the weak French and British troops positioned there.

The German strategy soon ran into difficulties, however. The French were able
to regroup, and at the Battle of the Marne (September 1914) the German
advance was halted—permanently as it turned out. What had been planned as a
war of swift movements in the west became a war of attrition. For the next three
and a half years, defensive operations were far more effective than offensive
sallies. At the end of 1914, an elaborate system of trenches, stretching from the
English Channel in the north to the Swiss border in the south, separated by no-

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man’s-land, dominated the strategic picture in the west. For the soldiers, the war
became long years of boredom, filth, and disease. There were periodic
offensives involving hundreds of thousands of men on both sides, but until mid-
1918 these efforts were largely futile. Major innovations in weaponry, notably
permanently mounted machine guns, enabled defenders to inflict heavy
casualties. Offensive forces had no comparable weapons until the beginning of
1918, when tanks became operational on a large scale and tipped the balance in
favour of the offensive. Only rarely was the fighting interrupted by moments of
commonsense humanity. One such event occurred in December 1914, when
along one section of the western front German and Allied soldiers met in the no-
man’s-land between the lines and celebrated Christmas together. Within two
months after the start of the war, Germany’s strategy for winning a two-front
confrontation had failed. (The emperor’s eldest son, Crown Prince William,
admitted privately in November 1914 that Germany could not win the war.)
One reason for the setback in the west was the unexpectedly early arrival of the
Russians in the east. During the Battle of the Marne, the Germans had to send
two army corps (about 60,000 men) from the western front to the eastern front
to deal with the Russians on the borders of East Prussia (see Map 3.1). Tactical
mistakes by the commander on the eastern front, General von Prittwitz,
aggravated the situation. Almost in desperation, in mid-August command of the
eastern front troops was transferred from Prittwitz to General Paul von
Hindenburg. The new commander in turn selected General Erich Ludendorff as
his chief of staff.

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War and Society

Like its enemies, Germany entered the age of twentieth-century global warfare
woefully unprepared. World War I was the first “total war” in which victory
depended as much on a country’s economic and social resources as on the
military skills of its armies at the front. Germany’s military strategists were
justly famous for their general staff work, but in planning for the eventuality of
war they had completely neglected the economic and social implications of a
drawn-out conflict among the Great Powers. Anticipating a short war, all of the
military’s plans assumed that the outcome of the conflict would be determined
by one or two decisive battles.

As far as German life on the home front was concerned, the most important
neglected factors in this scenario were the cumulative and debilitating effects of
the British blockade, the lack of mechanisms to manage the war economy
during the first two years of the conflict, and the pressures of inflation. The
blockade and the constantly increasing demands of the military quickly brought
on an economy of chronic shortages. The primary victims both in terms of
reduced supplies and higher prices were civilian consumers because in wartime
the needs of the military always came first.

In November 1918, the Reich’s new leaders inherited a staggering legacy of

destruction, despair, and uncertainty. The armed forces had suffered more than
6 million casualties, including 1.6 million war dead. At home malnutrition-
related diseases brought massive increases in the death rate. Germany faced
peace with an exhausted population, worn-out industrial facilities, and a vast
national debt. (The total cost of World War I for all belligerents is estimated at
about 1 trillion marks [about $238 billion] in 1914 prices; Germany’s share of
that sum was 175 billion [about $42 billion].

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In November 1918 Germany was an exhausted, deeply polarized nation in need
of a new national consensus. But it was entirely unclear if such a new consensus
could be reached, and, if so, what form it would take. In the fall of 1918, the
Germans were united only in their desire for peace and their determination to
maintain the Reich’s territorial and political integrity.

Treaty of Versailles

The treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, was the product of conflict between the
Allied victors. The United States hoped to achieve, in Woodrow Wilson’s
words, “peace without victory,” and Britain hoped to put Germany back on
its economic feet. Meanwhile, France and other Allied nations wanted just
compensation for the physical, moral and economic devastation of the war.
Given the contradictory aims of reparations and future stability, statesmen
found themselves in a terrible bind. The Allied nations ultimately rejected
the idea of peace without victory in favour of making Germany pay for
causing the war (in their minds) and for perpetuating and escalating the
conflict for four long years. The treaty forced Germany to surrender colonies
in Africa, Asia and the Pacific; cede territory to other nations like France
and Poland; reduce the size of its military; pay war reparations to the Allied
countries; and accept guilt for the war. No one in Germany was happy with
the settlement, and the Allies threatened Germans with military invasion to
get them to sign the treaty. After four years of war and sacrifice, German
citizens felt humiliated to accept blame for the war and territorial loss.
Equally important, the economic provisions of the treaty slowed the nation’s
postwar recovery. Slow economic growth and popular dissatisfaction were
difficult to manage, especially for the new Weimar Republic, and political
leaders struggled to manage the growing volume of complaints. When the
government defaulted on payments in 1923, France and Belgium lost

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patience and occupied the Ruhr mining region. In response, the German
government printed more currency to pay the French, sending German
citizens into hyperinflation, which wiped out the savings of the middle class.
By the mid-1920s, the German economy recovered, and the United States
helped Germany renegotiate reparations payments with the Dawes Plan.
Germany managed to rebuild and recover after the war, but not at a pace that
satisfied everyone.

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