And so, when you do something like that with, I mean, again, like a historical event, like World War Two, where, I mean, the one rule is that you shall not do that. You shall not look at this topic and try to understand how the Germans saw the world: like how the whole thing from the First World War on up to the very end of the war, how these people might have genuinely felt like they were the ones under attack, that they were the ones being victimized by their neighbors and by the allied powers.
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There is no “rule that you shall not do that” when it comes to writing about World War I or World War II. The opposite seems more accurate.
In truth, World War II is the most written-about war in history. There are tens of thousands of books and archival documents in dozens of languages that do not agree, in part or in whole, with the pro-Anglo-American view. Most accounts of the 1943–45 fire-bombing of Germany, for example, written outside the Anglosphere but easily obtained in English are critical (see for example Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945), and have created lively debate.
And, while now largely dominant in English-language scholarship, the American and British narrative is itself hardly monolithic.
The same diversity of opinion holds true for World War I.
The author may perhaps be unaware of an entire corpus of revisionist published works that seeks to sympathetically understand––if not even exonerate––Germany’s role in World War I. Mark Hewitson’s Germany and the Causes of the First World War discusses the bibliographies of the various branches of revisionist interpretation of Germany’s role in World War I, which either offer legitimate reasons for Germany’s preemptive invasions or allot blame to the British, and less frequently to France and Russia, for starting the war.
For two quite contrasting views on Britain’s entrance into World War I, see Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (which mostly blames Germany’s aggression) and Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (which sees it as mostly England’s fault).
Still, it is hard to fathom arguments that blame Germany’s enemies for the outbreak of World War I. Germany began the conflict with a preemptive attack on France on August 3, 1914—two days after it declared war on Russia, which had joined the war in order to support Serbia, itself attacked by Austria in late July 1914.
The German invasion of Belgium and France was consistent with the Kaiser’s increasingly un-Bismarckian policy of brinkmanship and, more specifically, hinged on the eponymous 1905 “plan” of the then-Chief of Staff of the German Army, Alfred von Schlieffen, for a quick, cartwheeling invasion of France that would shock, surround, and incapacitate it, thus enabling Germany to defeat Russia despite a two-front war.
Germany’s aggressive confidence was predicated on the idea that, in the near half-century following the dramatic German victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War, France had only suffered further relative military decline and would offer only temporary and feeble resistance.
The German general staff expected that its larger, better-equipped, and more mobile army would overrun France in a matter of months if not weeks (which it initially almost did). Thus, the war did not begin out of German fear of being encircled. Instead, it was a deliberate preemptive choice to strike at an opportune time of growing tensions, in which Germany felt that it could achieve its prewar agendas through the use of a superior military.
Accordingly, in the first weeks of the war, Germany was already preparing terms of surrender for an anticipated quickly-defeated France. The most infamous blueprint would be completed and formalized in late summer 1914 as the September program memo drafted by the Chancellor’s secretary Kurt Riezler. It included inter alia the destruction of a free Belgium, the end of Luxembourg, and vast permanent annexations of strategic French territory, along with the German absorption of key Atlantic ports and demands for huge indemnity payments. This was an expansionist, not a defensive, agenda.
In the East, Germany’s even more ambitious prewar aims were eventually realized through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) that ceded to Germany over a third of Russia—and populations nearing 50 million, along with unprecedented transfers of many of Russia’s critical natural resources.
The spoils that the Kaiser and his generals imagined from the defeated nations were good indicators of why Germany went to war in the first place. Both these two accords, one potential and one realized—along with earlier Prussian terms handed to France through the Treaty of Frankfurt after Germany’s victory of 1871—were far harsher on Germany’s enemies than what Germany itself suffered through the much-misunderstood Versailles Treaty of 1919. (And Versailles was also far milder than what the Allies in 1945 forced upon a defeated German Third Reich.)
Cooper does not discuss Germany’s own proposed peace terms in order to understand the 18th– and 19th-century standard of postbellum demands on the defeated or seek to understand how the Versailles Treaty did not keep the peace with Germany while the far-harsher 1945 terms so far have.
In sum, Germany started World War I most likely because it felt that it was blocked from its colonial, military, economic, and political aspirations by the Western powers and Russia. And it decided that only by a preemptive war could it achieve its supposedly deserved role of continental supremacy. Therefore, Berlin opted for a surprise strike to take out France and Belgium, then pivot with decisive forces to reinforce the Eastern front, and with a two-front victory establish a German-dominated Europe—presenting Britain, America, and Russia with an irrevocable fait accompli.
And finally, Adolf Hitler did not constantly cite the course and outcome of World War I as a conflict in which enemies had attacked and invaded Germany. Rather, he railed about the prior war as a near-miss offensive opportunity, one that came very close to achieving its agendas of expropriating large swaths of Western Europe and Russia into an envisioned colossal German state.
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>World War II. Germany and the Causes of World War I, Part Three appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.