Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The German history of military captivity was thus part of a larger story. In 1918 close to 2,500,000 enemy soldiers (and about 100,000 civilians) were in German hands.20 Hundreds of prison camps, labor camps, and sub-camps were constructed throughout Germany – some of which, such as the one in the Animal Quarantine Facility of the Bremen harbor, were “outsourced” to private companies.21 Camps of all descriptions accommodated a population whose representatives became a familiar feature of life on the German home front, where they, like German prisoners in enemy lands, worked in fields and factories, mines and quarries.22 Others worked outside Germany. Like German prisoners in enemy captivity, hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners were pressed into forced labor behind the front lines, often in perilous circumstances near the fighting. This spectacle fueled the ongoing debate over German atrocities, which had already expanded to include the conditions of military captivity in Germany itself, particularly after an outbreak of typhus in several German camps early in 1915 resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 prisoners of war. Although they vigorously denied the charges of barbarous treatment, the Germans again had the weaker side in the argument. Conditions in the German camps and labor companies were, as a rule, harsher than in Britain or France, the rations more meager, violence against prisoners more frequent, and death rates higher.23 Some of these problems were due to the unanticipated numbers of captured prisoners and the lack of German preparations to care for them. Unlike the systems in France and Britain, the administration of the camps in areas under German control lay entirely with the army, and, like the German military bureaucracy in general, it was decentralized, ill coordinated, and little noted for compassion. Finally, the plight of prisoners of war in Germany reflected deteriorating material conditions on the German home front generally. Military prisoners represented an available and eagerly exploited source of industrial manpower in a country where labor shortages had become acute by 1916, while prisoners’ rations corresponded to deteriorating patterns of consumption among German civilians. The toll taken on Allied soldiers in German captivity thus reflected broader problems from which German civilians were not spared.

  Home front and battle front

  The home front and the fighting front were inextricably married.24 The performance of the German armies in the field defined the central mandate of civilian efforts, and it affected the material circumstances of civilian life at home. The impact of war on the home front was less immediate than on the front lines, simply because of the distances that separated civilians from the fighting; but the experience of war at home was no less massive or comprehensive. The home front and the fighting front were also linked in constant communication. The attempt of the censors to police this link met with only mixed success, for numerous channels of communication kept civilians and soldiers abreast of one another’s fortunes.

  The direct experience of war on the German home front did not match the terrors of the next European conflict, although there were several exceptions to the rule. Germans in the southeastern parts of East Prussia endured several hard months of Russian occupation in the fall of 1914. Apart from small areas in Alsace, the west remained unoccupied until war’s end; but the western front ran close enough to the border in several places that German civilians experienced the sights and sounds of combat. Residents of towns and villages in the upper Rhine region, in Baden, could hear and see artillery exchanges along the Alsatian sector of the front, which ran along the crest of the Vosges Mountains. Residents in a number of west German cities, such as Düsseldorf, Cologne, Mainz, Strassburg, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe, received a foretaste of the next war in a series of bombing raids by French and British airplanes, which operated out of eastern France. The material damage inflicted by these small aircraft was no more significant than the harm brought by German aircraft to civilian targets in France and England. Allied bombers visited the university town of Freiburg twenty-five times and killed thirty-one people.25 In all, 768 Germans perished in enemy raids throughout the war.26 Even so, these episodes provided an ominous introduction to the ordeal of strategic bombing. Most of them took place randomly at night, so families were evacuated from sleep into cellars or makeshift shelters in public buildings. Anti-aircraft fire was primitive, as much a danger to civilians nearby as to enemy airplanes.

  Occupation and strategic bombing were the most immediate channels through which the war came home, but they represented exceptional experiences, which were confined to regions of the country near the frontier. Other forms of communication brought the war more commonly to the home front.

  The war was about dying. The censors could suppress the aggregate statistics, but the death of an individual soldier could not be concealed from those at home who were directly affected – a category that comprised the families of close to 2 million men. During the first weeks of the war news of death and injury arrived publicly. Lists of casualties were posted in public places, such as police stations and newspaper offices, before the growing length of these documents invited discouraging public speculation about the war’s course. So the communication of tragedy was banished to the more private channels provided by the postal service, where it remained, unless families chose to publish notices of their bereavement in the newspapers. As in other armies, the painful duty of communicating the news of death at the front fell to junior officers, who resorted to a set of sterile formulas to describe deaths that were proud, heroic, and quick. The language of these letters validated the official reading of the war, but the ritual quickly lost its power to disguise the grisly circumstances in which soldiers were dying at the front. Uncertainty often compounded the family ordeal. The heavy weapons that shaped the face of battle in this war were not “clean.” About half the soldiers who died in combat were destroyed beyond identification. In these cases, the dreaded letter home brought news only of a loved one “missing in action,” if it arrived at all.

  The war was also about injury. Some 4 million German men were wounded in various degrees of severity, and evidence of their misfortune was far too abundant to conceal. The serious cases were transported back to Germany to makeshift hospitals, which the army or the Red Cross set up in schools, auditoriums, theaters, or other large buildings. Trains and horse-drawn carts filled with wounded soldiers thus became common sights in localities near the eastern and western borders of Germany, which initially played host to most of the casualties. Convalescing soldiers, many of whom had survived thanks to advances in antisepsis and other medical arts, which matured in this war, were also a common sight here. Given the critical shortages of manpower in the army and the war economy, their rehabilitation for service in trench, factory, or field became an urgent question. Many of them were too badly injured, however. They were frightfully disfigured, protected only by the shields that a new, thriving prosthetics industry had devised for them.27 The sights and sounds of men in uniform were constant reminders of combat in faraway places, as more enthusiastic or anxious young men on their way to war mixed with these forlorn ambassadors from the front.

  The predominant mode of communication in this war remained the written word. Beyond carrying news of death or injury, letters constituted the great bulk of the traffic to and from the battle front, the principal medium in which the experience of war was given expression in both arenas. A staggering amount of mail traveled in both directions. Including the so-called Liebesgaben, or “care packages” of food, liquor, clothing, tobacco, and other essentials for the soldiers from home, the deliveries in both directions numbered close to 30 billion during the war. Some 7 million deliveries went homeward every day.28 The volume of packages, letters, and cards complicated the efforts of front-line officers and censors at home to prevent the exchange of military secrets or negative feelings about the war. The mails could be screened only selectively, so they offered a more authentic view of the war than did censored newspapers, which also went to the front to tell of life at home.

  Like the newspapers, the Feldpostbriefe, the letters from the
front, announced the elation of the early months. Even as they spoke of the hardship and brutality of combat, they embraced the official language to represent the war in terms of the bravery, heroism, sacrifice, and common exertions it evoked. “There can be nothing more beautiful for me,” read a typical outpouring from a young officer, soon to be killed, “than to sacrifice my earthly happiness on the altar of the Fatherland.”29 Early letters such as this one were welcome to censors and newspaper editors alike as instruments of home-front propaganda. Many of these documents found their way into the press or the dozens of anthologies that appeared in the first two years of the war. Collected letters of university students, Saxons, Socialists, or assorted other groups of soldiers urged resolve on the home front and underscored the unity that was supposed to reign among all sectors of German society.

  This genre did not survive the campaigns of 1916; nor did the sentiments that had inspired it. The letters home were no longer published, for their disillusionment and cynicism conveyed a much drearier picture of war. The subversive potential of such letters was of great concern to the censors, who were already occupied with another dimension of the same problem: the so-called Jammerbrief, the letter of complaint in the other direction, which detailed the growing hardships of life on the home front. The censors feared the impact of these letters on front-line morale, for the welfare of the home front represented not only the premise of a defensive war but – probably in the eyes of most soldiers – also the only compelling grounds for holding out. The situation bred its ironies. During their offensives of early 1918 German soldiers raided Allied supply depots and dispatched much of the bounty homeward, as Liebesgaben for the beleaguered home front.

  Despite their complex dependencies, experiences on the home front and fighting front were geared to different phases of the war. The gulf between the two worlds bred resentments, which fed through the Jammerbrief and another channel of communication homeward, the furlough. Soldiers ordinarily received two weeks’ leave at home after a year of front-line service. These visits often became occasions of more discomfort than solace, and they left soldiers yearning to return to the front. Furloughs brought direct contact with the privations faced by loved ones on the home front, as well as the grumbling and apparent ingratitude of civilians, who had little comprehension of life at the front. Two figures, who symbolized the problem, became the focus of the soldiers’ resentments of the home front. The first was the profiteer, the greedy businessman with the war contracts, to whom the war had brought riches amid the general misfortune. The other figure was the blustering home-front patriot, like the headmaster in Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, who had not himself served in the army and whose understanding of the war had, as a consequence, frozen in the summer of 1914. Soldiers found this loud, arrogant patriotism repugnant, for it no longer provided an adequate interpretive framework for the experience of the front. Nor, for that matter, did it make much sense of the crippling costs that the war was extracting from nearly everyone at home.

  Paying for war

  The costs of the war were incalculable – less because of their magnitude, however difficult this aspect was for Germans to comprehend, than because of their variety and long-lingering consequences. They included direct demographic costs, which registered as several ugly indentations in the twentieth century’s population curve, depreciation costs to plants and equipment, and the less tangible emotional costs of deprivation in its many forms. One category of costs did have to be counted, however; and accounting for these expenses had far-reaching social consequences.

  Every gun, shell, sandbag, cartridge box, horseshoe, belt buckle, and boot nail carried a price tag. The government, in the guise of the War Ministry, paid out these costs in the form of war contracts. The immediate consequence was an astronomical increase in the outlays of the German federal government. By 1918 direct war-related expenses stood at more than ten times the total federal budget on the eve of the war (see Figure 2).

  Figure 2 War-related expenditures of the German government Source: Gustav Stolper, The German Economy: 1870 to the Present (New York, 1967), 57.

  These direct outlays totaled nearly 150 billion marks over the course of the war. They represented but the beginning. The federal government was by no means the only public agency that paid out the price of war. State and local governments took on the immense ancillary costs. Cities and communes supported the families of soldiers in the field, and they shared with the federal government the costs of pensions to the families of those who were killed or incapacitated in action, as well as caring for the wounded. In the name of equity, local governments provided subsidies in cash or rations to the poor – a category that by war’s end comprised about half the population.30 These agencies also paid the full salaries of public officials who were serving in the military, as well as partial wages to other classes of public workers who were in the field. In the absence of these employees, however, the responsibilities of local governments increased. From the pool of those who were not at the front – a group made up largely of women – public offices expanded their staffs to coordinate the rationing of food and other essential goods, as well as to replace departed workers whose services were indispensable. The women who donned uniforms to collect fares on the tramways in Karlsruhe, Munich, and other cities symbolized both the social and financial implications of this situation. State governments provided some subsidies, while the federal government agreed to indemnify both state and local governments after the war for the expenses that they had accumulated; but, as long as the war continued, these agencies needed enormous revenues of their own in order to finance their daily operations.

  Public agencies from the top down thus faced an urgent problem: how to raise the money to cover these staggering costs. Amid great patriotic fanfare, public collections and donations served important symbolic functions. The spectacle in Berlin, where residents purchased nails to emboss Hindenburg’s wooden statue, was a model for civic festivals elsewhere. In Frankfurt an der Oder the “Iron Soldier” (Eiserner Wehrmann) was the object of the nails; in Wiesbaden an “Iron Siegfried” awaited them in the city center.31 The problem was that these rituals raised negligible revenues. So two practical options remained: to tax or to borrow. Taxation was unpopular. Persuasive voices in the German government, foremost among them Karl Helfferich, the federal secretary of finance, argued that Germans were already under such duress from the war that increasing the burden of taxation would threaten morale. Officials also feared that a debate over new federal taxes would raise intractable issues of social equity, which were best avoided in the interests of national unity. Proponents of increased federal taxes encountered an additional, constitutional, obstacle: the federal government had historically levied only indirect taxes, such as excises and tariffs, so no apparatus was in place to administer direct federal taxes. States and communes, which were under no such limitation, did increase the levels of taxes that they levied on property and income, although the communes nonetheless found themselves some 2 billion marks in debt by the fall of 1917.32 In all events, the actions of these bodies further discouraged the idea of direct federal taxation. Only in 1916 was a major federal tax introduced to help finance the war. It too was indirect, a value added tax; and it was levied against a vulnerable target, the war profiteers, who were taxed at a sliding rate on their “excess profits.” War contractors soon found ways to pass these additional costs on in their negotiations with procurement agencies, however. Because of the government’s reluctance to tax or to deal ruthlessly with the businessmen who supplied essential materials, taxation covered only about 15 percent of the direct outlays for the war.

  That left borrowing. The German government faced obstacles here as well. Unlike the British and French, the Germans found themselves practically excluded from foreign financial markets, after an attempt to float a major loan on Wall Street failed in 1914. The only alternative was domestic borrowing; and it became far and away the major vehicle for
raising revenue during the war. It took place in several forms. The most publicized was the Kriegsanleihe, the selling of war bonds. Nine times during the war, once every six months, the Reichstag authorized additional war credits, which were then issued in the form of public bonds. Most of these sold at an interest rate of 5 percent and were redeemable over ten years in semi-annual payments. These bond issues were accompanied by extravagant displays of patriotism, which were calculated to increase subscriptions. The bonds sold at banks, credit institutions, and post offices. Children were released from school to canvass door to door for individual subscribers. Banks invested in them; so did parishes and voluntary associations. Businesses and public offices purchased quantities of them, which they then encouraged their employees to buy with advanced wages. In part because of the tremendous public pressure, in part too because of popular commitment to a war that would be won, the bond issues raised enormous amounts of money.33 Over the course of the war the federal government generated in this fashion close to 100 billion marks.