Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Table 7 Some costs of the war1

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  United KingdomFranceGermanyAustria–HungaryRussia (–1917)

  Population, 1910–112 40,460,000 39,192,000 64,296,000 51,356,000 160,700,000

  Male population, 1910–112 19,638,000 19,254,000 32,040,000 25,374,000 78,790,000

  Men mobilized 6,211,4273 8,410,0004 13,250,0005 7,800,000 12,000,000

  Percentage of male population mobilized 31.6 44.0 41.4 30.7 15.2

  Military casualties 2,377,092 5,631,735 6,055,689 4,612,500 6,650,000

  Dead 683,830 1,365,735 1,808,546 992,500 1,700,000

  Wounded 1,693,2623 4,266,000 4,247,143 3,620,000 4,950,000

  Casualties per 1,000 prewar male population 121 292 189 182 84

  Civilian deaths due to war6 292,0003 500,0007 760,000 2,320,0005 5,050,0008

  Birth deficits9 1,788,000 3,074,000 5,436,000 5,063,000 26,000,00010

  Monetary costs:11

  Direct $44,029,011,868 $25,812,782,800 $40,150,000,000 $20,622,960,600 $24,383,950,000

  Cost per head $1,088 $659 $624 $402 $152

  Loss of life: capitalized value $3,083,066,280 $4,060,000,000 $6,911,762,000 $2,992,000,000 $3,353,500,000

  Property losses $1,750,000,000 $10,000,000,000 $1,750,000,000 n.a. $1,250,000,000

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  1 Unless otherwise indicated, the figures are drawn from Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (2 vols., Jefferson, NC, 1992), II, 782–7.

  2 Brian R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970 (New York, 1978), 4–8.

  3 Francis W. Hirst, The Consequences of the War to Great Britain (London, 1934).

  4 Includes colonial troops.

  5 Leo Grebler and Wilhelm Winkler, The Cost of the World War to Germany and to Austria–Hungary (New Haven, CT, 1940).

  6 Horst Mendershausen, The Economics of War (New York, 1941), 307.

  7 Charles Gide and William Oualid, Le bilan de la guerre pour la France (Paris, 1931).

  8 Stanislaus Kohn and Alexander F. Meyendorff, The Cost of the War to Russia (New Haven, CT, 1932).

  9 Derek H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street 1919–1929 (Berkeley, CA, 1977), 15.

  10 Includes period of revolution and civil war.

  11 Calculated from figures of Ernest L. Bogart, Direct and Indirect Costs of the Great World War (New York, 1919).

  Several of these numbers are of particular interest, for they suggest what might be called an east–west gradient in organizational effectiveness. France and Germany mobilized significantly larger proportions of their male populations for military service than did Russia or Austria–Hungary. The low British figure reflects the delay of conscription in this country until the end of 1916. Ratios of direct costs to population suggest that Britain, France, and Germany also mobilized material wealth more effectively than did the two eastern monarchies, where the staggering numbers of civilian casualties betray as well the mismanagement of the domestic food supply – and the fact that enemy blockades largely isolated both lands from overseas supplies.

  The Russian and Austro-Hungarian monarchies were by virtually every conventional index the least “developed” of the major powers. Their many weaknesses ought to have recommended a conciliatory foreign policy in 1914, for they rendered both empires, despite their large armies, unequal to the pressures of the war that erupted that summer. In both lands, the sinews of industrial development and political legitimacy were alike fragile. Russia’s industrial resources were abundant but largely untapped.6 A meager railway system, which faltered under the challenge of Imperial Russia’s vast distances, throttled the movement of industrial raw materials to the manufacturing centers, food to the cities, and troops, weapons, and supplies to the front. The tsar stood atop the most autocratic political system in Europe. His officials regarded all signs of civic initiative with suspicion and hence subverted the advice and cooperation offered to them in a rush of patriotism by the feeble Duma, business organizations, the local administrative councils (zemstvos), and a host of voluntary organizations such as the Red Cross. Industrial mobilization thus proceeded with little coordination among public and private agencies. Oversight of the war effort remained centralized in principle, where it was ultimately hostage to court favorites and a corps of bureaucrats, both military and civilian, most of whom were neither practiced nor trained in the skills now demanded of them, and whose incompetence was equaled only by their corruption. Mismanagement of the economy rivaled that of the army. The results surfaced in paralyzing shortages of basic goods on the home front and in the grotesque deficiencies in modern weapons, munitions, and supplies that plagued Russian foot soldiers in their encounters with the armies of Imperial Germany. Opposition built quickly in the industrial centers, particularly in Petrograd and Moscow, which were home to enormous concentrations of hungry and maltreated munitions workers. Resistance built as well among the troops, as repeated operational misadventures and incompetent leadership eroded the stolid residual loyalties to the monarchy that for three years had furnished the primary prop of discipline in this peasant army.

  To judge by the performance of its soldiers in the field against the Russian army, the Habsburg monarchy was even less prepared to wage an extended industrial war.7 Material backwardness was not as crippling a handicap as in Russia, for the integrated foundations of an industrial economy had been laid in Bohemia, western Hungary, and the environs of Vienna. The problem lay, rather, in the precarious state of ethnic relations in the Dual Monarchy, the intensification of national passions that had threatened the legitimacy of the imperial constitution even before the war broke out. The war’s great paradox was that mobilization required administrative centralization, which, because Germans and Magyars presided over it, could only exacerbate resentments among the other, subordinate ethnic groups that were the objects of its heavy hand. Mobilization bred a sprawling, hybrid bureaucratic colossus of civilians and soldiers, which was more efficient and less corrupt than in Russia (and less efficient and more corrupt than in Germany). During the first three years of the war the army was the dominant force in the mobilization of the home front. Military administration descended onto broad swaths of territory that abutted the many fronts on which Austrian troops were fighting. The army’s role in the management of the war-related industries was more direct than in Germany; and it extended to the militarization of factories in the core areas of production. If this arrangement kept the soldiers in the field better equipped than their Russian antagonists, it could not relieve a more comprehensive torment. A breakdown of the food supply, both at home and in the field, followed upon the Allied blockade, the inadequacy of the Austrian railway system, and one of the monarchy’s basic constitutional features – the autonomy of its Hungarian half, which survived in significant degrees, even amid the mobilization, to constrict the movement of grains to the Austrian half. Misery in the Habsburg lands was thus defined by hunger, as well as by the nearly uninterrupted calamities that failures of staff and command inflicted on Austrian armies on the eastern front. Opposition to the war rapidly accumulated. It found expression primarily in ethnic unrest at home and within the army, where it debilitated military performance. The unreliability of Czech units was manifest early in the contest; and, by the last two years of the war, the high command had grounds for anxiety over the loyalty of many others, including contingents of Poles, Ruthenians, Serbs, Romanians, and Italians. The pressures of war, which had swelled in the monarchy’s ethnic fissures, thus hastened the collapse of both the army and the Habsburg state in 1918.

  The two eastern European monarchies collapsed in the wake of defeat; France and Great Britain survived the ordeal of the war. The fact that these two western European lands were home to much broader and more centralized parliamentary regimes, with traditions of civilian control over the military, was more than incidental to this outcome. The strains of industrial mobilization nourished domestic
strife here, too, which surfaced foremost in industrial strikes and other manifestations of labor unrest, particularly during the final two years of the war. Domestic discord was more serious in France, where it peaked in 1917; but neither the mutinies in the army nor the spread of defeatist sentiment on the left at home destroyed the military and political foundations of the war effort. In both Britain and France, compulsory arbitration tribunals helped mollify labor, while governments could rely on extended networks of voluntary associations, from political parties to teachers’ organizations, to stoke the popular consensus in support of the war during the darkest periods in 1917 and early 1918. Thus in 1917, as revolution arrived in Russia and a new Austrian emperor desperately sought a way out of the war, the two western powers engineered a “remobilization” of their energies under the leadership of two powerful civilian politicians, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George.8

  French mobilization was the most thorough among the major belligerents.9 The country comprised the smallest population, and it ceded the bulk of its industrial resources to German occupation during the first weeks of the war. These were grave burdens in an industrial war, and they required, in compensation, the ruthless conscription of manpower into the army and industry. The French industrial effort reassembled in the interior; its ownership and management remained in the hands of the industrialists, but its planning took place in central civilian public agencies, which evolved in 1917 into a Ministry of Armaments. To this extent, the industrial mobilization in France, the melding of private enterprise and public direction, resembled the process in Germany and elsewhere, except that the first French minister of armaments was a Socialist. That France became the Entente’s principal manufacturing source of weapons testified to the effectiveness of this arrangement, as well as to the availability of industrial raw materials from abroad.

  The British mobilization required the greatest degree of innovation and improvisation.10 The most basic institutions were absent at the outset, for Great Britain was unique among the European powers in lacking a conscript army and an attendant military bureaucracy. The British economy in 1914 was also unique in its freedom from public intervention. Paradoxically, these failings were initially a liability but ultimately advantageous in the long war that eventuated, for, while mobilization required basic and painful ruptures with established practices, it was relatively unencumbered by bureaucratic tradition or jurisdictional conflicts in either the military or economic realms.11 The institutions that emerged were hence geared better to the new mandates of industrial war. The process culminated in the creation of a Ministry of Munitions, which imposed centralized direction on business and labor, and a mass army, which was fed initially by volunteers and then, beginning in 1916, by conscripts. Along with the Royal Navy, these institutions shielded the country’s civilian populace from the worst material privations, and they enabled the British army to bear the brunt of the military effort against Germany during the last year and a half of the war.

  While the dynamics and broad institutional contours of mobilization were similar in all the major belligerent states, each case displayed characteristic features, which corresponded to the unique political, social, and cultural circumstances in which it was set. In Germany, the setting was governed by massive bureaucratic intervention, the dominant place of the army in politics and society, and the endurance of basic domestic conflicts. That these aspects of German mobilization produced baleful consequences is easy to demonstrate, but so is the fact that feckless bureaucratic intrusions, powerful soldiers, and domestic conflict were prominent features of mobilization elsewhere. Did they result in the failure of mobilization in Germany?

  Did mobilization in Germany fail? If the criteria of success are marked out in November 1918, the question begs a positive answer.12 In this light, the exhaustion of the German home front was pivotal. It can be traced to basic administrative failures – above all, to those that confounded management of the food supply – and to the collapse of domestic consensus on the legitimacy of the war, which the soldiers and their civilian allies insisted on prosecuting to the limit for aggressive and uncompromising ends at home and abroad. Several problems attend this logic, including the question of whether the renunciation of aggressive war aims would have resulted in a compromise peace. A more basic question arises from the observations of a distinguished authority on international history. “With no considerable assistance from her allies,” writes Professor Northedge, Germany “had held the rest of the world at bay, had beaten Russia, had driven France, the military colossus of Europe for more than two centuries, to the end of her tether, and in 1917, had come within an ace of starving Britain into surrender.”13 Whether France was a military colossus any longer or whether Britain came within an ace of starving are not at issue. By Northedge’s criteria, the German mobilization was no failure. It was effective.14 It sustained a remarkable military feat: a comprehensive national exertion that for more than four years defied material odds to hold at bay a far superior coalition of enemies.

  This reasoning is compelling. It invites comparisons away from mobilization, the organization of resources, to these resources themselves – and their limits. Here the numbers speak an unambiguous language (see Table 8). These statistics relate only to the major powers. They anticipate neither the German occupation of Belgium and the French industrial north nor the changes in the cast of characters in 1917, when the Russians departed and the Americans entered the war (nor do they account for the resources of the British Empire). They reveal nonetheless that, in the categories most pertinent to an extended industrial war – those that translated directly into producing soldiers and deadly machines – the opposing sides were dramatically unequal. The figures also suggest that the fateful moments of the war came at the first hour, when the British intervened in the continental conflict, and then in early 1917, when the United States formally joined the coalition arrayed against the Central Powers. The British intervention was pivotal. Apart from ensuring the commitment of British troops and material resources to the coalition, it turned the commercial balance to the decisive disadvantage of the Central Powers, which were, for all intents and purposes, denied access to overseas trade for the duration of the war. The western powers, by contrast, henceforth enjoyed privileged access to the resources of the world’s most formidable industrial power. Agricultural imports from America likewise spared the western powers from food shortages in the degree that plagued the Central Powers. The German decision to risk war with the United States in 1917 rested in part on the (accurate) perception that the American economy was already underwriting the Entente’s war effort; but the same decision sealed the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, for it led to the acceleration and expansion of the American commitment of financial, material, and human resources to the war against Germany. However skillful the organization and management of their military resources, the Germans could not, as Paul Kennedy has emphasized, contend with “this massive disadvantage in sheer economic muscle, and the considerable disadvantage in the size of total mobilized forces.”15

  Table 8 Material resources, 1913

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  GermanyAustria–HungaryCentral PowersFranceRussiaBritainEntenteUnited StatesEntente and United States

  Population (millions) 66.9 52.1 119.0 39.7 175.1 44.4 259.2 97.3 356.5

  Iron and steel production (millions of tons) 17.6 2.6 20.2 4.6 4.8 7.7 17.1 31.8 48.9

  Percentage of world manufacturing output 14.8 4.4 19.2 6.1 8.2 13.6 27.9 32.0 59.9

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  Source: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 199–202, 258–71.

  The terrible costs of defying this disadvantage visited Germans in a multitude of guises during the four and a half years of the war. They also bequeathed a paralyzing legacy to the republican regime that emerged in the war’s aftermath.16 Indeed, the most fateful consequences of the Great War lay in the manner in which Germans dealt with its lingering costs, both material and moral.

&n
bsp; The material costs

  The political institutions of Imperial Germany collapsed in the fall of 1918, along with the army. Into the institutional chaos, which was compounded by the return of millions of veterans from the front, trod the German Social Democrats, who had hoped that the end of the war and the disappearance of authoritarianism would ease the way to democracy and social peace in Germany. Spearheaded by the USPD and the new Communist Party, in which the German advocates of Bolshevism gathered, revolutionary violence in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and other German cities demonstrated how formidable this challenge would be, however.

  From the instant when its representatives signed the armistice on November 11, 1918, the successor regime was saddled with the monumental burdens of the war. The restoration of civic order was purchased eventually at the high price of civil war, during which the wartime schism in the German labor movement was sealed in blood and the permanent alienation of a significant part of the working class from the new republic. The Treaty of Versailles, the formal instrument of international peace, was thereupon communicated to the Germans. Beyond the territorial and financial tributes it imposed on the new regime, it inflicted a crippling symbolic blow to the parliamentary republic, whose constitution was announced at virtually the same moment in the summer of 1919. Paragraph 231 of the treaty, the infamous “war guilt” clause, destroyed juridically the consensus on which the German war effort had been founded from the beginning of the conflict: the proposition that the country was waging a defensive war. Instead, the treaty insisted that the war and all the destruction that it had caused were the product of German aggression. In this way, the treaty married the republic with national humiliation; and it mocked the argument that the war had brought political benefits. At the same time, the settlement was less draconian than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, so, paradoxically, in leaving the foundations of German power largely intact, it kept alive nationalist visions of a Germany that was unvanquished militarily and still destined for dominance in Europe.