Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  The German commanders have suffered a mixed fate at the hands of their biographers. The most fortunate has been Erich von Falkenhayn, the subject of Holger Afflerbach’s splendid scholarly biography, Falkenhayn: Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich, 1996), which stands in a class by itself. The biographies of other leading German military figures tend to be shallow, though Annika Mombauer has written an excellent study of the man who led the German armies into battle in 1914: Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001). Important scholarly biographies of both Hindenburg and Ludendorff have now appeared: Manfredd Nebelin, Ludendorff: Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2010); and Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007). Both are welcome, solid, and at times gripping accounts. Nebelin’s volume emphasizes Ludendorff’s career during the First World War, while Pyta’s deals more centrally with political affairs and extends the account into the 1930s. The two are best read together, for each underplays the significance of the other’s hero. Nebelin characterizes Ludendorff as a dictator; Pyta portrays Hindenburg as a skilled and calculating political figure, whose principal concern was the cultivation of his own image. In truth, the career of neither was conceivable without the other. This fact alone recommends the older, but much less thorough, popular studies of the two figures together: Trevor N. Dupuy, The Military Lives of Hindenburg and Ludendorff of Imperial Germany (New York, 1970); and Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the First World War (London, 1991). Jesko von Hoegen’s Der Held von Tannenberg. Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (Cologne, 2007) emphasizes the broader social and cultural factors that contributed to Hindenburg’s popularity. Anna von der Goltz’s Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2011) presents a careful and balanced evaluation of Hindenburg’s politics. The new studies of both Hindenburg and Ludendorff have superseded all the older ones: John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London, 1936); Walter Goerlitz, Hindenburg: Ein Lebensbild (Bonn, 1953); Wolfgang Ruge, Hindenburg: Porträt eines Militaristen (East Berlin, 1977) – a Marxist account; Rudolf Olden, Hindenburg: Oder der Geist der preussischen Armee (Hildesheim, 1982); and Werner Maser, Hindenburg: Eine politische Biographie (Rastatt, 1989). Ludendorff, along with the younger Moltke, is the subject of a stimulating portrait in Correlli Barnett’s The Sword-Bearers: Supreme Command in the First World War (Bloomington, IN, 1963). Ludendorff is also the subject of several popular military biographies: Donald J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Genius of World War I (Boston, 1966); Roger Parkinson, Tormented Warrior: Ludendorff and the Supreme Command (London, 1978); and Wolfgang Venohr, Ludendorff: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Berlin, 1993). I myself have analyzed Ludendorff’s retrospective efforts to make sense of the German defeat in “Sore loser: Ludendorff’s total war,” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 2003), 151–78. On Groener, there is the biography by his daughter, Dorothea Groener-Geyer, General Groener, Soldat und Staatsmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1954).

  On the German navy in the First World War, there is also a massive official history: Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918 (23 vols., Berlin, 1920–66). A better place to start is Paul G. Halpern’s fine study, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, 1994). Holger H. Herwig’s “Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (Amherst, NY, 1987) is strong on technical details. On the Germans at Jutland, see Michael Epkenhans, Jörg Hillmann, and Frank Nägler (eds.), Skagerrakschlacht: Vorgeschichte – Ereignis – Verarbeitung (Munich, 2009); and V. E. Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective: A New View of the Great Battle, 31 May 1916 (London, 1995). Problems of naval policy, particularly with respect to submarine warfare, are treated in Bernd Stegemann’s Die deutsche Marinepolitik 1916–1918 (Berlin, 1970). On the unrest in the navy in 1917, see Daniel Horn, The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969); and Wilhelm Deist, “Die Unruhen in der Marine 1917/18,” in his Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft: Studien zur preussisch-deutschen Militärgeschichte (Munich, 1991), 153–64.

  Events in the air war are traced by John H. Morrow, Jr., German Air Power in World War I (Lincoln, NE, 1982); and Peter Kilduff, Germany’s First Air Force, 1914–1918 (London, 1991).

  Scholarly interest has turned increasingly to the global dimensions of the war. The first of three projected volumes in Hugh Strachan’s massive survey of the world war, The First World War: To Arms (Oxford, 2001) carries the account generally through 1915 but attends to military operations against German forces in Africa, the Pacific, and Asia throughout most of the war. The war in the Pacific is treated in the first section of Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu, 1995). On operations against German colonies in Africa, see in general Edward Paice, World War I: The African Front (New York, 2008); Melvin E. Page (ed.), Africa and the First World War (London, 1987); Byron Farwell, The Great War in Africa, 1914–1918 (London, 1987); and Werner Haupt, Die deutsche Schutztruppe 1889–1918: Auftrag und Geschichte (Eggolsheim-Bammersdorf, 2001). Good accounts of the war in the individual colonies are to be found in Richard Henning, Deutsch-Südwest im Weltkrieg (Wolfenbüttel, 2011); Uwe Schulte-Varedorff’s Krieg in Kamerun: Die deutsche Kolonie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2011); and Tanja Bührer, Die kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918 (Munich, 2011). There is now a first-rate biography of Paul Lettow-Vorbeck: Eckard Michels, “Der Held von Deutsch-Ostafrika”: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck: Ein preussischer Kolonialoffizier (Paderborn, 2008). On the German war in the Middle East, there is an extended literature. The older studies emphasize the diplomacy of the Turkish alliance: Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1968); Frank G. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent: Germany, Austria, and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance, 1914–1918 (Ithaca, NY, 1970). The anti-colonial motif in German operations is well analyzed in Donald McKale, War by Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of World War I (Kent, OH, 2008); and Martin Kröger, “Revolution als Programm: Ziele und Realität deutscher Orientpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Michalka, Der Erster Weltkrieg, 366–91. On the question of German complicity in the Armenian genocide, see now Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York, 2011), while Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005) remains an excellent introduction.

  Mobilization of the economy

  The social and economic history of the Great War was the subject of the comprehensive, multinational studies that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sponsored in the 1920s. Many of the works that made up the German series are still indispensable. The volume by Otto Goebel, Deutsche Rohstoffwirtschaft im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1930), deals with the administration of industrial raw materials and the Hindenburg Program. Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge, 2005), present an invaluable, up-to-date, comparative overview of economic developments during the war. The chapter on Germany is by Albrecht Ritschl, “The pity of peace: Germany’s economy at war, 1914–1918 and beyond” (41–76). German industrial mobilization, particularly the links among state, economy, and military, has inspired several additional studies. The most balanced is Friedrich Zunkel’s Industrie und Staatssozialismus: Der Kampf um die Wirtschaftsordnung in Deutschland 1914–1918 (Düsseldorf, 1974), while several East German studies have emphasized the significance of the link to the state as a factor in the crisis of German capitalism: Alfred Schröter, Krieg–Staat–Monopol 1914 bis 1918: Die Zusammenhänge von imperialistischer Kriegswirtschaft, Militarisierung der Volkswirtschaft und staatsmonopolitischem Kapitalismus in Deutschland während des ersten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1965); and Helmuth Weber, Ludendorff und die Mon
opole: Deutsche Kriegspolitik (East Berlin, 1966). Hermann Schäfer, Regionale Wirtschaftspolitik in der Kriegswirtschaft: Staat, Industrie und Verbände während des Ersten Weltkrieges in Baden (Stuttgart, 1983), provides an excellent guide to the bureaucratic maze that mobilization spawned in the federal state of Baden, while Hans Ehlert, Die wirtschaftliche Zentralbehörde des Deutschen Reiches 1914 bis 1919: Das Problem der “Gemeinwirtschaft” in Krieg und Frieden (Wiesbaden, 1982), presents a more general institutional map. On the role of Walther Rathenau in industrial mobilization, there are many studies, among them: Lothar Burchhardt, “Walther Rathenau und die Anfänge der deutschen Rohstoffbewirtschaftung im ersten Weltkrieg,” Tradition: Zeitschrift für Firmengeschichte und Unternehmerbiographie 15 (1970), 169–96; Gerhard Hecker, Walther Rathenau und sein Verhältnis zu Militär und Krieg (Boppard, 1983); and David Graham Williamson, “Walther Rathenau and the KRA, August 1914–March 1915,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 23 (1978), 118–36.

  The problems of agriculture and the food supply were first analyzed thoroughly in two volumes of the Carnegie series: Friedrich Aereboe, Der Einfluss des Kriegs auf die landwirtschaftliche Produktion in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1927); and August Skalweit, Die deutsche Kriegsernährungswirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1927). Anne Roerkohl’s exhaustive studies of the food supply are fundamental: Hungerblockade und Heimatfront: Die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung in Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart, 1991); and “Die Lebensmittelversorgung während des Ersten Weltkrieges im Spannungsfeld kommunaler und staatlicher Massnahmen,” in Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg (ed.), Durchbruch zum modernen Massenkonsum: Lebensmittelmärkte und Lebensmittelqualität im Städtewachstum des Industriezeitalters (Münster, 1987), 309–70. Armin Triebel examines food consumption in “Variations in patterns of consumption in Germany in the period of the First World War,” in Richard Wall and Jay M. Winter (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1988), 159–96. George L. Yaney, The World of the Manager: Food Administration in Berlin during World War I (New York, 1994), analyzes the problem of food shortages in the light of the managerial challenge. Jochen Oltmer’s study, Bäuerliche Ökonomie und Arbeitskräftepolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg: Beschäftigungsstruktur, Arbeitsverhältnisse und Rekrutierung von Ersatzarbeitskräften in der Landwirtschaft des Emslandes 1914–1918 (Sögel, 1995), analyzes the role of labor shortages in producing the food crisis. Arnulf Huegel compares German food management during the two world wars: Kriegsernährungswirtschaft während des Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieges im Vergleich (Constance, 2003). On the impact of the blockade on the German food supply, see C. Paul Vincent’s The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens, OH, 1985); Marion C. Siney’s The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914–1916 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1957); and the pertinent chapters of Avner Offer’s The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989). Several recent studies deal with the German peasantry during the war, though their emphasis falls on agrarian politics: Robert Moeller, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914– 1924: The Rhineland and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986); Moeller, “Dimensions of social conflict in the Great War: the view from the German countryside,” Central European History 14 (1981), 142–68; Martin Schumacher, Land und Politik: Eine Untersuchung über politische Parteien und agrarische Interessen 1914–1923 (Düsseldorf, 1978); and Jens Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie: Ländliche Gesellschaft, Agrarverbände und Staat 1890–1925 (Bonn, 1978).

  Gerald D. Feldman’s Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), remains the basic study of labor relations in Germany during the war. The older volume in the Carnegie series, Paul Umbreit and Charlotte Lorenz’s Der Krieg und die Arbeitsverhältnisse (Stuttgart, 1928), contains a lot of information about trade unions (and women’s labor), but it has now been largely superseded. Robert Armeson deals with the difficulties of labor recruitment in Total Warfare and Compulsory Labor: A Study of the Military–Industrial Complex in Germany during World War I (The Hague, 1964). Günter Mai has provided an important regional survey, Kriegswirtschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Württemberg 1914–1918 (Stuttgart, 1983), as well as a valuable anthology of essays: Mai (ed.), Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland 1914–1918: Studien zu Arbeitskampf und Arbeitsmarkt im Ersten Weltkrieg (Düsseldorf, 1985).

  Feldman has also published the standard work on German war finances and inflation, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation 1914–1924 (Oxford, 1993). It supersedes the older East German studies of this problem: Ruth Andexel, Imperialismus, Staatsfinanzen, Rüstung, Krieg: Probleme der Rüstungsfinanzierung des deutschen Imperialismus (East Berlin, 1968); and Kurt Gossweiler, Grossbanken, Industriemonopole, Staat, Ökonomie und Politik des staatsmonopolischen Kapitalismus (East Berlin, 1983). Manfred Zeidler provides an overview in “Die deutsche Kriegsfinanzierung 1914 bis 1918 und ihre Folgen,” in Michalka, Der Erste Weltkrieg, 415–33. Martin Geyer’s cultural history of inflation in postwar Munich contains an introductory section on the war: Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation, und Moderne – München 1914–1924 (Göttingen, 1998).

  Social history of the war

  The Carnegie series offers important studies on several phases of the war’s social history. The essays in the volume edited by Franz Bumm and Rudolf Abel, Deutschlands Gesundheitsverhältnisse unter dem Einfluss des Weltkrieges (Stuttgart, 1928), document the impact of malnutrition and other shortages on public health. Moritz Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1930), documents the erosion of the legal order, while the essays of Otto Baumgarten and his team of scholars in Geistige und sittliche Wirkungen des Krieges in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1927) examine the breakdown of the moral order. The massive study overseen by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1997–2007), stands in many respects as the heir of the Carnegie series, albeit with a great deal more cultural history; and it contains a wealth of information about the German capital.

  Several broader studies trace the effect of war on the evolution of German social policy: Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1949), which contains an extended prologue on the war; Rolf Landwehr, “Funktionswandel der Fürsorge vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik,” in Rolf Landwehr and Rüdiger Baron (eds.), Geschichte der Sozialarbeit: Hauptlinien ihrer Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Weinheim, 1983), 73–138; Christof Sachsse and Florian Tenstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1988); and Christof Sachsse, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung, 1871–1929 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986). Robert Weldon Whalen’s fascinating study Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 1984) treats, among other things, efforts to provide public assistance to injured soldiers during the war; so does Ewald Frie, “Vorbild oder Spiegelbild? Kriegsbeschädigtenfürsorge in Deutschland 1914–1919,” in Michalka, Der Erste Weltkrieg, 563–80. Deborah Cohen’s book analyzes the mobilization of injured veterans after the war, but it contains useful information about developments during the war: The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, CA, 2001). Although it, too, is concerned primarily with the war’s aftermath, Richard Bessel’s Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993) offers a compact survey of the war’s social history.

  The front experience has been the subject of a large literature. Like Whalen’s Bitter Wounds, Eric Leed’s offering in this genre, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), adduces material from the German trenches. In his Der grosse Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen, 2000), Aribert Reimann has sought to link several dimensions of the war by means of the metaphors that organized experience on the battle front and the home fronts in Germany and Britain. The confusion and pani
c of the battlefield are documented in a gripping analysis by John Horne and Alan Kramer of German actions in Belgium and northern France during the first weeks of the war, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001). Alan Kramer’s Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007) deals centrally with German soldiers but reflects more broadly on the disappearance of cultural constraints on mass killing. Paul Lerner’s superb study of war neurosis, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 2003), illuminates another problematic dimension of the battlefield experience, as does Jason Crouthamel, The Great War and German Memory: Society, Politics, and Psychological Trauma, 1914–1945 (Liverpool, 2010), whose emphasis falls in the postwar period.

  The attention of German scholars has turned, with excellent results, to trench newspapers and the Feldpostbrief as source material. On the newspapers, see especially Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 2003); and Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge, 2011). On letters from the front, see, in addition to the work of Reimann and Ziemann, Bernd Ulrich, “Feldpostbriefe im Ersten Weltkrieg: Bedeutung und Zensur,” in Peter Knoch (ed.), Kriegsalltag: Die Rekonstruktion des Kriegsalltags als Aufgabe der historischen Forschung und der Friedenserziehung (Stuttgart, 1989), 40–83; Ulrich, “Feldpostbriefe des Ersten Weltkrieges: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer alltagsgeschichtlichen Quelle,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 53 (1994), 73–84. Bernd Ulrich and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), Frontalltag im Ersten Weltkrieg: Wahn und Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1994) contains documents of everyday life on the front lines. The deterioration of morale among the German troops has (again) occasioned lively controversy. Two studies offer persuasive syntheses: Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2008); and Scott Stephenson, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge, 2009). Of particular importance among the older studies are Wilhelm Deist, “Der militärische Zusammenbruch des Kaiserreichs: Zur Realität der ‘Dolchstosslegende,’” in his Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft, 211–34; Deist’s “Verdeckter Militärstreik im Kriegsjahr 1918?” in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten (Munich, 1992), 146–67; Wolfgang Kruse, “Krieg und Klassenheer: Zur Revolutionierung der deutschen Armee im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996), 530–61; Benjamin Ziemann, “Fahnenflucht im deutschen Heer 1914–1918,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 55 (1996), 93–130; and Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten: Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1998). On German prisoners of war, the place to start is Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France, and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, 2013), but see also Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford, 2002), which focuses on the troops of Austria–Hungary. Ute Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg: Kriegsgefangenschaft in Deutschland 1914–1921 (Essen, 2006), offers the most thorough study of the German camps.