#39 Was Germany Responsible for Starting the War?
Following on from last week’s blog, a second possibility was that Germany was responsible for the war in 1914. All the winning powers agreed with this proposition in 1919. The new Germany was the "contending" nation for world power. In the 25 years before 1914, the German economy was growing significantly faster than Britain's. Germany had only been unified as a single state in 1870, and therefore had missed out in the race for colonies: the ‘common sense’ of European foreign policy of the era. And Germany was competing for oil, the new super energy in the ground in the Middle East.
A map of the German Reich 1871-1918, by kgberger, CC BY-SA 3.0. Retrieved from Wikipedia.
After 1945, this proposition was examined in detail by German historians. Unsurprisingly, the people of Germany wished to find out why their leaders had led them into two utterly disastrous wars. This issue became of widespread interest throughout German-speaking peoples.
Fritz Fischer wrote extensively about German's responsibility in both wars. He began with the Lutheran religious tradition in German life which glorified the state as a divinely sanctioned institution. Fischer’s history had examined the imperial German government archives. His first book, published in 1961, was said to have rendered obsolete every book previously published on the responsibilities for the 1914 war. The book, Germany's Aims in the First World War, was translated into English. He argued that Germany had deliberately instigated the war to become a world power.
Germany’s war aims, according to Fischer, were not so different from Hitler’s 25 years later: territorial expansion to create a German-dominated Europe. World War One was not a ghastly mistake. His argument caused a revolution in German historiography, highlighting deliberate ethnic cleansing of Russian and Poland followed by German colonisation to make living space (Lebensraum), an idea that long preceded Hitler.
Support for Fischer centred around plans to create a German-dominated "Mitteleurope". Ideas of Mitteleurope – that is, a central European federation of states - had been discussed since 1815. The logic of European integration had a long history, from the time of the Hapsburg Empire, integrated under the Catholic Church. The logic of a powerful grouping of European states that could compete on equal terms with Britain and the USA gained credence throughout the 19th century. The logic was set up by Napoleon, and the threat from Britain was real throughout the 19th century. The Mittleuropean concept was widely discussed; at its core was an alliance between the German states and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but it also included Belgian, Switzerland the Netherlands, thus conceptualised as extending from the Rhine to the Baltic Sea.
As Fischer argues, the pan-European notion accompanied German settler colonialism, propagated by the pan-European League, creating puppet states in between Russia and Germany. Direct annexation and a cultural hegemony collating literature and poetry was all part of the idea. German control of Alsace-Lorraine which Germany had captured in 1871 was part of the plan. By 1914, a Mitteleurope element was central to Germany’s war plans.
German's war plan was to fight a three- to four-month violent blitzkrieg against Russia, then find a speedy and friendly settlement with France and Britain. Under this argument, Fischer continued that Germany wished for the war but had failed to understand Britain's own hegemonic Mackinder conceptualisation of European and world politics. Halford John Mackinder had propagated an entirely separate world view in the first decade of the 20th century. Namely that it was the control of Eastern Europe that was vital to control of the world. This was to become known as the Heartland Theory: Who rules Eastern Europe commands ‘the Heartland’. There would be no friendly Britain to make any settlement.
German historians hit back against Fischer’s interpretation, of course, and argued:
Germany was not uniquely aggressive at this time
All the leading European states already had many colonies
German war aims only became apparent after the war had begun
France after its defeat by Germany in 1870 was committed to revenge
The major powers of Europe were already committed to hostile alliances
The multi-national Empires of Austro Hungary, Ottomans and Russians had national aspirations for independent states
In brief, the German historians in attempting to refute the facts presented by Franz Fischer, fell back on the popular view, that the war just ‘happened’ and no one party was responsible.
This argument remains potent. If no country or body was responsible for the origins of the war, then historians would not need to examine the role of colonisation or world leaders. The war could then be understood in terms of nationalism, failed glory, and we could all mourn the dead with a clear conscience. But if the war had been started because national leaders wanted to expand and control their colonies then that was a different issue; wealth, greed and war could then be joined together.
Image retrieved from the Imperial War Museums, © IWM Q 66190, Source: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205022641
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Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.