War guilt issue

This article deals with the question of war guilt. For the journal Die Kriegsschuldfrage see Die Kriegsschuldfrage: Berliner Monatshefte .

The question of war guilt (French: question de la responsabilité dans la guerre ; English: question of war guilt ) was the term used in the Weimar Republic to describe the public debate about who was responsible for triggering the First World War . Despite similar debates in many other wars , the history of the 20th century mostly treated the causes and responsibilities of the First World War under this term.

overview

War guilt was hardly discussed publicly until 1914 and was not enshrined in peace treaties. That since the Peace of Westphalia usual tabula rasa principle concluded the examination of the reasons for war and prosecution of the vanquished from ( Oblivionsklausel ). Only after the First World War did a question of war guilt become politically acute. Its victims and the damage it caused far exceeded those of earlier European national wars. Previously codified international martial law such as the Hague Land Warfare Regulations , which primarily standardized warfare , remained largely ineffective.

In World War I, which began as a cabinet war and which later escalated into total war , national war propaganda helped to decide the course of the war. The mobilization of the armies and further conduct of the war also depended on the opinion of the own as well as the hostile population on the guilt of the war. Selective assignments of blame and interests of the belligerent elites determined the debate far beyond the end of the war and were instrumentalized for their post-war goals.

In the Weimar Republic, state authorities saw the defense of the Central Powers' sole guilt enshrined in the Versailles Treaty as a national task in order to mitigate and revise the conditions established by it (see Treaty revisionism ). Many party politicians also vehemently fought the so-called war guilt lie. After the Second International broke up at the outbreak of war in 1914, the SPD also largely fought off German war guilt in the years after 1918.

In France and Great Britain too , joint responsibility for the escalation into World War I before 1939 was hardly examined. Some British historians replaced the Versailles thesis of German / Austro-Hungarian sole guilt with the assumption that the governments involved would "break out of war" unintentionally. In the context of the appeasement policy , they largely relieved Germany of deliberate war planning before 1914.

The apologetic guidelines made it difficult to examine all accessible documents and to conduct scientific research into the causes of war . Most historians examined almost exclusively events and decision-making processes at the government level in the July crisis of 1914 and at the beginning of the war. Gerhard Hirschfeld therefore judges:

"Neither in Germany nor in France or Great Britain did the First World War in the 1920s and 1930s find a historiographical representation that would have met scientific standards beyond narrowly defined questions of military history."

In the United States there was hardly any war guilt debate because of the short war involvement and lower number of victims, in the Soviet Union because of the state ideology of Marxism-Leninism .

The Nazis used the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of a war debt of world Jewry in preparation for the Second World War and the Holocaust .

In the Federal Republic of Germany the thesis of an equal war (inn) guilt was initially continued. This blocked the question of possible common causes of both world wars and continuities in the war aims of German military and economic elites . It was not until 1959 that the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer opened a new debate on the pre-war policy of the German Empire . With the " Fischer controversy ", which lasted until around 1985, differentiated research into the long-term, social and economic causes of the First World War began in Germany and abroad. This takes into account the handling of war guilt before 1933, also with a view to the conditions in which the Second World War came about.

Due to the increased information and manipulation possibilities in the age of the mass media, debates on war guilt have led to many wars since 1945 and have influenced their beginning, implementation, termination or processing in various ways.

The term “war guilt question”, which is historically linked to the First World War, is only occasionally applied to other wars in the media and book titles.

First World War

War propaganda

A war of aggression was legal under international law at the time, but morally outlawed. In order to prove that the opponents of the war had started it and that they had absolutely tried to avoid it, all the governments involved published “color books” - collections of selected diplomatic documents - during the course of the war .

Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg

For the propaganda of the Entente , Germany had been the aggressor since its invasion of Belgium . The German government presented the Russian general mobilization as an "attack"; their own declarations of war should have anticipated "encirclement". With this, the Supreme Army Command (OHL) justified its procedure according to the Schlieffen Plan and its orientation towards a victory peace . Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg justified the violation of Belgian neutrality in the Reichstag on August 4, 1914 as follows:

“We are now in self-defense; and need knows no command. Our troops have occupied Luxembourg, perhaps have already entered Belgian territory. Gentlemen, that contradicts the requirements of international law. [...] The injustice - I speak openly -, the injustice that we do with it, we will redress as soon as our military goal is achieved. "

Few political leaders blamed their allies or themselves for the war. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Stephan Graf Tisza , had rejected Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia on July 26, 1914 because of the risk of World War II. He is said to have internally assigned Austria-Hungary's Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and the German government the main culprit for the escalation into the world war.

Proof of having been attacked was primarily necessary for domestic purposes. The supporters of social democracy in France and Germany had demonstrated en masse for peace at the end of July 1914. The willingness to go to war was particularly low in Great Britain; In Germany, the masses of war enthusiasts in the big cities faced a predominantly skeptical and indifferent rural population. It was clear to everyone in charge that one had to portray one's own country as innocent of the outbreak of war in order to win the population over to the war. Indeed, the color books promoted readiness for war in all warring states.

War support in Germany

Friedrich August von Kaulbach: Germania , 1914

Almost all historians established in the empire  - including Georg von Below , Otto Hintze , Erich Marcks , Friedrich Meinecke , Hermann Oncken  - understood the support of the government in the war through nationalistic representations of their own history as their patriotic duty. Many artists and writers, such as Ludwig Fulda , supported the war innocence propaganda: for example the Manifesto of 93 of September 1914 and the declaration of the university professors of the German Reich of October 1914, which was followed by a response to the German professors in the USA .

In the SPD, due to the approval of the war credits on August 4, 1914, which enabled the total mobilization of the army, and for the peace of the castle, initially no questions were asked about the German war guilt. Most Germans believed that Russia started the war and forced a defensive war on Germany . On this basis, the MSPD voted with the liberal Progressive Party and the Catholic Center Party on July 19, 1917 in the Reichstag for a peace resolution to get the OHL to abandon the course of annexation and submarine warfare , but also the Allies to end the sea ​​blockade and to guarantee guarantees under international law to move German "integrity". Without this, the war would have to continue: In their unity, the German people are insurmountable.

War opponents

Doubts about the imperial innocence of war arose immediately after its declarations of war, but initially hardly came into play because of the prevailing propaganda, martial law, party discipline and press censorship . Opponents of the war in the Central Powers were only able to spread their convictions and goals illegally until autumn 1918 and risked heavy penalties for high treason or treason - including the death penalty . Many opponents of the war persecuted in Germany therefore emigrated, especially to Switzerland , where a war guilt debate began during the war.

Socialists

A few revolutionary socialists in the SPD, who refused their consent to war, gathered in the International Group on August 5, 1914 . Its founder, Rosa Luxemburg , gave the SPD in the Junius brochure of June 1916 a major complicity in bringing about the World War. According to its Marxist view, the party of the working class should have recognized and made aware of the historical laws that tended towards pan-European war. The fact that this has not happened must be consistently analyzed and the right conclusions drawn for the future.

From 1915, other SPD members withdrew from their previous approval of the war. Kurt Eisner , through his own study of the documents of warring states, came to the conclusion that the German Empire played a role in triggering war in the July crisis. In 1917 he was confirmed in the memorandum of the diplomat Karl Max Fürst Lichnowsky and a declaration by the director of the Krupp works, Johann Wilhelm Muehlon, who had resigned because of the German war guilt .

The USPD , founded in April 1917, called for an immediate end to the war and rejected the Reichstag's peace resolution. The Spartacus group that had joined it called for mass strikes across the empire in December 1917 to end the “genocide”. The German government had unleashed the war, but this was the result of pan-European imperialism , which only a social revolution could overthrow. A partial peace with Russia, which has been ready for peace since the October Revolution, will only prolong the war and enable a new Western offensive. The revolution program of October 7, 1918 stated:

“This war, begun with the cheekiest lie in world history - that of the shameful attack - finally confronts the German proletariat with the bare fact that Germany's imperialism is politically and militarily defeated [...] after four years of accumulation from lie to lie. "

That is why the federal government called for extensive social changes, including expropriation of banks and heavy industry and democratization of the army.

Pacifists

The German Peace Society , founded in 1892, had called for international agreements on arms limitation and general disarmament before the war. It called on the warring governments to negotiate and renounce colonies and conquests, but did not question the national right of self-defense and did not call for conscientious objection or disempowerment of the military elites. Their co-founder Richard Grelling , however, showed himself to be convinced of the German war guilt in his work J'accuse (1915).

Since November 1914, the newly founded New Fatherland Federation stood up against the annexationists organized in the Pan-German Association for a mutual agreement and binding international treaties. To win the government over, he did not focus on the question of war guilt. However, it was banned in 1916.

The radical pacifist and anti-militarist Fritz Küster blamed the German government for war since the occupation of Belgium, called their thesis of the "attack" a lie and did not agree to the war credits. Without recognition and confession of war guilt and condemnation of the guilty, there would be no new German beginning. That is why he urged a “real revolution of conscience ” and a break with the “war spirit” in order to create lasting peace.

Hugo Ball , who emigrated to Switzerland with his wife Emmy Ball-Hennings , wrote the article “The True Face” in Zurich in 1915 on the question of war guilt. In 1918 he became editor of the Berner Freie Zeitung , in which many prominent war opponents also had their say about war guilt, including Ernst Bloch , the married couple Claire and Yvan Goll , Carl von Ossietzky , Franz Werfel and Else Lasker-Schüler . Allegations of financing by the Entente remained unresolved. From August 1917, German authorities co-financed the less-circulated Zurich counter-newspaper “Das Freie Wort”.

The pacifists welcomed US President Woodrow Wilson's 14-point program of January 18, 1918. This demanded the return of all conquered and occupied territories and the right of peoples to self-determination without naming German war guilt. It was only after the Reich government's offer of an armistice on October 3, 1918, that Wilson demanded the emperor's abdication as a condition for negotiations.

Weimar Republic

November Revolution

The workers 'and soldiers' councils formed in the November Revolution blamed the previous elites for the world war and sought their complete disempowerment. The condemnation of individuals took a back seat to the abolition of the monarchy and the goal of the greatest possible democratization of the judiciary, administration, economy and the military. Officers were mostly dismissed and disarmed, but not imprisoned or killed.

Only the “Central Council of the Navy” on November 9, 1918 and the Munich Workers 'and Soldiers' Council on December 12, 1918 demanded a people's court that was to determine and sentence those guilty of the war: above all the OHL and the Reich government, but also war and war Field judges for their death sentences against soldiers and deserters .

On November 25, 1918, Kurt Eisner, as provisional Prime Minister of the Free State of Bavaria, which he had proclaimed, gave extracts of secret documents from the Bavarian legation in Berlin to the press in order to prove Germany's war guilt. He hoped to break through Germany's international isolation and to convince the victorious powers of a change of attitude among the Germans in order to achieve better peace conditions for Bavaria as well. In addition, he wanted to inform the Germans that the Reich government and military leadership had deliberately deceived them about their actual war aims, so that only the replacement of the military and administrative elites could ensure sustainable democratization. The provisional government under Friedrich Ebert and most of the members of the Bavarian council government rejected this. From then on, many right-wing media and the Bavarian and Prussian military saw Eisner as a traitor.

At the international socialist congress in Bern (February 3–10, 1919) he again called for the German war guilt to be recognized and proposed a major reconciliation work for the voluntary reconstruction of foreign areas destroyed by war. While the KPD and USPD welcomed this, the Federal Foreign Office , SPD and conservative-bourgeois media accused Eisner of betraying German interests out of political naivety and giving the victorious powers reasons for cracking down on Germany. The Allies did not meet Eisner. He was murdered on February 21, 1919 by a nationalist assassin. It is only since the 1960s that some historians have recognized his isolated approach as an alternative to the politics of the Reich government and a contribution to international understanding .

International Court of Arbitration

While USPD and KPD representatives emphasized the moral war guilt of the imperial leaders and associated social, less legal consequences with it, the provisional government in Berlin demanded a "neutral" international court in early 1919 to exclude the question of war guilt from the upcoming Paris peace negotiations.

With similar goals, some national liberals, including Max von Baden , Paul Rohrbach , Max Weber , Friedrich Meinecke , Ernst Troeltsch , Lujo Brentano and Conrad Haußmann , founded a “Working Group for the Politics of Law” (“ Heidelberger Vereinigung ”) on February 3, 1919 . She tried to scientifically clarify the question of guilt and wanted an arbitration tribunal to investigate the proportions of guilt and violations of international law. She combined this with criticism of the German policy of the Entente powers and fought their alleged "war guilt lie" before the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty. A four-person delegation from the association was supposed to reject the Allied war guilt theses on behalf of the Foreign Office and handed over a "memorandum to examine the war guilt question" (also called "professors memorandum") in Versailles .

After the Allies rejected the proposals and instead demanded the extradition of the "war guilty", Otto Landsknecht (MSPD Bavaria) demanded a national state court on March 12, 1919 for their conviction. Only a few SPD representatives supported this, including Philipp Scheidemann . Ex-General Erich Ludendorff attacked him violently and accused the government representatives of treason in the sense of the stab in the back legend . After the Versailles editions became known, they demanded the deletion of the paragraph on the extradition of the war guilty.

"War Debt Department"

The line of the SPD majority, which followed on from its own war approval from 1914 to 1918 and left the imperial administrative apparatus almost untouched, continued to determine the internal political processing of the war. In view of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , which began on January 18, 1919 , the Foreign Office had set up the “Bülow Special Office”, named after the former Chancellor Bernhard Fürst von Bülow , at the end of 1918 . In 1919 this became the "war guilt department". It collected documents in the manner of “color books” in order to counter allegations that Germany and Austria-Hungary planned the world war and “deliberately” disregarded international war law. This should also provide foreign historians and journalists with exonerating material in order to influence public opinion abroad.

The department also acted as an “internal censorship agency”, stipulating which publications were to be praised or criticized, and prepared official statements for the Reich Chancellor and the Reich President on the issue of war guilt. Theodor Schieder later wrote about this: "In the beginning, the research was almost a continuation of the war by other means."

Documentation of the war guilt department was not taken into account by the delegates of the victorious powers at the Paris conference and in the following years. From 1922 onwards, the Allies only waived the demand for the German “main war criminals” to be extradited, which was vehemently rejected in Germany.

the Versailles Treaty

William Orpen : The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors . Contract signing in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

On May 7, 1919, the conditions adopted by the victorious powers at the conference were officially announced, including the cession of territory, the loss of all colonies , upper limits and controls for the German military, and extensive financial reparations . Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty , on which France in particular had insisted, justified this under international law by establishing the sole responsibility of Germany and its allies for the damage caused during the World War.

A mantle note from the Allies to the German delegation on June 16, 1919 exacerbated the allegations: Germany alone “instigated” the war, which was “the greatest crime against humanity and the freedom of the peoples”, “which a nation claiming to be civilized has ever committed consciously ”. Out of a traditional Prussian striving for hegemony , the imperial government of Austria-Hungary had encouraged to declare war on Serbia, knowing that this would unleash the general war for which only Germany was prepared. To this end, she withdrew from all attempts at negotiation and reconciliation.

This was widely perceived not only as the legal legitimation of the reparations, but also as a moral condemnation and therefore triggered a storm of indignation in the German public. The rejection ranged from the extreme right to the governing parties to the KPD. In order not to have to answer for the contract, the cabinet resigned in June 1919. However, following an Allied threat of intervention , the Reichstag approved the treaty by a majority on June 22, 1919, so that it was signed on June 28 and entered into force on January 10, 1920 - in Austria the following December. Because of the threat, the SPD government members referred to the treaty as a “shameful dictate” and “dictated peace”.

The Versailles Treaty stipulated the personal responsibility of the former German Emperor Wilhelm II in Art. 227 and demanded in Art. 228–230 an Allied court to publicly indict "the most serious violation of international morality and the sanctity of the Treaties" and the indictment of others Persons “for an act contrary to the laws and customs of war” in national military courts. There was no charge against Wilhelm II, but the Leipzig trials before the Imperial Court.

Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry

In August 1919, the constituent national assembly convened a "committee of inquiry into questions of guilt" . He was supposed to examine "to what extent Germans who were influential because of their position in public life are suspected of having culpably contributed to the outbreak, prolongation and loss of the world war". His stated goals were: a .:

• "Investigation of the events that led to the outbreak of war in July 1914 as a result of the assassination attempt in Sarajevo."
• "Clarification of all possibilities to get to peace talks and clarification of the reasons that have caused such possibilities or pertinent plans and resolutions on the German side to fail or if talks have taken place; the reasons why such meetings were unsuccessful. "
• "Education about military measures that were prohibited by international law [...]. Education about the economic war measures at the front, in the occupied territory, which were contrary to international law [...]. "

According to Reich Minister of the Interior Hugo Preuss , this test was intended to protect Germany from “men who are complicit in its difficult fate regain office and dignity or otherwise gain public influence”.

The debates in the committee were conducted openly and represented all opinions of the time on war guilt. However, they missed the original target because the majority of the committee, in accordance with the demands of the Foreign Office, left the secret documents on Germany's annexation plans known since April 1919 unpublished in order not to weaken the Reich government's negotiating position with the Allies. In 1932 the committee wanted to publish five volumes with documents, witness interviews and expert opinions on German World War II goals, but the war guilt department prevented this with its veto.

"Central Office" and "Working Committee"

After the Versailles Treaty came into force, the Federal Foreign Office continued state control of the war guilt debate. These funded and conducted the "war guilt Unit" after the London Conference (1921) , the Center for the study of the causes of war . It should underpin the “innocence campaign” for foreign countries “scientifically”. In addition, from 1923, her magazine, The War Guilt Question, appeared: Berlin monthly books with monthly articles from sixty to one hundred pages. In addition, the editorship awarded contracts to supposedly independent “war guilt researchers”, including non- historians such as Bernhard Schwertfeger and Hermann Lutz or foreign historians such as Milos Boghitschewitsch . They received fees from the Foreign Office for their regular articles. This regularly bought larger editions for free distribution in the German diplomatic missions and to foreign journalists. The editor was the former general staff officer Alfred von Wegerer , whose book “Der Erste Weltwar” , published in 1934, was considered a standard work during the Nazi era.

A "Working Committee of German Associations" with representatives of many groups regarded as "socially acceptable" was set up for domestic war innocence propaganda.

The universities hardly took part in the state-controlled war guilt debate. The respected historical magazine published only nine articles on the subject from 1918 to 1933. However, some specialist historians wrote their own contributions to the "war guilt question", such as Hans Delbrück, Kurt Jagow , Johannes Haller , Fritz Hartung , Hans Herzfeld , Hermann Oncken, Hans Rothfels , Dietrich Schäfer and Friedrich Thimme .

From 1922 the war guilt department published collected and selected files on the First World War under the titles "German documents on the outbreak of war" and "Great policy of the European cabinets 1871-1914" in 40 volumes. These should underpin the German Reich's wartime innocence and assign the main blame to Serbia and Russia.

From 1929, the central office renamed its magazine in Berlin monthly issues . Its authors now stated more often that no nation was to blame for the world war, and blamed fateful, uncontrollable circumstances for it. Rothfels, Herzfeld and, since 1928, Gerhard Ritter denied that an understanding with Great Britain was possible between 1890 and 1914. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had hoped for too long instead of expanding his own military strength. On the other hand, Hans Delbrück, who had already advocated a mutual agreement during the war, and Friedrich Meinecke believed in opportunities for a German-English rapprochement before the war, which the empire had carelessly gambled away.

Potsdam Reich Archives

Since 1914, the German military itself had a decisive influence on German historiography. The war coverage was incumbent to 1918 the General Staff , after 1918, that of Hans von Seeckt founded Potsdam State Archives . In addition to the Foreign Office, the leadership of the Reichswehr with its largely anti-democratic civil servants determined the representation of war in the Weimar Republic.

The archive was also dedicated to the task of "refuting" the German war guilt of 1914 and German war crimes. To this end, it prepared reports for the Reichstag's committee of inquiry and published 18 volumes on the subject of World War 1914–1918 from 1925 until it was taken over by the Federal Archives in 1956 . By 1933, however, historical-critical methods gradually gained acceptance:

• The scheduled questioning of contemporary witnesses, e.g. B. sentiment reports from subordinate military agencies or war letter collections has been included as a new historical source.
• A partial criticism of the OHL was accepted in official representations: Mostly it was only practiced on Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke and Erich von Falkenhayn in order to exonerate their successors Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
• The primacy of government policy and the traditional orientation towards the “great leaders” contradicted - sometimes unintentionally - the logic of the war innocence legend, which was based on fateful constraints.

However, there was still no analysis of economic, mass psychological and ideological influences on the course of the war. The development of government decisions into an all-out war for entire societies remained unexplored.

Political advances to recognize the German war guilt

While most of the media fought against the Versailles Treaty, some concluded from war and revolutionary experiences that the war guilt had to be dealt with morally, according to the left-liberal magazine Die Weltbühne founded in November 1918 under editor Siegfried Jacobsohn . He considered unsparing enlightenment about the mistakes of the German pre-war policy and the admission of German war guilt as absolutely necessary for a successful democracy and a departure from militarism.

Heinrich Ströbel wrote on May 8, 1919 a few days after the bloody end of the Munich Soviet Republic in the world stage :

“No, in Germany one is still far from realizing anything. Just as one refuses to admit guilt, one also denies the good will of others by hardening the faith. You still only see the greed, the intrigues, the malice of others, and the most invigorating hope is that one day the day will come when these dark forces will serve your own interests. Those in power today have not yet learned anything from the world war, they are still dominated by the old madness, the old mania for power. "

Carl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky shared this attitude . On July 23, 1929, he wrote in a review of Emil Ludwig's book July 14 :

“The peoples did not want war, no people wanted it; the narrow-mindedness, negligence and malevolence of the diplomats led to this 'stupid of all wars'. "

A German peace movement arose in the Weimar Republic and demonstrated annually on the anti-war day on August 1st . In addition to supporters of the left-wing parties, liberal and anti-militarist groups, it also included some former soldiers, officers and generals who had dealt with the question of war guilt and, as a result, as well as through the influence of their wives, had turned into pacifists, including Hans-Georg von Beerfelde and Moritz von Egidy, Major Franz Carl Endres , Lieutenant Captain Hans Paasche and Heinz Kraschutzki , Colonel Kurt von Tepper-Laski , Fritz von Unruh and Generals Berthold Deimling , Max Count Montgelas and Paul Freiherr von Schoenaich .

At the first German pacifist congress in June 1919, the New Fatherland Federation and the Central Agency for International Law made recognition of German war guilt their program against a strong minority led by Ludwig Quidde who rejected the Versailles Treaty. In the USPD, which became politically insignificant after the first parliamentary elections, as well as in the parliamentary committee, Eduard Bernstein advocated this . He achieved the abandonment of the social democratic idea that war was a necessary precondition for a successful social revolution. This favored the reunification of a USPD minority with the SPD in 1924 and the inclusion of some pacifist demands in the SPD's Heidelberg program of 1925.

Minority votes among historians

Only a few Weimar historians expressed doubts about the official research results and contradicted the national consensus on defense: among them Eckart Kehr , Hermann Kantorowicz , Arthur Rosenberg , Richard Grelling and Georg Metzlers . Methodically, Kehr called for a departure from the history of diplomacy in favor of a "primacy of domestic politics". He attributed Germany's isolation in foreign policy to long-term social tensions in the German Empire: Its pre-democratic elites had deliberately relied on the risky naval armament to stabilize the state. Gerhard Ritter therefore called Kehr a “noble Bolsheviks who are very dangerous for our history” and who should rather do his habilitation in Russia.

In an expert report for the parliamentary committee of inquiry in 1923, Kantorowicz worked out that in 1914 the Berlin government was legally responsible for an unconditional resolution to initiate a Balkan war, a conditional resolution to initiate a continental war and the negligent initiation of a world war. However, his completed report remained unpublished at the instigation of the Committee Secretary General Eugen Fischer-Baling and the War Debt Department and was only published by the historian Imanuel Geiss long after the Second World War in 1967 . Kantorowicz also published the book The Spirit of English Politics and the Ghost of the Encirclement of Germany in 1929 , in which he rejected in detail the OHL thesis of the encirclement of the empire and warned of new war plans by the same military elites.

But such voices were exceptional. They were made taboo and their representatives were socially isolated. Works by foreign historians, which presented the guilty shares of the great powers in a differentiated way, were ignored: including Les origines immédiates de la guerre by Pierre Renouvin (Paris 1925) or The Coming of the War 1914 by Bernadotte E. Schmitt (two volumes, London / New York 1930). Schmitt (1886–1969, professor at the University of Chicago from 1924–1946) held on to his main German responsibility in this work.

Historical consensus of defense

Overall, during the Weimar period, neither science nor politics nor the media raised objective and critical questions about the causes of the war and Germany's personal responsibility for the war. The official historical picture continued to follow the attack or encirclement thesis issued by the OHL in 1914. Revising the Versailles requirements became the main goal of German foreign policy in Weimar.

This defensive consensus significantly promoted agitation against foreign countries and the Weimar Constitution as such. Above all the NSDAP , but also the DNVP , questioned the entire post-war order and propagated the "war guilt lie". In line with national conservative and bourgeois right-wing parties, they accused the governing parties of having contributed to the humiliation of Germany by signing the treaty and of denying it the right to self-determination.

They were thus in line with the self-justification of the overthrown Emperor Wilhelm II in his memoirs of 1922, in which he denied any German and personal guilt for the war. Today's emperor biographies like that of John Röhl judge:

“He has not committed any war crimes, has not issued a murder warrant or anything like that. But conspiracy to launch a war of aggression - you have to blame him for that. I think his guilt is very great, much greater than is commonly assumed. And if he had come to court, he would also have been convicted. "

Historians at the time such as Werner Conze (1910–1986) or Theodor Schieder (1908–1984) fought against the waiver of German territorial claims with the war guilt charge. Today's historians like Gerhard Hirschfeld make the Weimar war guilt taboo jointly responsible for fateful consequences:

“According to the will of numerous Weimar democrats, the 'war innocent legend' should act as an emotional bracket for the diverging political and social forces of the young republic. The rejection of the Peace Treaty of Versailles (in particular the responsibility for the world war stipulated in Article 231) once again proved to be the only 'emotionally effective means of integration' ( Hagen Schulze ) that the republic commanded. The fight against the allied 'war guilt lie' prevented the necessary historical break with the past and made a decisive contribution to the political and 'moral continuity' ( Heinrich-August Winkler ) between the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic. "

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1925 in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler claimed that all Germans were in favor of war:

"The struggle of 1914 was not forced upon the masses, true God, but desired by the entire people themselves."

Nevertheless, he saw the initiative for the world war on the side of the Entente, so that the German war guilt consisted in the failure of a preventive war :

“The German government was to blame for the fact that, in order to keep the peace, it always missed the favorable hours of strike, got entangled in the alliance for the maintenance of world peace and thus finally fell victim to a world coalition that was driven by the urge after the maintenance of world peace, countered the resolve to go to war. "

In 1930, as an amendment to the Republic Protection Act, the Reichstag faction of the NSDAP demanded that the assertion that Germany caused the First World War, as well as conscientious objection , demands for disarmament, "despising living and dead war heroes" and "belittling national symbols" as "treason" with death penalty punish. This met with enthusiastic approval from some of the then prominent legal scholars such as Georg Dahm .

After Hitler came to power in 1933, a “Führer word” ended the German war guilt debate following the previously propagated “war guilt lie” and in line with British historians of the appeasement era:

"Neither the emperor, nor the government, nor the people wanted this war."

Alfred von Wegerer quoted Hitler's statement in December 1934 in the Berlin monthly magazine and linked it with the expectation that the "honor of the nation" "severely injured" by the Versailles treaty would finally be "fully restored".

Under these new political guidelines, German historians no longer asked about the guilt of the war, but about the politically necessary consequences in order to effectively prevent a new world war allegedly imposed from outside. In 1934, Julius Hashagen wrote in retrospect about the Berliner Monatshefte : “... under the dominant and meritorious direction of this magazine and its staff”, German war guilt research had made “considerable progress”. Most of the military historians employed at the Reichsarchiv welcomed the suppression of the question of war guilt that began in 1934 in favor of military war history. But the measures of the Nazi regime, which they initially welcomed, were soon directed against some historians associated with the journal themselves.

On January 30, 1937, Hitler revoked the German signature under the "War Guilt Article" 231 of the Versailles Treaty. On January 30, 1939, he justified his war course in the Reichstag with the announcement:

“Today I want to be a prophet again: If international financial Jewry inside and outside Europe were to succeed in plunging the peoples into a world war again, then the result would not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. "

In the early summer of 1940, the Nazi regime passed the swift conquest of Belgium and France as the actual end of the First World War, which was supposed to convert the defeat of 1918 into a late victory. Liberal historians such as Friedrich Meinecke also welcomed these victories as personal satisfaction.

Federal Republic of Germany

post war period

After the Nazi era, nationally conservative historians from the Weimar period again dominated the West German specialist debates and mostly returned to the old line after "a few years of initial confusion and national contrition [...]". In the 5th edition of his book Die Demonie der Macht (Stuttgart 1947) , written in 1940, Gerhard Ritter claimed a "military-political predicament that literally shackled our diplomacy at the moment of the great world crisis in July 1914". Friedrich Meinecke gave a similar judgment in The German Catastrophe (Wiesbaden 1946). Foreign research was again disregarded: especially the comprehensive, source-critical work on the July crisis of 1914 by the Italian historian Luigi Albertini , Le origini della guerra del 1914 (three volumes, published in Milan 1942–1943, translated into English after 1945). He gave all European governments responsibility for the outbreak of war, but saw the German pressure on Austria-Hungary as a decisive factor for its warlike approach against Serbia.

In September 1949, as the first chairman of the newly formed German Historians' Association , Ritter claimed in his opening lecture that the struggle over the war guilt issue in the Weimar Republic had "ultimately led to the global success of the main German theses". In 1950 he affirmed in an essay:

"In the immeasurable international special research, the German thesis that there could be no question of a long deliberate attack by the Central Powers on their neighbors soon became generally accepted."

Ritter did not expect any new information on this and declared the Weimar war guilt debate over. At the same time, he called for a research institute analogous to the Weimar “Central Office”, which should be headed by an “experienced specialist historian” and should sift through and process the files from the Nazi era. This task initially displaced the further specialist discussion on the First World War. The national apologetic pre-war consensus remained almost unquestioned as an alleged state of research.

In 1951, Ludwig Dehio described German politics before 1914 as a constantly increasing "war risk" with a "singular dynamic" aimed at changing the status quo , but remained isolated among his colleagues. In the same year, German and French historians, including Ritter and Pierre Renouvin, jointly declared after a meeting that the historical documents did not allow

“[…] In 1914 ascribing to any government or people the conscious will to a European war […]. In 1914 the German government did not aim to unleash a European war; it was primarily due to the alliance commitment to Austria-Hungary. […] The German government was dominated by the idea that a localization of the conflict with Serbia would be possible as in 1908/1909; nevertheless it was ready to take the risk of a European war if necessary. "

It seemed that historians who belonged to the former warring states had finally settled the dispute over the question of war guilt.

Fisherman controversy

Main article: Fischer controversy

The Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer researched for the first time all accessible archive holdings for the war aims of the Central Powers before and during the war. In October 1959, his essay German War Aims - Revolutionization and Separate Peace in the East 1914–1918 was published . With Hans Herzfeld's answer in the Historisches Zeitschrift , a controversy that lasted until around 1985 began, which changed the national-conservative consensus on the war guilt question that had been in force until then.

Fischer's book Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961, expanded 1965) drew the conclusion from a detailed analysis of longer-term causes of war and their connection with Wilhelmine foreign and colonial policy :

“Since Germany wanted, wished for and covered the Austro-Serbian war and, trusting in German military superiority, deliberately let it come down to a conflict with Russia and France in 1914, the German Reich leadership bears a considerable part of the historical responsibility for the outbreak of a general war. "

At first, right-wing conservative authors like Giselher Wirsing Fischer accused Fischer of falsifying history ( ... also guilty of World War I? In: Christ und Welt , May 8, 1964) and tried, like Erwin Hölzle ( reaching for world power? In: HPB 1962), the OHL thesis to maintain the Russian war guilt. Imanuel Geiss supported Fischer in 1963/64 with a two-volume collection of documents, referring to the destruction of important files from the July crisis in Berlin shortly after the war.

After a speech battle lasting several hours at the 1964 Historians' Day, Fischer's main opponent, Andreas Hillgruber , admitted that the German leadership under Bethmann Hollweg had considerable responsibility for the outbreak of war, but continued to contradict the German Empire's continuous striving for hegemony before and during the war. Gerhard Ritter stuck to his view of a foreign policy "encirclement" of Germany by the Entente powers, which made any German hegemony in 1914 as an adventure illusory.

Fischer's work stimulated research on socio-economic causes of war since around 1970. This included the orientation towards a war economy , the imperial monarchy's inability to reform domestic policy, and domestic political distribution struggles.

France

France's war propaganda, which since 1914 saw the country as threatened by Germany for a long time and finally attacked under a pretext, initially continued unchanged after the end of the war: the official view of history was shaped by works such as the Senate report by Émile Bourgeois and Georges Pages or the text Comment fut déclarée la Guerre de 1914 of the former Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré .

The French government under Georges Clemenceau had insisted in 1919 on the contractual determination of German / Austro-Hungarian sole guilt. The focus was on the economic and socio-political interest in compensation for war damage and permanent weakening of the arch enemy: Le boche payera tout - “The German pays everything!”. The French public saw this not only as a justification for the reparations, but also as a demonstrative statement of political and moral guilt. The socialists also saw only a French part of the guilt ( responsabilité partagée ) for the war and also insisted on Germany's civil liability under Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty.

When Germany was about to join the League of Nations in 1925 , war guilt was discussed again in France. The French “yellow book” and the Senate report were reissued. In contrast, Pierre Renouvin's book on the July crisis Origines immédiates de la guerre (published 1925) showed forgeries in the Yellow Book, but received little attention. Parallel to the German attempts to use documents to prove the innocence of the German Empire at the outbreak of war, the Documents Diplomatiques Français (1871–1914) were published in three series from 1929 to 1959 .

At the Historians' Days of the 1950s, German and French historians jointly advocated a version of Lloyd George's thesis that none of the participating governments intentionally sought war. In 1993 Mark B. Hayne represented with the book The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford 1993) the thesis of an essential French complicity, especially of Poincaré and his colleagues. In order to thwart the Schlieffen plan, they had urged the Russian mobilization as quickly as possible. Stefan Schmidt came to a similar assessment in 2009 in his research in Paris archives.

The Fischer debate stimulated a self-critical view of French politics in France from 1914 onwards. Georges-Henri Soutou criticized the fact that Fischer viewed the German war aims separately from those of the other powers and neglected the related interactions, which should not be ignored. He also relativized the importance of Bethmann Hollweg's “September program” , on which Fischer based his thesis of continuous German hegemony planning. Marc Ferro took the opposite position . He found the main fault, based on Fischer, but also on French and Russian sources, with Germany and a secondary fault with the Entente powers. Germany had the strongest will to wage war.

Great Britain

The British war guilt debate fluctuated until around 1955 between the finding of sole German guilt and an equal war guilt or innocence of all powers involved. The change in the image of history was strongly influenced by the current policy towards Germany.

In the summer of 1914, opinions on war guilt in Great Britain were partly critical of the government and pacifist, partly fatalistic or social Darwinist . After the German invasion of Belgium, Germany - even with Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith - was the sole cause of the war. Leonard T. Hobhouse , who shortly before had accused the government of not having done enough to prevent war, now pleaded for "national unity". In 1914, Oxford historians also blamed Germany alone and stressed that they would not engage in propaganda, although they viewed the Entente color books uncritically. William GS Adams , who saw the war as a “struggle for freedom against militarism”, tried to prove that Germany had deliberately risked a “European conflagration” in order to force England to honor its “moral obligations” to France and Belgium .

Analogous to the German document collections, eleven volumes of the British Documents on the origin of the war 1898–1914 were published in Great Britain from 1926 to 1938 . The desired entry of Germany into the League of Nations then triggered a change. British historians such as Paul Kennedy , Michael Howard or Jonathan Steinberg have now taken into account previously neglected economic, socio-historical and military-historical aspects as well as the role of Austria-Hungary. In Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy , John Gooch denied that "anyone wanted war" at all. William H. Dawson , who shortly before had seen “German militarism” as the sole cause of the war, now identified the alliance system as the culprit. Raymond Beazley wrote in 1933:

"Germany had neither planned nor desired the Great War, and it made independent, belated and poorly organized efforts to avoid it."

Both received payments from the German War Debt Department for their exonerating articles.

Former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George became the most prominent proponent of the general war innocence thesis popular in the British appeasement policy by declaring in his 1934 War Memoirs :

“The nations slipped over the edge into the boiling cauldron of war with no trace of apprehension or concern… The nations backed into the abyss… not one of them wanted war; at least not to this extent. "

Under the influence of National Socialist foreign policy from around 1935, the thesis of primary German sole guilt regained approval.

In the Fischer controversy, British historians mostly agreed with Fischer's main theses, but thereupon also began a differentiated and critical examination of Britain's own responsibility for the First World War. For example, James Joll wrote in the introduction to his translation of Fischer's work:

"Even if Fischer's work confirms the assumption that the German leaders bear the greatest weight of responsibility for the outbreak and prolongation of the First World War, it obliges British historians all the more to look again at the share of the British government."

The British battleship HMS Dreadnought, built in 1906 .

In 1999, the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, in his book The False War , advocated the thesis that the world war could have been avoided with the crisis management of European diplomacy at the time; It was only Britain's entry into the war that had escalated into a pan-European war. The British decision of 1905 to build large battleships, a meeting of British generals, admirals and the government in 1911 and the British lack of willingness to negotiate had incalculably fueled the arms race in naval building . As soon as Germany was no longer seen as the first military and economic competitor, British politicians sought alliances with France and Russia. On the German side, the British fluff aroused first illusions of British neutrality, then fears of encirclement, and thus strengthened German willingness to go to war. Britain's alliance policy had forced Germany to go to war after the Russian general mobilization. He denied an essential role of militarism and imperialism as well as a significant colonial conflict of interests between Germany and Great Britain.

Despite praise for the economic analyzes, however, these theses were mostly rejected. Thomas Kühne described Ferguson as a history revisionist .

Even the military historian John Keegan did not see the First World War in 1999 as caused by the deliberate action of the powers that be, but rather by the fateful automatism of the alliances:

“The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. It was unnecessary because the chain of events that led to its outbreak could have been broken at any time during the five-week crisis that preceded the first armed clash. "

Therefore, like Keith M. Wilson and Michael Brock , he doubts Germany's main guilt for the outbreak of war. These historians point to the willingness of the British public to intervene and rather confrontational policies of the Foreign Office .

According to John Leslie, "the real originators of the war are not only to be found in Berlin, as the Fritz Fischer School has always claimed, but also in Vienna." A group of "falcons" in the Austrian Foreign Ministry unleashed the war. The Scottish military historian Hew Strachan emphasizes the economic competition between Germany and England, Germany's isolation in terms of foreign policy and what, in his view, the alliance policy has had fatal effects:

“Numerical inferiority and geographical location meant that in the event of war Germany could not simply remain on the defensive: It had to act decisively and attack. [...] Maintaining and breaking alliances became an end in itself, more important than maintaining peace. Consequently, in 1914 no state was particularly guilty. "

According to Paul W. Schroeder , the German fears of encirclement in 1914 were based on reality and resulted from a lack of social and political readiness for reform in Germany and Austria-Hungary:

“Consensus historians recognize further that Germany, already in 1914 largely isolated diplomatically and threatened with encirclement by the Triple Entente, faced an imminent future threat, that once Russia had completed its announced plans for military expansion, scheduled for completion by 1917, the German army would be numerically as decisively inferior to those of its opponents as the German navy already was on the sea. [...] Thus in both cases the supposedly counterproductive and dangerous foreign policies of Germany and Austria-Hungary culminating in their gamble in 1914 are linked to a wider problem and at least partly explained by it: the failure or refusal of their regimes to reform and modernize in order to meet their internal political and social problems. "

The Australian historian Christopher Clark also contradicts Fischer's thesis in his 2012 study The Sleepwalkers (2013: Die Schlafwandler ):

“All [major European powers] believed that they were acting under pressure from outside. Everyone believed that the war was being forced upon them by their opponents. However, all made decisions that contributed to escalating the crisis. In this respect, they are all responsible, not just Germany. "

United States

A historians' dispute arose in the United States in 1920 over the causes of the First World War, the role of American participation in the war, and the post-war policy of the United States towards Germany. The trigger was a series of articles by the historian Sidney B. Fay in the prestigious American Historical Review , in which he denied every German aspiration and planning of the war. German diplomats had tried longest to avoid it and were the last of all to mobilize the German army after exhausting all other options. He attributed the United States' entry into the war to deliberately launched propaganda. To this end, he relied on documents published by the US government after 1918. However, this had clearly condemned Germany in the person of Woodrow Wilson , for example in April 1918: "Germany has once again made it clear that the power of arms and that alone should decide about war and peace."

The later Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles A. Beard supported Fay since 1923 and sharply attacked American policy on Germany and its portrayal by American mainstream historians in the years that followed. They not only rejected German and Austrian war guilt, but also declared the conditions of the Versailles Treaty that were justified by them as historically wrong and immoral. Before, during and after the war, British and French propaganda thwarted and concealed German peace efforts, invented and exaggerated German war crimes and thus drawn the United States into the war. The Allies would have continued their anti-German falsification of history even after the end of the war.

All three historians called themselves "revisionists". Their minority votes were mostly rejected by US historians (e.g. the German-American Klaus Epstein in the Journal of Contemporary History , 1967). In Germany, on the other hand, Barnes' publications in particular met with a great deal of approval, for example from the editorial staff of the magazine “War Guilt Question”.

Barnes also wrote the foreword for the work Germany not guilty in 1914 (Boston 1931) by MH Cochran, in which the author opposed the statements by Bernadotte Everly Schmitt.

Soviet Union and GDR

In line with Lenin's theory of imperialism, the state-mandated historical image of the Soviet Union had assigned the war guilt to all “ capitalist states” and hardly allowed independent research into the causes of war. At the same time, attempts have been made since about 1925 to relieve tsarism of the main guilt that the Empire and the Weimar national historians had assigned it. To this end, the Soviet Union published files from tsarist archives.

The Soviet historian Igor Bestuschew contradicted this attempt at national relief and emphasized against Fischer:

Rather, an examination of the facts shows that the policies of all the great powers, including Russia, objectively led to world war. The ruling circles of all great powers without exception bear the responsibility for the war, regardless of the fact that the governments of Germany and Austria that started the war were more active because Germany was better prepared for a war and because the Austria's internal crisis steadily worsened, and regardless of the fact that the decision about the timing of the war was ultimately made by Germany and England. "

Marxist explanatory models for war guilt assign the economy and big banks a major interest in the outbreak of war. In 1976 Reinhold Zilch criticized the "clearly aggressive goals of the Reichsbank President Rudolf Havenstein on the eve of the war", while Willibald Gutsche said in 1991 that in 1914 "[...] next to the coal and steel monopoly [...] there were also influential representatives of the big banks, the electrical and shipping monopolies." tended towards non-peaceful disposition ”.

This is contradicted by individual studies on the specific behavior of the economy before the war. Nonetheless, economic interests and structures are also recognized as a factor of war by historians traditionally researching diplomacy history (e.g. Imanuel Geiss ).

Austria

For Emperor Franz Joseph I , the responsibilities for the military action against Serbia at the end of July 1914 were clear: “The activities of a hateful enemy force me to take up my sword in order to preserve the honor of my monarchy and to protect its position of power.” The Serbian government In the run-up to the Sarajevo assassination attempt, Vienna had issued a warning that was not taken seriously.

"We started the war, not the Germans and even less the Entente," was the assessment of Leopold Andrian , a former diplomat of the Danube Monarchy , shortly after the war. It was "about the existence of the fatherland".

Chancellor Karl Renner , who headed the Austrian negotiating delegation in St. Germain in 1919 , saw it in a similar way: the delegation pledged a war guilty pledge.

The German historian and expert on the July crisis, Annika Mombauer, agrees today with her knowledge of extensive files, although she also sees Germany as responsible: “... the main part of the responsibility for the outbreak of war must still lie in the decisions of Austria-Hungary and Germany be located ".

Research in the German-speaking area since 1990

Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, archives from the former GDR and the Soviet Union have also been evaluated. Initiated by Fischer's theses, researchers increasingly devoted themselves to German politics in the states occupied by the German Empire. Wolfgang J. Mommsen identified concrete plans for the forced evacuation and resettlement of Poles and Jews and in 1981 made the nationalism of important interest groups responsible for government action. Wolfgang Steglich , on the other hand, used foreign archive material to emphasize German-Austrian efforts to achieve a mutual or separate peace since 1915 and the lack of crisis management by Germany's opponents.

Thomas Nipperdey contradicted socio-historical explanations in 1991 with his view that the “war, the German readiness for war and the crisis policy” were not a consequence of the German social system. He modified Lloyd George's thesis of "slipping into" and referred to disastrous military plans and war decisions by the executive, including in parliamentary states.

Since the Fischer controversy has subsided, according to Jürgen Kocka (2003) and Gerhard Hirschfeld (2004), a decisive contribution Germany made to the outbreak of war in 1914 has been largely recognized, but explained in a more differentiated manner than with Fischer also from the pan-European power constellations and crisis situations before 1914. Gerd Krumeich wrote in 2003 that Germany had largely sabotaged efforts to de-escalate diplomacy and was therefore largely responsible.

2013 published with Christopher Clark , Die Schlafwandler - How Europe moved into the First World War , and Herfried Münkler , The Great War. Die Welt 1914 to 1918 , two works that deny that Germany, through its actions and omissions, contributed more to the outbreak of the world war in 1914 than the other great powers. Since then, according to some researchers, the debate has been considered open again.

More recent publications mostly stick to the previous view of things, according to which Germany made a major contribution to “that the crisis spread and alternative strategies for a de-escalation did not come to fruition [...] With its policy until July 23, pressure on the Viennese Exercising government in order to take advantage of the given situation and to settle accounts with the Serbs, Germany undoubtedly had a special responsibility. "Gerd Krumeich, John CG Röhl and Annika Mombauer sum up to Christopher Clark that the Central Powers bear the main responsibility at the outbreak of war, if even this was not to be blamed on them alone.

The debate about the longer-term causes of war continues openly. Today it mainly relates to the following subject areas:

• the question of political room for maneuver or inevitability in view of armament and alliance politics before the war. With this question, the earlier classification of the epoch as imperialism is varied and differentiated. Usually the common guilt of all European hegemonic powers is emphasized without weakening the initiating initiative of Germany and Austria.
• the role of domestic policy, social tensions and economic interests in the escalation of foreign policy in all participating states
• the role of mass mentalities and war experiences in interaction with war propaganda. This is the theme of Bruno Thoss's essay: The First World War as an event and experience. Paradigm shift in West German World War II research since the Fischer controversy .
• the role of military leaderships and interests in torpedoing de-escalation and negotiated peace
• the question of a possible German special route into the 20th century
• the question of the continuing factors that may have made the First World War a condition, preparation, and continuation of the Second World War and its crimes and which significantly contributed to the outbreak and course of the Second World War: This is how many speak of the great catastrophe of the 20th century ; Raymond Aron sees both world wars as a new " thirty years war ".

Anne Lipp ( Opinion Control in War. War Experiences of German Soldiers and Their Interpretation 1914–1918. Göttingen 2003) analyzed how soldiers, military leaderships and propaganda reacted to the experiences of mass extermination at the front. Doubts about the defensive character of the war had been attempted by placing it in an aggressive nationalistic context. The "Patriotic Lessons" offered front soldiers hero images to identify them in order to divert their horror, their fears of death and defeat into the opposite of what they had experienced. The “homeland” was presented with the “frontline fighters” as a model to prevent refusal to obey, desertions , open agitation against a war of conquest and solidarity among soldiers and civilians against it. This has created massive mentalities that have paved the way for the post-war success of war-glorifying myths such as the stab in the back legend.

In 2002, the historians Friedrich Kießling and Holger Afflerbach emphasized the opportunities for relaxation between the major European powers that existed up to the assassination attempt in Sarajevo , which were simply not used. Various colleagues contradicted this: In 2003, Volker Berghahn found the structural causes of war that went beyond individual government decisions in the alliance system of the major European powers and their gradual bloc formation. Like Fischer and others, he, too, saw the naval rivalry and competition in the conquest of colonies as essential factors with which all the great powers of Europe, albeit in different degrees, would have contributed to the outbreak of war. He also took into account domestic minority conflicts in multinational Austria. Nonetheless, he named the small leadership circles, especially in Berlin and Vienna, as those primarily responsible for the fact that the July crisis of 1914 led to the war. The decision-makers had shown a high willingness to take risks and at the same time, with mismanagement and miscalculations, exacerbated the crisis until the only solution they saw was "flight forward" to war with the other great powers.

Georges Soutou and David Stevenson ( London School of Economics ) emphasized similarly at a symposium of Western European historians in May 2004 on the special exhibition The World War. Event and memory in the Deutsches Historisches Museum : The conventional European equilibrium policy had simply reached its limits in the summer of 1914 due to the series of foreign policy crises since 1900. In all major European powers, chauvinism and militarism had grown to such an extent that the war was often seen as a downright redemption . Even if the political decision-makers in Berlin and Vienna wanted to keep the peace, the military general staffs would have wanted war. Even then they were not controlled by the civilian politicians, so that their war course became independent. In contrast, Annika Mombauer (Milton Keynes) argued against Ferguson that the military in Great Britain, unlike in the German and Austrian empires in 1914, was very much politically controlled.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius described the differences and parallels between the German population policy in the conquered eastern areas in both world wars and emphasized:

“It would be wrong to characterize the German occupation policy, which aimed at ethnic manipulation, as an anticipation of Hitler's later extermination policy in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, there are historical parallels: practice in the East opened up new possibilities for treating countries and people as objects of politics. ... The failure of Ostpolitik in World War I was blamed on the 'human material' with which one had to work; entire peoples were classified as deeply inferior. "

Historians 2004 also referred to other hitherto neglected aspects that contributed to the outbreak of war and were hardly dealt with as war guilt under international law in the course of the war. Gerd Krumeich and Gundula Bavendamm recalled the hitherto unknown mass phenomenon of an irrational fear of enemy espionage and counter- espionage justified by it (" Spionitis ”) in almost all European countries. John Horne and Alan Kramer showed that during the German invasion of Belgium around 5,000 civilians perceived as enemy fighters were mistakenly killed as alleged franc-tireurs . The Hague Land Warfare Regulations would have prevented neither the consequences of the British naval blockade nor the German submarine war nor the mass deaths of prisoners of war in German and Austrian camps.

See also

• Casus Belli

literature

Publications from the Weimar period

• Heinrich Ströbel : The old madness. In: The world stage . May 8, 1919.
• Max Weber : On the subject of "war guilt". In: Frankfurter Zeitung . January 17, 1919; To investigate the question of guilt. In: Frankfurter Zeitung. March 22, 1919.
• Karl Kautsky : How the World War came about . Paul Cassirer, Berlin 1919. New edition Elektrischer Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-943889-33-8 .
• Raymond Poincaré : The responsibility in world wars. The war guilt debate in the French Chamber. From the official gazette of the French Republic of June 6, 7 and 10, 1922. O. O. o. V. 1922.
• Max Graf Montgelas : Guide to the War Guilt Question . W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin / Leipzig 1923.
• Lujo Brentano : The authors of the world war , 2nd edition 1922. ( full text ).
• Mathias Morhardt: The real culprits. The evidence, the crime of common law, the diplomatic crime . Leipzig 1925.
• Walter Fabian : The question of war guilt. Fundamental and factual about their solution. 1st edition. 1926 (reprint: 1985, afterword by Fritz Fischer, ISBN 3-924444-08-0 ).
• Heinrich Kanner : The key to the war guilt question . Munich 1926.
• Raymond Poincaré: The fault of the war. Fourteen answers to fourteen questions on the war guilt question, asked by René Gerin . Kindt & Bucher, 1930.
• Hajo Holborn : War guilt and reparations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 . B. G. Teubner, Leipzig / Berlin 1932.
• Hans Draeger: Accusation and Refutation. Paperback on the question of war guilt. Ed .: Working Committee of German Associations . 1934.

Representations of the Weimar debate

• Fritz Dickmann : The question of war guilt at the peace conference in Paris in 1919 (= contributions to European history 3). Munich 1964.
• Sidney B. Fay: The Origins of the World War . 2 volumes, New York 1929.
• Hermann Kantorowicz: Expert opinion on the war guilt issue 1914. From d. Estate ed. u. a. by Imanuel Geiss. With e. Escort by Gustav W. Heinemann . Europäische Verlagsanst., Frankfurt am Main 1967, DNB  457135808 .
• Michael Dreyer, Oliver Lembcke : The German discussion about the war guilt question 1918/19 . Duncker & Humblot, 1993, ISBN 3-428-07904-3 .
• Eric JC Hahn: The German Foreign Ministry and the Question of War Guilt in 1918-1919. In: Carole Fink, Isabell V. Hull, MacGregor Knox (eds.): German Nationalism and the European Response 1890–1945 . Norman, London 1985, pp. 43-70.
• Ulrich Heinemann: The suppressed defeat. Political public sphere and question of war guilt in the Weimar Republic (=  critical studies on historical science . Volume 59). Göttingen 1983, ISBN 3-525-35718-4 .
• Heinz Niemann: The debates about the causes of war and war guilt in the German social democracy between 1914 and 1924. In: Yearbook for research on the history of the workers' movement , issue I / 2015.

After 1945

• Fritz Fischer : Reach for world power. The War Target Policy of Imperial Germany 1914/1918 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1961. (New edition 2000, ISBN 3-7700-0902-9 ).
• Gerhard Ritter : statecraft and war craft. Volume 3: The tragedy of statecraft . Munich 1964.
• Paul M. Kennedy : The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860-1914 . Allen & Unwin, London 1980, ISBN 1-57392-301-X .
• Wolfgang Jäger : Historical research and political culture in Germany. The 1914–1980 debate about the outbreak of the First World War . Göttingen 1984.
• Jean-Pierre Cartier: The First World War . Piper, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-492-02788-1 .
• Imanuel Geiss: The long way to catastrophe. The prehistory of the First World War 1815–1914 . Piper, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-492-10943-8 .
• Robert K. Massie : The Bowls of Wrath. Great Britain, Germany and the approach of the First World War . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-10-048907-1 .
• Wolfgang Michalka: The First World War - Effect, Perception, Analysis. Piper 1994. Here licensed to Seehamer Verlag, Weyarn 1997, ISBN 3-932131-37-1 .
• Volker Ullrich : The nervous great power. Rise and fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-10-086001-2 .
• Niall Ferguson : The Wrong War . DVA, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-05175-5 .
• Wolfgang J. Mommsen : The Great Disaster in Germany. The First World War 1914–1918 (= Handbook of German History. 17). Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-608-60017-5 .
• Sönke Neitzel : outbreak of war. Germany's path to catastrophe 1900–1914 (= German history in the 20th century). Pendo, Munich a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-86612-043-5 .
• Stig Förster (ed.): On the threshold to total war. The military debate about the war of the future 1919–1939 (= war in history. 13). Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-74482-8 .
• Markus Pöhlmann : War history and history politics: The First World War. The official military historiography 1914–1956 (= war in history. 12). Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2002, ISBN 3-506-74481-X .
• Volker Berghahn : The First World War . (Knowledge in the Beck series). CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-48012-8 .
• Jörg Richter: War Guilt and National Pride. Politics between myth and reality . Katzmann, 2003.
• Anne Lipp: Control of opinion in war. War experiences of German soldiers and their interpretation 1914–1918 (=  critical studies on historical science . Volume 159). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-525-35140-2 .
• James Joll, Gordon Martel: The Origins of the First World War . Longman, 2006, ISBN 0-582-42379-1 .
• Christoph Gnau: The German elites and the Second World War . PapyRossa-Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-89438-368-8 (represents long-term war aims of German economic and military elites for both world wars).
• Dieter Hoffmann : The jump into the dark. Or how World War I was unleashed . Militzke, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-86189-827-6 .
• Jürgen Angelow : The way to the original disaster. The disintegration of old Europe 1900–1914 . be-bra Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-89809-402-3 .
• Christopher Clark : The Sleepwalkers: How Europe moved into the First World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2013, ISBN 978-3-421-04359-7 (Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Harper, 2013, ISBN 978-0-7139-9942-6 ).
• Gerd Krumeich : July 1914. A balance. With an appendix: 50 key documents about the outbreak of war . Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77592-4 .
• Annika Mombauer : The July Crisis: Europe's Way to the First World War. Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66108-2 .
• Egbert Jahn : Nobody slipped into it. 100 years of dispute over the war guilt issue. In: Eastern Europe , 11-12.2014, pp. 3–38.
• Gerd Krumeich : The unresolved defeat. The trauma of the First World War and the Weimar Republic. Herder, Freiburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-451-39970-1 .

Web links

Wiktionary: War guilt  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Original documents

• The wording of the Versailles Treaty
• The World War I Document Archive 1914: “Color books” , mostly in English

Contemporary evidence

• Kurt Tucholsky : The War Guilt Question . In: The world stage . October 20, 1931, No. 42, p. 609.

historiography

• Gerhard Hirschfeld : The First World War in German and International Historiography . In: The Parliament - From Politics and Contemporary History No. 29–30 / 2400, 90 years of the First World War. July 8, 2004, Federal Office for Civic Education
• Klaus Große Kracht : The War Guilt Question and Contemporary Historical Research in Germany. Historiographical aftermath of the First World War. In: Contemporary history online . 2004.
• War guilt question: material for history lessons at the municipal Louise-Schroeder-Gymnasium in Munich ( Memento from January 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Klaus Große Kracht: As an introduction: Experience of the front and post-war order - effects and perceptions of the First World War. Volume 3 (Introductions to more recent research on the First World War), Historical Forum of the Humboldt University Berlin, 2004

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 1918–1933: Reparations , German Historical Museum.
2. ↑ Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann: British Historians and the outbreak of the First World War. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The First World War. Effect, perception, analysis . Seehamer Verlag, Weyarn 1997, p. 934 f.
3. ^ Hirschfeld: The First World War in German and International Historiography . 2004.
4. ^ Ronald Smelser : The American World War Research . In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The First World War. Reality, perception, scientific analysis . Piper, Munich 1994, pp. 991-1011.
5. ↑ Berthold Wiegand: The First World War and the peace that followed it . Cornelsen, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-454-59650-5 , p. 31.
6. ↑ For example Helmut Schmidt : After the megalomania - Japan and Germany are both burdened by heavy war guilt. How they tried to come to terms with their own history and with their neighbors . In: Zeit Online . November 16, 2010.
7. ↑ Quoted from Johann Viktor Bredt : The German Reichstag in World War II . 1926, p. 52.
8. ^ Fritz-Konrad Krüger: Hungary and World War I. ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). Simon Publications, Safety Harbor, FL 2000 (PDF; 782 kB).
9. ^ A. Weber: Count Tisza and the declaration of war on Serbia. In: The War Guilt Question. 3rd year, Berlin, November 12, 1925.
10. ↑ Jochen Bölsche: A hammer blow on heart and brain. In: Stephan Burgdorff, Klaus Wiegrefe: The 1st World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05778-8 , p. 54 ff.
11. ↑ Ewald Frie: The German Empire. WBG Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2004, p. 82.
12. ↑ Otto Hintze, Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, Hermann Schumacher: Foreword. In: Germany and the World War. Leipzig / Berlin 1915, III f.
13. ↑ Rainer Traub: The war of the spirits. In: Stephan Burgdorff, Klaus Wiegrefe: The 1st World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05778-8 , p. 50.
14. ^ Peace resolution July 1917 .
15. ↑ On the war guilt debate in the SPD, cf. Heinz Niemann: The debates about the causes of war and war guilt in the German social democracy between 1914 and 1924. In: Yearbook for research on the history of the workers' movement , issue I / 2015.
16. ^ Rosa Luxemburg: The Crisis of Social Democracy . With an introduction by Clara Zetkin, from the Red Flag. 2nd Edition. Berlin 1919.
17. ^ Kurt Eisner: Mobilization as a cause of war . 1916.
18. ^ Lichnowsky's memorandum My Mission to London 1912–1914 (English).
19. ↑ Central Committee of the SED (ed.): History of the German workers' movement . Volume 3, pp. 448 and 468.
20. ^ Karl Holl: Pacifism in Germany . Edition Suhrkamp 1533, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 106.
21. ^ Lothar Wieland (University of Oldenburg): Fritz Küster and the struggle of the German Peace Society in the Weimar Republic . Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenbourg (PDF; 51 kB).
22. ↑ Bern 1910–1920: Chronology of artistic and historical events ( memento of August 24, 2004 in the Internet Archive ), here the year 1917.
23. ^ Heinemann: The suppressed defeat . 1983, p. 25.
24. ^ Bernhard Grau: Bavarian documents on the outbreak of war and the Versailles guilty verdict, 1922. In: Historisches Lexikon Bayerns . March 18, 2011, accessed March 8, 2012 . 
25. ^ Bernhard Grau: War Guilt Question , 1918/1919. In: Historical Lexicon of Bavaria . January 26, 2010, accessed March 8, 2012 . 
26. ↑ Bernstein's struggle for recognition of the German war guilt . Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
27. ↑ Imanuel Geiss : The war guilt question - the end of a national taboo. In: The German Reich and the prehistory of the First World War. Vienna 1978, p. 205.
28. ↑ Cf. Heinz Niemann: The debates about the causes of war and war guilt in the German social democracy between 1914 and 1924. In: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue I / 2015.
29. ^ Development and function of the Reich Chancellery ( Memento from May 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). Federal Archives.
30. ↑ Imanuel Geiss: The war guilt question - The end of a taboo. In: Outbreak of war 1914. (= Journal of Contemporary History. Issue 3). Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1967, p. 105.
31. ↑ Quoted from Frie: Das deutsche Kaiserreich . 2004, p. 83.
32. ↑ 1918–33: "War Guilt Office" . German House of History.
33. ↑ Versailles Treaty, Article 231 .
34. ↑ The Peace Treaty of Versailles together with the final protocol as well as the cover note and German implementation provisions. New revised edition as revised by the London Protocol of August 30, 1924 . Verlag Reimar Hobbing, Berlin 1925, p. 1 f.
35. ^ Peter Krüger: The foreign policy of the republic of Weimar. WBG Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1993, ISBN 3-534-07250-2 , p. 63.
36. ↑ Versailles Treaty, Article 227 .
37. ^ Heinemann: The suppressed defeat . 1983, p. 157.
38. ↑ Geiss: The War Guilt Question - The End of a Taboo . 1978, p. 208; Heinemann: The suppressed defeat . 1983, p. 19 ff.
39. ↑ Geiss: The War Guilt Question - The End of a Taboo . 1978, p. 102 f.
40. ↑ Great Kracht: War Guilt Question and Contemporary Historical Research in Germany. 2004 (p. 9 ff. In the PDF edition).
41. ↑ 1918–33: Central Office for Research into the Causes of War . German House of History.
42. ↑ Volker Ackermann (University of Düsseldorf): Modern History - Literature Report: First World War , collective review, etc. a. about Markus Pöhlmann : War history and history politics: The First World War. The official military historiography 1914–1956. Paderborn 2003. In: H-Soz-u-Kult . May 13, 2004.
43. ^ Kurt Tucholsky: Emil Ludwig: July 14 . From: reviews and reviews. Collected Writings 1907–1935 .
44. ^ Wolfram Wette: From Officer to Pacifist - Farewell to War Culture . Published August 2000 in the Kassel Peace Council.
45. ↑ Bernstein's struggle for recognition of the German war guilt . Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
46. ↑ Lothar Wieland: Social Democracy and Pacifism 1914-1919. A historical assessment. In: Gerard Kraiker / Dirk Grathoff (ed.): Carl von Ossietzky and the political culture of the Weimar Republic: Symposium for the 100th birthday . Bis, Oldenburg 1991, ISBN 3-8142-0365-8 , p. 149 f. ( Online version as PDF; 1.11 MB).
47. ^ Frie: The German Empire . 2004, p. 84.
48. ↑ Klaus Schwabe, Rolf Reichardt: Gerhard Ritter. A political historian in his letters . Boppard am Rhein 1984, p. 236 ff.
49. ↑ Hermann Kantorowicz: Expert opinion on the war guilt issue 1914. Edited from the estate. and a. by Imanuel Geiss. With an escort by Gustav W. Heinemann. Frankfurt am Main 1967.
50. ↑ s. Geiss: The war guilt question - the end of a taboo . 1978, p. 207 ff.
51. ↑ Alexander Bahar: From the “Reach for World Power” in the “War of Illusions” ( Memento from October 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). Global equality portal.
52. ^ Full text Vol I and Vol II ; it received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1931 (1931).
53. ^ Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern: Events and figures from the years 1878-1918 . Verlag K. F. Köhler, Leipzig and Berlin 1922, pp. 261-290.
54. ↑ "His guilt is very great" . John Röhl in conversation with Martin Doerry and Klaus Wiegrefe. In: Stephan Burgdorff, Klaus Wiegrefe (ed.): The 1st World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05778-8 , p. 39.
55. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hirschfeld: The First World War in German and international historiography . 2004.
56. ↑ Quoted from German history in documents and images (DGDB): Documents - Germany in War, 1914–1918: Mobilization of the Home Front .
57. ↑ Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf . 1925/27, Volume I, Chapter V, p. 176.
58. ^ Ingo Müller: Terrible lawyers . Knaur 1989, ISBN 3-426-03960-5 , p. 76.
59. ↑ Quoted from Große Kracht: War guilt question and contemporary historical research in Germany. 2004.
60. ↑ Alfred von Wegerer: Versailles and the honor of the nation . In: Berlin monthly books. 1934/12, p. 1.
61. ^ Volker Ackermann: Markus Pöhlmann: War history and historical politics: The First World War. The official military historiography 1914–1956. Paderborn 2002 (review). In: H-Soz-u-Kult, May 13, 2004.
62. ↑ Great Kracht: War Guilt Question and Contemporary Historical Research in Germany. 2004 (p. 11 in the PDF edition).
63. ↑ Quoted from: 6. The Holocaust . Brandenburg State Center for Political Education (PDF; 837 kB).
64. ↑ Geiss: The War Guilt Question - The End of a Taboo . 1978, p. 107.
65. ^ Ludwig Dehio: Germany and the era of the world wars. In: Historical magazine . Volume 173, 1951, pp. 77-94.
66. ↑ Bruno Gebhardt: Handbook of German History . Volume 4, Stuttgart 1963, p. 25.
67. ^ The First World War in historical research. In: Microsoft Encarta ; Frie: The German Empire . 2004, p. 85.
68. ^ Fritz Fischer: Reach for world power . Düsseldorf 1961, p. 97.
69. ↑ Freimut Köster: Teaching material on the Fischer controversy .
70. ↑ Imanuel Geiss: July crisis and outbreak of war 1914 - A collection of documents . Work in two volumes. With a foreword by Fritz Fischer. Verlag für Literatur u. Current events, Hanover 1963 or 1964. Quoted in Adolf Gasser : Prussian military spirit and the unleashing of war 1914 - studies on the outbreak d. First world war . Helbing and Lichtenhahn, Basel / Frankfurt 1985, ISBN 3-7190-0903-3 , p. 2.
71. ↑ Andreas Hillgruber: Germany's role in the prehistory of the two world wars. 3rd edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, ISBN 3-525-33440-0 , p. 56f.
72. ^ Gerhard Ritter: Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk. The tragedy of statecraft . Volume 3, Munich 1964, p. 15.
73. ↑ Gerd Krumeich: Comparative Aspects of the War Debate Debate after the First World War. In: Michalka (Ed.): The First World War . 1997, p. 913 ff.
74. ^ Frie: The German Empire . 2004, p. 82.
75. ^ Krumeich: Comparative aspects of the war guilt debate after the First World War . 1997, pp. 920-926.
76. ↑ Stefan Schmidt: France's foreign policy in the July crisis 1914. A contribution to the history of the outbreak of the First World War (= Paris historical studies, volume 90). Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, online at perspectivia.net.
77. ↑ Georges-Henri Soutou: The war aims of the German Empire, France, Great Britain and the United States during the First World War: a comparison. In: Michalka: The First World War . 1997, p. 28 f.
78. ↑ Marc Ferro: The Great War , 1988 (French 1968), chapter The question of guilt
79. ↑ Pogge von Strandmann: British Historians and the outbreak of the First World War . 1997, p. 929.
80. ^ H. Rössler et al .: Specialized dictionary on German history , 1958, keyword war guilt question
81. ↑ Pogge von Strandmann: British Historians and the outbreak of the First World War . 1997, p. 931 ff.
82. ↑ British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914 . British documents, Harold B. Lee Library (English).
83. ↑ Quoted from Catherine A. Cline: British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles. P. 86.
84. ↑ Quoted from Four Steps to War June – Aug 1914 . Website of John D. Clare, Oxford University.
85. ↑ Pogge von Strandmann: British Historians and the outbreak of the First World War . 1997, p. 939 ff.
86. ↑ Ferguson: The Wrong War . 1999, p. 110.
87. ↑ Ferguson: The Wrong War . 1999, p. 89 ff.
88. ↑ Ferguson: The Wrong War. 1999, pp. 49, 74, 80 and 86.
89. ^ Thomas Kühne: Niall Ferguson: The War of the World. History's Age of Hatred. London 2006 (review). In: H-Soz-u-Kult, February 6, 2007.
90. ↑ John Keegan: The First World War. A European tragedy . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 2001, p. 13.
91. ↑ Pogge von Strandmann: British Historians and the outbreak of the First World War . 1997, p. 944 f.
92. ^ John Leslie: Austria-Hungary before the outbreak of war. In: Karl Otmar von Aretin, Ralph Melville: Germany and Europe in modern times. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-515-05053-1 , p. 662.
93. ↑ Hew Strachan: Who was to blame? - How the First World War came about. In: Stephan Burgdorf, Klaus Wiegrefe: The 1st World War - The original catastrophe of the 20th century . Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05778-8 , pp. 244 and 246.
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95. ↑ Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers. As Europe moved into the First World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2013.
96. ↑ Interview with Christopher Clark: The Reach for World Power . In: The time . September 12, 2013, p. 22.
97. ^ Sidney B. Fay: The Origins of the World War . Volume 2, New York 1966, pp. 552 ff. (Article from 1920 in book form).
98. ^ Fischer Weltgeschichte / RAC Parker: Europe 1918 to 1945 , 1967/1985, p. 10.
99. ^ Charles Beard: Heroes and Villains of the World War. In: Current History. No. 24, 1926; Harry Elmer Barnes: The Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt. New York, 1929, p. 641.
100. ^ Deborah Lipstadt: Denying the Holocaust - The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory . Penguin, 1993, Chapter 2: The Antecedents: History, Conspiracy, and Fantasy. P. 31 ff.
101. ^ Igor W. Bestuschew: The Russian foreign policy from February to June 1914. In: Outbreak of war 1914. (= Journal of Contemporary History. Issue 3). Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1967, p. 150 f.
102. ↑ Bestuschew: Russian Foreign Policy from February to June 1914 . 1967, p. 151.
103. ↑ Reinhold Zilch: The Reichsbank and the financial preparation for war from 1907 to 1914 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-05-000243-3 , p. 79.
104. ^ Willibald Gutsche: The foreign policy of the empire in the historiography of the GDR. In: Gregor Schöllgen: Escape to War? The foreign policy of imperial Germany . WBG Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991, ISBN 3-534-80130-X , p. 84.
105. ↑ Imanuel Geiss: Social structure and imperialist dispositions in the Second German Empire. In: The German Reich and the prehistory of the First World War. Pp. 28-52.
106. ^ Michaela Vocelka, Karl Vocelka : Franz Joseph I. Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-68286-5 , p. 273.
107. ↑ Annika Mombauer: The July Crisis - Europe's way into the First World War. 2014, p. 33.
108. ↑ Annika Mombauer: The July Crisis - Europe's way into the First World War. Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66108-2 , p. 39.
109. ↑ H. Rössler et al .: Subject dictionary on German history. 1958, p. 1105.
110. ↑ Annika Mombauer: The July Crisis - Europe's way into the First World War. 2014, p. 117.
111. ↑ Wolfgang J. Mommsen: The First World War. Beginning of the end of the bourgeois age. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-15773-0 , p. 118.
112. ^ Wolfgang J. Mommsen: The authoritarian nation state. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 211.
113. ↑ Bruno Thoss: The First World War as an event and experience . 1997, p. 1021.
114. ↑ Wolfgang J. Mommsen: The Age of Imperialism. In: Fischer Weltgeschichte, Volume 28. 22nd Edition, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-596-60028-6 , pp. 284-287.
115. ↑ Thomas Nipperdey: German History 1866-1918 . Volume 2, Beck, Munich 1992, p. 696 f.
116. ↑ Jürgen Kocka: Distance and insight. World War Research in Transition ( Memento of July 23, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), pp. 8 and 11 (PDF; 1.8 MB).
117. ↑ G. Hirschfeld et al .: Encyclopedia First World War , 2003, keyword war guilt question
118. ↑ Christoph Cornelißen: “Oh! What a Lovely War! ”On the research results and the tendencies of selected new publications about the First World War. In: History in Science and Education 65 (2014), pp. 272–279.
119. ↑ Jörn Leonhard: Pandora's box. History of the First World War. Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66191-4 , p. 94 f.
120. ↑ Gerd Krumeich: July 1914. A balance sheet. With an appendix: 50 key documents about the outbreak of war. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77592-4 , p. 184; John CG Röhl: Wilhelm II. , Beck, Munich 2013, p. 9; Annika Mombauer: The July crisis. Europe's path to World War I , Beck, Munich 2014, p. 117.
121. ↑ In: Michalka (Ed.): The First World War . 1997.
122. ↑ Volker Ackermann: Anne Lipp: Opinion control in the war. War experiences of German soldiers and their interpretation 1914–1918. Göttingen 2003 (review). In: H-Soz-u-Kult, May 13, 2004.
123. ↑ Volker Ackermann: Volker Berghahn: The First World War. Munich 2003 (review). In: H-Soz-u-Kult, May 13, 2004.
124. ^ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: The poisoned victory. In: Stephan Burgdorff, Klaus Wiegrefe: The 1st World War . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-421-05778-8 , p. 216.
125. ↑ John Horne, Alan Kramer: German war horrors 1914. The controversial truth. Hamburger Edition , Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-930908-94-8 .

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 11, 2007 .