It’s more accurate to say that WWII was caused by resentment over the Treaty of Versailles. The actual terms were pretty reasonable. But Germany had deluded itself over its situation and had unrealistic expectations.
I thought there was a great deal of money to be paid to France. So much that a wheel barrow of money bought a loaf of bread. Surely that is an exaggeration, but German money was in a very bad state because of the treaty.
Or an American. If you’re A-H and a mad Yank takes out your heir… what do you do?
So that’s my idea - go back in time and kill the Archduke on June 27.
Germany was required to pay substantial reparations. But the figure was arrived at based on the formula the Germans invented after they won the Franco-Prussian War and required France to pay reparations. And Germany had imposed large reparations on Russia when it surrendered in 1918. So German protests over reparations ring a little hollow.
As for the hyperinflation, it was real. But it was an intentional policy adopted by the German government to try to convince other countries it couldn’t pay reparations. To a certain extent it worked; the amount of reparations was substantially reduced.
Took me a while to figure out that you did not mean Adolf Hitler… 
Me too.
Especially hollow when you consider the scorched earth (including poisoned wells and other acts of sabotage) left behind by German troops as they retreated in France, which someone had to pay to fix (acts which the French and Russians were not guilty of inflicting on other countries).
Didn’t think about the fact that the two have the same initials, but yes, I meant “Austria-Hungary”.
But, seriously - if the archduke had been killed by an American… how would the AH empire respond?
I agree with everything in your post except this last sentence.
Economic ties bound all of the European Great Powers to each other in 1914, and it still didn’t prevent that war from happening. As a matter of fact, many prominent folks (politicians, businessmen), also poo-poo’d the idea of a great war breaking out in Europe because of those ties that existed at that time.
Other’s thought that Europe’s armies had grown so large (and so materially advanced), that a major war would be so obviously devastating (both in manpower and economically), that no sane nation would choose to wage a war for anything less than (national) survival.
But wars are not always fought over resources, or markets. Sometimes its fear of being dominated by “the other”. Sometimes its the misguided hope that a short victorious war (v. some foreign power) will help unite internal (domestic) factions or cultures (this is one of the many reasons for Austria’s determination to pressure Serbia). Sometimes it’s fought to avoid looking weak. Or religion.
In other words, there are many emotional reasons for war to happen.
To prevent WWI you’d have to do a lot more than interfere with the Archduke’s assassination WWI was a systemic problem.
Historian John Keegan wrote,
The whole first chapter of his book, The Second World War, is devoted to a thumbnail analysis of what caused the First, and it’s the best summation I’ve read.
Basically, and I’m certainly doing it injustice, improvements in public health (the result of sewage systems, clean water, medicine, nutrition, food distribution, quarantine, communication, availability of trained physicians) caused a massive population boom in Europe shortly before the war. And unlike the demographics of the past, the rural peasantry was no longer sickly and malnourished – a problem that had bedeviled armies of earlier centuries. Thus, a huge pool of healthy young men was available.
Improvements in record-keeping (largely for taxation) and communications allowed governments to find and enroll these young men into armies that could be larger specifically because they were not “standing” and consuming the state’s resources, but they could still be quickly mobilized.
Improvements in industrial production made it possible to build armaments on a gigantic scale to arm them.
Railroad development promised to rapidly deliver mobilized mass armies to the front, and to feed and supply them there.
The enormous wealth generated by all this productivity could pay for it all, and the optimism that accompanied all these positive changes made it less likely anyone would foresee the coming apocalypse.
By the early 1900s, Europe was able to mobilize armies on a scale completely dwarfing anything anyone had ever tried or seriously thought of before.
The concern that one’s neighbor would mobilize first and catch your dormant army unready began to eat at the minds of military planners and political figures alike.
These were large-scale, society-wide demographic, economic and industrial factors. There would have been a war whether the Archduke lived or died.
We have gone over this before:
The treaty forced Germany to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions, and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion, roughly equivalent to US $442 billion or UK £284 billion in 2016). The treaty stripped Germany of 25,000 square miles (65,000 km2) of territory and 7,000,000 people.
FP war+ *The indemnity was 5 billion francs (£200 million or $1000 million), with German troops occupying France until it was paid.[4] *
Or to make it more clear the Germans were made to pay over 400 times what the French had paid. And give up far more land and people.
I agree with this. The big problem that lay behind WW1 was that an awfully large number of people overreacted and did not correct their course; they started going down paths and assumptions laid down decades beforehand. It’s not like triggers for war had not occurred before - but the leaders of Europe saw to it that these wars did not happen. If anything had changed, it was that societies were more democratic than ever before, and a new generation of leaders less wise and influential. The net result was that nobody could stop the engines of war.
Which is not to say that nobody tried. I cam here to dispel the misconception that so many had and still have about Germany and Austria-Hungary, because neither one of them really wanted a war. Austria decided against any annexation of Serbian land. They felt they had to go to war for national pride, which may have been reckless but under the circumstances was neither evil nor mad. Likewise, Kaiser Wilhelm and his government were honestly trying to prevent a wider conflict and work things out via diplomatic means, with perhaps a token show of force by the Austrians. The war would almost certainly have been avoided if not for a number of strange coincidences, and some last minute insanity from the Russian Czar.
The Germans did not spark the war, and it would not have happened in the end but that far too many millions of people in every corner of Europe wanted war, and that wave overrode all sensibility. The great pity of it is that too many o the battered survivors, before and after the conflict, only learned the lessons of bitterness. It took an entire further massive conflict to get the message through their skulls, and even then peace was achieved largely because the United States and the USSR threatened to stomp on anyone making further trouble in Europe.
I said they used the formula that Germany devised. It should be obvious the Franco-Prussian War and World War I weren’t similar wars. The Franco-Prussian War lasted nine months. Germany lost 28,000 people with another 90,000 wounded and fought the war on foreign soil. World War I lasted over four years. The Allies lost 5,500,000 people with another 12,800,000 wounded and the entire war was fought on their own territory. So Germany paid four hundred times more than France because it did four hundred times as much damage.
As for the land and people Germany lost, they were almost entirely land and people that Germany had captured in previous wars. They had to give Alsace and Lorraine back to France, Schleswig-Holstein back to Denmark, and the Polish Corridor back to Poland - all of these areas were full of non-Germans who were being liberated. The only notable exception was Danzig which was a predominantly German city and which was made into an independent city. The Danziggers wanted to reunite with Germany and they should have been allowed to.
No, this is not what happened. Britain and Russia did not want a war at all - they were both happy with the status quo. France wanted to get Alsace and Lorraine back at some point in the future but had no particular plans to fight a war in 1914. In fact all three countries were ill-prepared for war in 1914. Britain was facing a major uprising in Ireland, France was just coming out of the Dreyfuss turmoil, and Russia had just begun a ten-year plan to modernize its army.
Which is why Germany wanted to start a war. They looked around and saw that 1914 was probably their best opportunity to win a war. Austria wanted to fight a short war against Serbia only and Germany pushed that, knowing they could push it into a general war.
I didn’t say the governments wanted a war, nor did I say so. However, people across Europe were war-mad, and gravely underestimated the price they would pay.
No need to limit it. All the countries involved were ill-prepared.
Which is nonsense, because they didn’t want a war. German and Russian diplomats were trying to work out a resolution, and later the Kaiser pled with the Czar to avoid an open war. In fact, Germany was not well-prepared for the war (if they had been, might actually have won in the first two years) and went into the conflict having literally pulled out a strategy written for a different political scenario from decades beforehand.
Oh Hell, Wilhelm wanted to prove himself “The Supreme Warlord” despite his withered arm. Wilhelm and Nicholas did indeed telegraph each other not to mobilize. Someone’s minister told the ruler, “Sir, we have plans for mobilization, but no plans for demobilization.”
Honestly the blame lies fully on British diplomats who arrogantly thought they could “maintain the balance”. It blew up in their face.
They did want a war. There are minutes to the government meetings where they discussed their plans to cause a general war. It’s very well-documented. Any supposed peace attempts were just political cover. (Wilhelm may have gone back and forth between wanting war and peace but Wilhelm was not all that stable.)
Of course after 1918, nobody in Germany wanted to admit they had intentionally started the war. So they were more than happy to promote the idea that the war had happened accidentally and nobody had been responsible. And they were able to get away with this because all of the documents were classified secret. So the accepted view became that Germany was just as upset by the war as everyone else.
Then after 1945, government archives were seized and made available to historians. To their credit, it’s been German historians who have taken the lead in bringing out the truth.
There are plenty of books on the subject but if you want a quick online view you can read one here.
Little Nemo is spot on.
WW1 as we know it is German ambition plus stupidity.
An understatement.