Aftermath of World War I

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Aftermath of World War I reshaped the entire map of the world in ways that are still felt today. On the 11th of November 1918, the guns fell silent. But the peace that followed was not calm. Four empires collapsed. Borders that had stood for generations were redrawn overnight. New nations appeared where old dynasties had ruled for centuries. And in the rubble of that moment, ideologies that would define the rest of the twentieth century took root.

  The questions this documentary will explore are as consequential as any in modern history. How did the victorious Allies treat the defeated powers, and did that treatment sow the seeds of the next catastrophe? How did ordinary people, from French factory workers to Canadian soldiers to Chinese diplomats, experience the transformation of their world? And why did so many of the new democracies born from the wreckage slide so quickly into authoritarianism?

• 2. The Blockade's Long Shadow

  ›

  Seven months after the Armistice of the 11th of November 1918, Germany was still blockaded. The naval cordon that the Allies had maintained throughout the war did not lift until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on the 28th of June 1919. For a country dependent on imports, the consequences were severe. N. P. Howard of the University of Sheffield estimated that a quarter of a million excess deaths occurred in the eight months following the war's end, with 40% of those deaths concentrated in November 1918 alone, bringing the total excess death toll for the 1914-1919 period to 474,085.

  The question of who bore responsibility for this suffering became deeply contested. Historian Sally Marks argued that the Allies offered food and medicine after the Armistice, but that the German government refused to allow its own ships to carry the supplies. Elisabeth Gläser found that by May 1919 Germany had become the chief recipient of American and Allied food shipments, and that France had provided food to Bavaria and the Rhineland during the early months of 1919 while the main relief effort was being organized. Gläser also concluded that the German government delayed the effort by refusing to hand over its merchant fleet.

  As author Robert Leckie wrote in Delivered from Evil, the continuation of the blockade did much to torment the Germans, driving them with what he called "the fury of despair" into dangerous political territory. Whether that fury was earned or manufactured would become one of the defining political disputes of the following decade.

• 3. The Treaty and Its Grievances

  ›

  On the 28th of June 1919, representatives of the Weimar Republic were brought to Versailles and, under threat of continued Allied military advance, signed a treaty of 440 articles. Among those articles was a demand that Germany officially accept responsibility for causing all the loss and damage of the war, and pay reparations fixed at 132 billion gold marks, equivalent to 31.5 billion dollars or 6.6 billion pounds. Only 50 billion of that sum had to be paid outright.

  The military restrictions were sweeping. German troop levels were capped at 100,000 men. The country was forbidden from possessing tanks, warships, warplanes, armored vehicles, or submarines. Germany's capital ships, moored at Scapa Flow, were scuttled by their own crews to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. The German city of Danzig was separated from the rest of Germany, and East Prussia was cut off from the German mainland to reconstitute an independent Poland.

  Hitler would later write in Mein Kampf that "Versailles was not the misfortune, but the shame of a whole people" and called the treaty "an unprecedented plundering of our People." The German government funded the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War specifically to promote the narrative that Germany had been wrongly blamed. Meanwhile, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on hearing the terms, reportedly observed: "This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years." His prediction would prove accurate almost to the year.

  Combined with wartime debt and inflation already high during the fighting, the reparations burden weakened German finances severely. The mark was stabilized briefly around 90 to the dollar in 1921, but hyperinflation struck between late 1921 and 1923. In December 1922 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, and on the 11th of January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, remaining there until 1925.

• 4. Nations Reborn and Nations Remade

  ›

  Poland reappeared on the map after 123 years of absence, carved from the territories of three dismembered empires. Czechoslovakia emerged from Bohemia and parts of the Kingdom of Hungary. Romania unified all Romanian-speaking territories into a single state. Russia became the Soviet Union and shed Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, each of which became independent. The Ottoman Empire was replaced by Turkey, and its Middle Eastern territories became mandates under British or French rule.

  In the South Caucasus, three new states declared independence from the Russian Empire in the late spring of 1918: the First Republic of Armenia, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia. A brief attempt at federation under the Transcaucasian Federative Republic collapsed in May when Georgia sought German protection and Azerbaijan aligned with the Ottoman Empire. Armenia was left to fight alone for five months before defeating Ottoman forces at the Battle of Sardarabad. By 1920 and 1922, all three had been absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

  For the Dominions of the British Empire, the war carried a different kind of transformation. The Battle of Gallipoli became known in Australia and New Zealand as those nations' Baptism of Fire. After the Battle of Vimy Ridge, where Canadian divisions fought together for the first time as a single corps, Canadians described their country as a nation forged from fire. At the war's conclusion, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa signed the Treaty of Versailles as individual nations.

  The Balfour Declaration of 1917, lobbied for by Chaim Weizmann and shaped partly by British fear that American Jews might encourage the United States to support Germany, endorsed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. More than 1,172,000 Jewish soldiers had served in Allied and Central Power forces, including 275,000 in Austria-Hungary and 450,000 in Tsarist Russia. The unstable power dynamics left by the war's end, and the political boundaries drawn by the victors with only cursory consultation of local populations, continue to fuel conflicts in the 21st century.

• 5. Revolution and Authoritarian Drift

  ›

  A communist revolutionary wave swept across several European countries in 1917-1920, most prominently in Germany and Hungary. In Germany, a socialist revolution produced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and led to the brief establishment of communist political systems in mainly urban areas. The resulting Weimar Republic was, almost immediately, a democracy under siege.

  In Austria-Hungary, the collapse of central authority created a patchwork of de facto governments as nationalists, social democrats, and communists all moved to fill the vacuum. The 1919 treaties included guarantees of minority rights but provided no enforcement mechanism. Millions of Germans found themselves as minorities in newly created states. More than two million ethnic Hungarians lived outside Hungary in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The interwar years proved hard for these communities as new governments worked to define national character, often at the expense of minorities.

  Although many of the new states were established as democracies, nearly all of them, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, reverted to authoritarian rule within a few years. Too weak to resist one another and too divided to unify, they were later unable to resist German expansion when it came.

  In Italy, the peace settlement's perceived failures gave rise to a specific and dangerous politics. Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio led veterans and nationalists to seize Fiume in September 1919, calling himself Il Duce and dressing his paramilitary forces in black shirts. Both the title and the uniform were later adopted by Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had himself been expelled from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914 for supporting intervention in the war. He founded Il Popolo d'Italia with funding from the armaments firm Ansaldo and with support from the Allied powers eager to draw Italy into the conflict. His Fasci di Combattimento, formed in 1919, suffered a heavy defeat in the November elections of that year, but support began to grow in 1921 as pro-Fascist army officers began supplying his movement with weapons and vehicles.

• 6. The Social Wound

  ›

  Those who fought became known as the Lost Generation, a phrase that captured not just loss of life but loss of certainty. For the next few years, much of Europe mourned privately and publicly, and memorials were erected in thousands of villages and towns. The British census of 1921 recorded 19,803,022 women and 18,082,220 men in England and Wales, a difference of 1.72 million that newspapers called the Surplus Two Million. In that same census, there were 1,209 single women aged 25 to 29 for every 1,000 men.

  Students at one girls' school were warned that only 10% of them would marry. By 1931, half of the women counted in that surplus were still single, and 35% of them would not marry while still able to have children.

  In France, the experience of the war cracked the gender order. Women who had filled factory and professional roles while men were at the front found little desire to return to prewar domesticity. Post-war debates often split the image of women into three categories: the modern woman, the mother, and the single woman, with the last representing those who would never find a partner in the depleted population of men.

  The collective wound expressed itself in culture. Artists Otto Dix, George Grosz, Ernst Barlach, and Kathe Kollwitz depicted the war's devastation in blunt paintings and sculpture. Erich Maria Remarque wrote grim novels from direct experience. German nationalists, including the Nazis, denounced this body of work as degenerate.

  As early as 1923, Stanley Baldwin recognized a new strategic reality when he stated that "The bomber will always get through," capturing a British public terror of aerial chemical attack that, though somewhat exaggerated, reflected a genuine shift in the nature of warfare. This was also, for the first time in major international conflict, a war in which more men died in battle than from disease.

• 7. Economic Reckoning

  ›

  The war turned Britain from the world's largest overseas investor into one of its biggest debtors. By the conflict's end, interest payments on war debt consumed around 40% of all government spending. Inflation more than doubled between 1914 and its peak in 1920. The value of the pound sterling fell by 61%. British private investments abroad were sold off, raising 550 million pounds, though 250 million in new investment also occurred during the war, making the net financial loss approximately 300 million pounds, less than two years' investment at the pre-war rate.

  War reparations in the form of free German coal depressed British domestic industry, contributing to the 1926 United Kingdom general strike. The military historian Correlli Barnett argued that the war in no objective sense inflicted crippling economic damage on Britain, but that it crippled the British psychologically.

  For Germany, the economic path was more destructive. Hyperinflation reduced the value of fiat Papiermarks relative to the earlier commodity Goldmarks to one trillionth of their former worth. American banks were ultimately the mechanism that kept the system from total collapse. The Dawes Plan was negotiated after France's 1923 occupation of the Ruhr, and then the Young Plan followed in 1929, just before the Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression and pulled Europe in with it.

  Beyond individual nations, the war produced a structural shift in economic power away from Europe toward the United States. Passport controls, introduced as temporary wartime measures, remained in place and hindered economic migration across borders. Military overcapacity was redirected in unexpected ways: nitrocellulose lacquers, for example, were commercialized after manufacturers learned to reduce the velocity of a substance originally developed for gunpowder. In the Champagne region of France and across the former battlefields of Belgium, the iron harvest continues to this day, as farmers still turn up unexploded ordnance in their fields, some of it containing mustard gas.