Germany's Aims in the First World War

Germany's Aims in the First World War PDF Author: Fritz Fischer
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393097986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
A scholarly interpretation of Germany's policies and attitudes during the first World War and their profound effect on subsequent world events

Germany's Aims in the First World War

Germany's Aims in the First World War PDF Author: Fritz Fischer
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393097986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
A scholarly interpretation of Germany's policies and attitudes during the first World War and their profound effect on subsequent world events

Germany's Aims in the First World War

Germany's Aims in the First World War PDF Author: Fritz Fischer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780701106935
Category : Alemania
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description


World Power Or Decline

World Power Or Decline PDF Author: Fritz Fischer
Publisher: New York : Norton
ISBN: 9780393094138
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description


The Purpose of the First World War

The Purpose of the First World War PDF Author: Holger Afflerbach
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110435993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Nearly fourteen million people died during the First World War. But why, and for what reason? Already many contemporaries saw the Great War as a "pointless carnage" (Pope Benedict XV, 1917). Was there a point, at least in the eyes of the political and military decision makers? How did they justify the losses, and why did they not try to end the war earlier? In this volume twelve international specialists analyses and compares the hopes and expectations of the political and military leaders of the main belligerent countries and of their respective societies. It shows that the war aims adopted during the First World War were not, for the most part, the cause of the conflict, but a reaction to it, an attempt to give the tragedy a purpose - even if the consequence was to oblige the belligerents to go on fighting until victory. The volume tries to explain why - and for what - the contemporaries thought that they had to fight the Great War.

Germany and the Causes of the First World War

Germany and the Causes of the First World War PDF Author: Mark Hewitson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472578104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
How can we understand what caused World War I? What role did Germany play? This book encourages us to re-think the events that led to global conflict in 1914.Historians in recent years have argued that German leaders acted defensively or pre-emptively in 1914, conscious of the Reich's deteriorating military and diplomatic position. Germany and the Causes of the First World War challenges such interpretations, placing new emphasis on the idea that the Reich Chancellor, the German Foreign Office and the Great General Staff were confident that they could win a continental war. This belief in Germany's superiority derived primarily from an assumption of French decline and Russian weakness throughout the period between the turn of the century and the eve of the First World War. Accordingly, Wilhelmine policy-makers pursued offensive policies - at the risk of war at important junctures during the 1900s and 1910s. The author analyses the stereotyping of enemy states, representations of war in peacetime, and conceptualizations of international relations. He uncovers the complex role of ruling elites, political parties, big business and the press, and contends that the decade before the First World War witnessed some critical changes in German foreign policy. By the time of the July crisis of 1914, for example, the perception of enemies had altered, with Russia - the traditional bugbear of the German centre and left - becoming the principal opponent of the Reich. Under these changed conditions, German leaders could now pursue their strategy of brinkmanship, using war as an instrument of policy, to its logical conclusion.

The Russian Origins of the First World War

The Russian Origins of the First World War PDF Author: Sean McMeekin
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674072332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

The Outbreak of the First World War

The Outbreak of the First World War PDF Author: Jack S. Levy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107042453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This volume brings together leading historians and international relations scholars to debate the causes of the First World War.

Germany's Drive to the West (Drang Nach Westen)

Germany's Drive to the West (Drang Nach Westen) PDF Author: Hans W. Gatzke
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9781421431932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Each of these forces had its own particular reasons for wanting to hold out for far-reaching territorial gains, yet one aim that most of them had in common was ensuring, through a successful peace settlement, the continuation of the existing order, to their own advantage and to the political and economic detriment of the majority of the German people.

Absolute Destruction

Absolute Destruction PDF Author: Isabel V. Hull
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146708X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard."Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904–7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process—a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies.Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.

The Marne, 1914

The Marne, 1914 PDF Author: Holger H. Herwig
Publisher: Random House Incorporated
ISBN: 1400066719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Evaluates the Battle of the Marne as what the author believes to be the most important land battle of the 20th century, in an account that analyzes the strategies of Germany's plan to capture France and how its failure culminated in a catastrophic trench war.