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Unwilling to tolerate the domination of the 73-year-old Bismarck, William forced him out of office, took charge of military and diplomatic matters and left the rest to underlings. When a band of pro-Serbian nationalists assassinated the Austrian Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, all the great powers found themselves enmeshed in a net of commitments that almost guaranteed disaster. The Austrians declared war on Serbia. The Russians went to the defense of their fellow Slavs and the Germans to that of the Austrians. When the French mobilized, the Germans declared war on them, and when the Germans invaded Belgium, the British honored a commitment to defend Belgian neutrality.
Historians of the day spent a good deal of effort trying to demonstrate German "war guilt," but in retrospect, it all seems more a tragedy of errors. The German strategy somewhat optimistically called for a bold sweep all the way to Paris and then an encirclement of the French defenders. But the French blocked the offensive at the Marne, within 30 miles of Paris. Then came the years-long horrors of trench warfare, with thousands of lives wasted for the capture of a few hundred feet of barbed wire and mud. Plus all the horrors that modern technology could add to the arts of combat: bombers, tanks, machine guns, poison gas. When it was over, four years later, more than 3 million German and Austro-Hungarians were dead, as well as 4.8 million of the Allies, including 126,000 Americans -- not just numbers, but the best of a whole generation.
The German, Austrian and Russian empires disappeared. In Berlin the Socialists proclaimed from the balcony of the imperial palace the birth of what would be known to history as the Weimar Republic. Though still physically united -- minus West Prussia, which was turned over to the newly independent Poland to give it a corridor to the sea -- Germany was still divided against itself. Traditionalists in the army, business, the judiciary and the schools never believed in the republic at all. Right-wing extremists, including a young Austrian demagogue named Adolf Hitler, attempted coups in 1920 and 1923. Others sabotaged the political process by assassinations. A powerful Communist Party periodically staged strikes and street battles. The punitive peace treaty imposed at Versailles forced Germany to pay huge war damages. Out of that came the ruinous inflation of 1923, when the reichsmark plummeted to 4.2 trillion to the dollar, wiping out both the savings and the faith of the middle class.
Substantial U.S. aid helped the Weimar Republic in the late '20s. But it was a fragile recovery, overseen by a badly splintered Reichstag and the octogenarian President Paul von Hindenburg, the losing commander in the war. When the Wall Street crash of 1929 set off a worldwide depression, Germany's new prosperity crumbled. The number of unemployed soared from 1.5 million to almost 2.5 million in just the month of January 1930.
And a new voice was heard in the land, shouting that this was all the fault | of the "system," of foreigners and Jews. "Germany, awake!" cried Adolf Hitler, and a frightened, impoverished and traumatized people began to listen. In private, the neurotic Hitler had a different view: "Brutality is respected. The people need wholesome fear. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive."