Seven of the Most Common Misconceptions About the First World War

Conflict between Germany and England was inevitable

Conflict between Germany and England was far from inevitable. In fact, Germany and England were natural allies for many years. They had a mutual dislike for the French and the royal families of the two countries were blood related. After all, Queen Victoria was the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Indeed, it was not until Kaiser Wilhelm II began pushing his British allies away with talk of building a naval fleet to rival them, that the British drew closer to the French. Obviously, this was one of the great foreign policy blunders of the 20th century and contributed both to the outbreak of World War I and Germany’s eventual defeat in it.

Reparation payments were the cause of Germany’s post-war economic problems

Many historians no longer debate the fact that the reparation payments that Germany faced as a result of the Versailles Treaty were responsible for its post-war economic problems and eventually ushering Hitler into power. While it is true that the reparation payments did significant damage to the German economy, especially during the Ruhr crisis which virtually shut down the Germany economy. Indeed, there may be a great deal of truth to this belief. At the very least, the Versailles treaty and the reparations had a significant psychological impact on the German people.

Their economic impact, however, is debatable because the Germans took i more money from American loans than they ever paid out in reparation payments during the interwar years. Although paying 16.8 billion gold marks, the Germans received 44.7 billion gold marks in loans from Allied Countries. While these loans may have contributed to Germany’s economic collapse after the stock market crash, at least until that time Germany was taking in more money in loans than it was paying out. Because of this, it is debatable whether the loans had the effect that is normally attributed to them.

Germany was virtually destroyed by the war

Because of the economic collapse that Germany experienced in the 1920s, many have assumed that Germany was virtually destroyed by the First World War. This is not true, however. Actually, France and Belgium suffered much more lasting damage from the war than Germany did. Germany was never occupied by enemy forces, but France and Belgium were provided the battlefields for the war along the Western Front. To this day, vast sections of France are uninhabitable because of the lasting damage done to the French countryside. France had the highest casualty rate of any combatant and Germany came out of the war with a population twice as large as France had. This inequity was responsible for the harshness of the Versailles Treaty and in the promulgation of the “stab in the back” theory that Hitler and the Nazis made so much of in the buildup to World War Two.

Germany was responsible for the war

While Germany was given official culpability for the war with the Versailles Treaty, it is impossible to assign blame for the war to any one country. No single country started the war just as no single country fought in it. The blame for the war rests on all of the combatants. Germany may deserve a larger share of the blame than France or Russia, but all of those countries contributed to the war.