Consequences of the First World War

According to various tallies, the First World War killed between 8.5 and 11 million soldiers and between 5 and 13 million civilians, and right after it the Spanish flu pandemic swept the world. Four empires fell, the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, and new states rose on their ruins, among them a reborn Poland. The Paris Peace Conference imposed treaties on the defeated, of which the most important, the Treaty of Versailles, is still argued over. The war left behind debts, inflation and millions of invalids, but also votes for women in many countries, the League of Nations and new movements, communist and fascist, that shaped the rest of the century.

The human cost

Nobody knows the exact number of dead, because states counted their losses differently and many soldiers vanished without trace. The US War Department’s 1924 tally gave 8.54 million soldiers killed or dead, the figure most often quoted is 9–10 million, and the highest estimates reach 11 million. Between 65 and 70 million men passed through all the armies. Germany lost the most soldiers, between 1.77 and 2.04 million, followed by Russia, between 1.7 and 2.25 million. Some 21 million were wounded.

The bloodiest were the great battles of attrition, such as Verdun, the Somme or the Brusilov offensive, in which each side lost hundreds of thousands of men. Relative to population, Serbia suffered the most: counting civilians, the war took between 16.1 and 27.8 per cent of its inhabitants. According to the USHMM, France lost sixteen per cent of the men it mobilised, the highest rate relative to the number of troops deployed.

Civilian deaths are even harder to count. Estimates range from 5 to 13 million dead from hunger, disease, military action and massacres. The greatest crime of the war was the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. In Germany the naval blockade killed, by various estimates, between 0.3 and 0.76 million people. The war left some 10 million refugees in Europe, three million widows and six million orphans.

On Polish soil the war set brother against brother, because Poles served in the armies of all three partitioning powers. Between 2.9 and 3.4 million of them were under arms, and between 385 and 530 thousand were killed, died or went missing. The front swept across Congress Poland and Galicia several times. In the summer of 1915, during the great offensive of the Central Powers, the Russians abandoned Congress Poland and forcibly removed huge numbers of people deep into the empire. This bezhenstvo, or refugee exodus, involved by various estimates between 2 and 3.5 million people of all nationalities.

A separate catastrophe was the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919. The war did not cause it, but in the United States it was first detected among military personnel, and in the last months of the fighting it ravaged armies from Palestine to East Africa. According to the American CDC, about 500 million people, a third of the world’s population, were infected, and at least 50 million died. Older estimates, quoted in Polish school materials, put the toll at about 20 million. Pandemic deaths are not usually counted as war losses.

The fall of four empires

The war swept away four dynasties that had ruled Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East for centuries: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. None of them survived the war, though Russia collapsed before it ended and the Ottoman Empire lingered on for several years.

Russia fell first. On 12 March 1917 the Petrograd garrison went over to the strikers (the February Revolution), and on 15 March Nicholas II renounced the throne for himself and his son. The Provisional Government proclaimed a republic, but on 7 November the Bolsheviks seized power (the October Revolution), and their government, the Council of People’s Commissars, was headed by Vladimir Lenin.

In January 1918 the Bolsheviks dispersed Russia’s first freely elected parliament, and on 3 March Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers. It lost Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Estonia, Finland and Ukraine, and according to frequently quoted figures some 56 million people lived in the lands it gave up. In July the Bolsheviks murdered the former tsar and his family. The country sank into a civil war that claimed more than seven million lives.

The German Empire collapsed within days. On 3 November 1918 the sailors’ mutiny in Kiel set off a revolution, and on 9 November it reached Berlin: the chancellor announced the abdication of Wilhelm II, Friedrich Ebert took power and Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic. The next day the Kaiser left for the Netherlands, where on 28 November he signed his renunciation of the crowns of Prussia and the Reich. On 11 November Germany signed the Armistice of Compiègne.

The Habsburg monarchy broke up into its nations. On 16 October 1918 Charles I announced the transformation of Austria into a federal state, but the nations of the monarchy rejected the offer. On 31 October Mihály Károlyi took power in Budapest, and on 3 November Austria-Hungary signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti. On 11 November Charles I renounced any part in affairs of state, though he never formally abdicated. The next day a republic was proclaimed in Vienna, and on 16 November Hungary declared itself a people’s republic.

The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918, and in November the Allied fleet appeared before Constantinople. The triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Djemal, which had ruled the state for years, fled the country. The sultan was deposed in 1922, after the victorious war of the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, and the Republic of Turkey emerged after the peace of Lausanne. Of the Central Powers only the Bulgarian monarchy survived, though Tsar Ferdinand had to hand the throne to his son.

New states and new borders

Several new states appeared on the map of Europe. On 11 November 1918 the Regency Council handed command of the army to Józef Piłsudski, who had returned from Magdeburg the day before, and that day became Independence Day. On 16 November Piłsudski notified the governments of the belligerent and neutral states by telegram of the existence of an independent Poland. Its borders, however, still had to be fought for: from 1 November there was fighting for Lviv, and on 27 December the Greater Poland Uprising broke out.

On 28 October 1918 the National Committee in Prague took power and declared the birth of Czechoslovakia, whose president from 14 November was Tomáš Masaryk. On 29 October the Croatian Sabor cut its ties with Austria-Hungary and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was born. After the assembly in Podgorica deposed the King of Montenegro, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, from 1929 Yugoslavia, was proclaimed in Belgrade on 1 December.

Romania, although in May 1918 it had to sign the Peace of Bucharest with the Central Powers, emerged from the war hugely enlarged. In April 1918 the Sfatul Țării in Chișinău voted for the union of Bessarabia with Romania, on 28 November the General Congress in Czernowitz joined Bukovina to it, and on 1 December the assembly at Alba Iulia proclaimed the union of Transylvania and the Banat with the kingdom. Thus Greater Romania was born, taking in almost all the lands inhabited by Romanians.

On the western fringes of the former Russian Empire, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia declared independence. Finland kept it for good, while the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940.

The Ukrainians proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kyiv and, in Eastern Galicia, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, whose troops fought the Poles for Lviv. In May 1918 the states of Transcaucasia declared independence: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. All three became Soviet republics in 1920 and in 1922 were absorbed into the Soviet Union.

In the Middle East the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire went to Britain and France as League of Nations mandates. France took Syria and Lebanon, Britain Mesopotamia and Palestine, where in the Balfour Declaration it had earlier pledged to support “a national home for the Jewish people”. As late as November 1918 the British and French had declared that they wanted “the complete liberation” of the peoples of Syria and Mesopotamia and governments of their own choosing. Germany’s colonies in Africa and the Pacific also became mandates.

The new borders could not be drawn so as to separate the nations. The new states of Eastern Europe had large minorities: millions of Germans found themselves outside Germany, and more than two million Hungarians outside Hungary. The 1919 treaties contained guarantees of minority rights, but nobody could enforce them.

The Paris peace and the Treaty of Versailles

The peace conference opened in Paris on 18 January 1919. Representatives of nearly thirty states took part, but decisions lay with the “Big Four”: US President Woodrow Wilson, who had sailed to Europe in December 1918, and Prime Ministers David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. The defeated powers were kept out of the talks, and Soviet Russia was not invited either.

The treaty with Germany was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and came into force on 10 January 1920. Germany lost all its colonies and between 10 (according to the US Office of the Historian) and 13 per cent (according to the USHMM) of its European territory. Danzig and the Saar came under League of Nations administration, and the army was limited to 100,000 men. In Article 231 the Germans accepted responsibility for the war and the obligation to pay reparations, which a commission set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks.

Separate treaties were concluded with the other defeated powers: with Austria at Saint-Germain on 10 September 1919, with Bulgaria at Neuilly on 27 November 1919, with Hungary at Trianon on 4 June 1920 and with Turkey at Sèvres on 10 August 1920. The Turks refused to accept the last of these and, after a victorious war, negotiated a new treaty at Lausanne on 24 July 1923, the only defeated power to overturn the terms of its defeat.

Wilson failed to convince his own country. In March 1920 the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and with it membership of the League of Nations. The United States made a separate peace with Germany in 1921 and never joined the League.

Economy and society

The war wrecked the finances of every belligerent. The damage is estimated at about 273 billion dollars. Governments patched their budgets by printing unbacked money, which in some countries led to hyperinflation of up to a million per cent. Britain went from the world’s largest overseas investor to one of its biggest debtors, with interest swallowing about 40 per cent of government spending. The Allies were in debt to the United States, to which economic leadership passed from Europe.

The most notorious case was the Weimar Republic. The burden of war debts and reparations, together with the printing of money to cover spending, caused a hyperinflation that from late 1921 to 1923 wiped out the savings of Germans. The paper mark in the end lost almost all its value, and in January 1923 the French and Belgians occupied the Ruhr over arrears in reparations.

The war changed the position of women. In the absence of men they replaced them in factories, on the land and in offices, supported their families, and some served in the armed forces. In many countries this hastened their winning the vote. In Britain an act of 6 February 1918 gave the vote to women aged 30 and over, and on 14 December 1918 they voted in an election for the first time. In Poland an electoral law giving women the vote was introduced on 28 November 1918 by the Moraczewski government. Women also voted in 1919 in Germany and in 1920 in the USA.

Millions of soldiers came home, and according to AFP between five and six million of them were maimed for life. Demobilisation itself angered the front-line men, and afterwards many of them could not find work in economies being switched from war to peace. Societies did not know how to look after their veterans, who founded their own ex-servicemen’s associations. The front-line men came to be called the “lost generation”, because many of them never got over what they had lived through.

Politics and ideologies

The war was supposed to bring a flowering of democracy, but it strengthened radicals of left and right. In Russia the Bolsheviks built the first communist state and wanted world revolution, which from March 1919 the Communist International set out to support. In Germany the Communist Party of Germany was founded as early as 30 December 1918, and in 1919 communist republics were proclaimed in Hungary (20 March) and in Bavaria (in April). The revolutionary wave ebbed only after the defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw in August 1920.

Fascism, too, grew out of disillusionment with the war. Italians felt they had not received the lands they had counted on and spoke of a “mutilated victory”. The dispute over Fiume, seized in September 1919 by veterans and nationalists led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, inflamed feelings. In 1919 Benito Mussolini, who had been expelled from the Socialist Party in 1914, founded the Fasci di Combattimento, at first dominated by veterans. In 1921 he turned them into the National Fascist Party. From 1922 he ruled Italy, having borrowed from D’Annunzio the title “Duce” and the black shirts.

The most ambitious idea of the new order was the League of Nations, with its seat in Geneva. Its creation had been announced in the last of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the League’s Covenant became the first part of the Treaty of Versailles. It was meant to settle disputes peacefully, guarantee the independence and borders of its members and, if need be, apply sanctions. Without the United States, which never joined, it worked, according to most historians, far less effectively than it might have.

The road to the next war

The Treaty of Versailles was criticised from the start, and from opposite sides. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, a member of the delegation at the conference, called it a “Carthaginian peace” in his 1919 book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, a misguided attempt to destroy Germany, and he considered the reparations impossible to pay. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on the contrary, thought the treaty too lenient on Germany and said: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”

Historians judge the treaty very differently. The French economist Étienne Mantoux argued against Keynes. The historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote in 1994 that the treaty was in fact rather advantageous to Germany, because it kept the country united and spared it occupation. The Briton Correlli Barnett compared it with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and considered it lenient, while Richard J. Evans pointed out that the German right would have accepted no peace that did not make Germany the victor.

What may have mattered more than the text of the treaty was how it was remembered. In Germany the “stab in the back” legend spread: the army had supposedly not lost the war but had been betrayed by the politicians who signed the armistice. For the opponents of the republic, 9 November became a date of “betrayal”, and Adolf Hitler exploited this grievance on his way to power. Yet the German economy was broken by the Great Depression, which the treaty did not cause, though it served as a convenient scapegoat. Historians still argue over how great the treaty’s real influence was, and the question of why the post-war order collapsed in 1939 remains open.