Raoul Wallenberg: Part II

Read Part I.

Chapter 3: The Road to Nazi Germany

"This is not peace; it is an Armistice for twenty years."¹ - Ferdinand Foch, about the Treaty of Versailles, 1919

So brutal, so vast, and so devastating, many believed that World War I, then known as the Great War, would be the war to end all wars. The conflict stretched from Europe to Russia and the Middle East, and was unlike any battlefield before it, with new technologies that enabled killing on a scale the world had never seen. Machine guns mowed down waves of troops. Poison gas choked soldiers in the trenches. Tanks rumbled across battlefields. And airplanes brought combat to the skies. Over 16 million people died during the four years of war.²

For Germany, while the battles didn’t take place on its soil, the country experienced immense devastation. Thirteen million German soldiers, mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties, were called to serve. About two million died, while 4.2 million returned home injured. Together, the dead and wounded made up nearly ten percent of the country’s population.

Within Germany, the economy had effectively collapsed or stood on the brink of doing so. The British Navy, vastly superior to Germany’s fleet, had established a naval blockade that cut off essential imports, including food, coal, oil, fertilizer, and raw materials vital to industry. Without these supplies, Germany experienced a sharp decline in industrial output. By 1918, coal production had significantly fallen, crippling everything from steelworks to home heating, as coal was Germany’s primary energy source. But even worse, agriculture suffered heavily, both from a shortage of farm laborers and from the inability to import fertilizer.  The result was a food crisis. One woman wrote in early 1917, "we are all growing thinner every day, and the rounded contours of the German nation have become a legend of the past. We are all gaunt and bony now, and have dark shadows round our eyes, and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering what our next meal will be."³ About 763,000 civilians died from hunger and related diseases during the war.

Morale across German society dried up long before the last bullet was fired. While Germany could have continued fighting despite the hardship and losses, the country’s leaders chose to surrender, in part because they had been promised or at least led to believe that the peace terms would be fair. And after four years of suffering, the German people did want the war to end. As one group of women wrote to the German government, "we want to have our husbands and sons back from the war and we don’t want to starve any more."⁴

The promises that had been hoped for, however, would not be kept. France, having endured the worst of the war’s bloodshed on the Allied side, pushed hard for retribution. Its cities lay in ruin from the many battles fought on French soil. French leaders demanded harsh peace terms to punish Germany and ensure it could no longer pose a threat.