Judenzählung (1916-1917)

Germany didn’t start the First World War. But Germany is the reason it became a world war. On 28 June 1914, a Serbian nationalist in Bosnia assassinated the heir apparent to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. Suspecting the Serbian government of involvement in the assassination, Austrian officials demanded permission to investigate in Serbia. When rebuffed, they threatened to invade.

Normally Austria would never have actually followed through on this threat, as it would have triggered a defensive alliance between Serbia and the Russian Empire. But Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany stepped in and promised to back up Austria in any such war– the infamous “blank check.” However, Germany’s invasion of Russia would have triggered yet another defensive alliance between Russia and France.

But having seen Russia’s failures in their war against Japan a decade earlier, Wilhelm and many German military leaders believed that they could take France out of the war before Russia could even mobilize a credible defense. Of course, their plan to do so involved circumventing French defenses by invading neutral Belgium, which would have triggered Britain into declaring war.

But due to a historical aversion to fighting wars in Europe, he British Army was really small by European standards (and most of it was in India), so German leadership figured that they wouldn’t be able to mobilize quickly enough to prevent Belgium and France from falling. The war would be over by Christmas. When war broke out in late July, most of Germany became enraptured in the “Spirit of 1914,”

and despite his personal prejudices, the Emperor was no exception. On 4 August, he entered the Reichstag in Berlin and declared a policy known as Burgfrieden, an indefinite truce between all political parties, economic interests, and demographic sectors in service of the common war effort. The message was simple: “today, we’re all Germans.” The German Empire wasn’t an absolute monarchy like Russia, nor was it a fully constitutional monarchy like Britain.