Aftermath (WWI)

”OOOPS – Sorry”
(Time Magazine, 1923)

Try as they may, the silver-tongued diplomats who rebuked Germany so mercilessly at Versailles in 1919 never could get an apology out of the Kaiser, or Hindenburg or Ludendorff. They just had to sit tight and wait – because in 1923 Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1869 – 1952), [alas] speaking in an unofficial capacity as a German, apologized for the whole monkey show: Lusitania, Belgium, etc. Everything comes to those who wait.

Praying for the Return of the Hapsburgs
(Time Magazine, 1923)

“Hungary is reported to be on the brink of revolution…[Since the war’s end] The Government has never been popular with the majority of the people; it was only accepted by them as a temporary measure, pending the advent of King Otto – the late King Charles’ young son – to the throne of Hungary.”

1923 Germany
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1923)

Maximilian Harden (1861 – 1927) was a major-league journalist and editor in Germany at the time of the First World War. Between 1914-18 he was all-in for a German victory. After the defeat he believed in the democracy that came with the Weimar Republic – but he hated the economic state that his country was forced to endure – and that is what he addresses in this column.


“An old married couple, or a widow, who in 1914 were assured of an untroubled existence on an income 6,000 marks a year, cannot buy with that amount today a pair of shoes, or any new sheets, and can get nine or ten pounds of butter at the most…If anyone has looked upon all this destitution, which is borne by many in silence and true dignity, if anyone has seen this decay of a whole nation, which is like the crumbling of some venerable cathedral, and if in spite of this he puts it all down as camouflage, then that person has a heart of stone in his breast.”

The Emergence of a New World Power
(The New Republic, 1922)

Having studied the global power structure that came into place following the carnage of the First World War, British philosopher Bertrand Russel (1872 – 1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) was surprised to find that the most dominate nation left standing was not one of the European polities that had fought the war from start to finish – but rather the United States: a nation that had participated in only the last nineteen months of the war.

The World After W.W. I
(The Bookman, 1929)

The book review of Winston Churchill’s 1929 tome, The Aftermath:

All too frequently Mr. Churchill passes lightly over the story he alone can tell and repeats the stories that other men have told….[Yet] no one who wants to understand the world he lives in can afford to miss The Aftermath. Would that all contemporary statesmen were one-tenth as willing as Mr. Churchill to tell what they know.


More about Winston Churchill can be read here.


Read the thoughts of one W.W. I veteran who regrets having gone to war…

‘Deutschland Unter Alles”
(Current Opinion Magazine, 1921)

This is a brief editorial from 1921 that pointed out how amazing and promising pre-war Germany once was and then remarks how far off the mark the nation had fallen since the war ended:


• Her empire dismantled.


• Occupied by alien armies.


• Worthless currency.


• Widespread despair.


Click here to read about Anti-Semitism in W.W. I Germany.


Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.


You might also want to read about the inflated currency of post W.W. I Germany.

How Canada’s Veterans are Fairing
(American Legion Weekly, 1921)

Second only to the part played by Canada on the battlefields of Europe is the magnificent spirit in which the dominion has dealt with the returned soldier and with the fallen soldier and his dependents. From the time the war ended to the present, Canada has led the rest of the world in looking after ex-service men.


When the men of the Dominion returned from Europe they originally got three months’ post-discharge pay at their discharge rank. On second thought this was changed early in 1919 to a war gratuity basis, as follows: For one year’s overseas service or more, four months’ pay and allowances; for three years’ service or more, six months’ pay and allowances. From these amounts deducted any sum paid out under the post-discharge system which had earlier prevailed. The men who had seen service in Canada only were not forgotten and received checks for one month’s pay and allowances for each complete year of service in the army.

Communists in Germany
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion.

The Return of the Coldstream Guards
(The New Red Cross Magazine, 1919)

To-day was a great day in London. The Guards’ Division was inspected by the King at Buckingham Palace and had a triumphant march to welcome them home…East End and West End rubbed shoulders to-day and showed the same respect for each other that not so long ago they had shown in the trenches.


Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.

The Political Crisis in Post-War Germany
(Current Opinion Magazine, 1919)

The Current Opinion foreign correspondent filed this short dispatch about the pandemonium unfolding in post-World War I Germany:

The great fact to the outside world is that a German parliament has actually precipitated a crisis. It threw out the Scheidemann cabinet. It presided over the birth of a Bauer one. It was the German parliament which dictated to the government regarding its composition, instead of meekly obeying the government, as had been the custom…


More about leftists in Weimar Germany can be read here.

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