Fresh from his trip through post-war Europe, U.S. Senator Robert La Follette (1855 – 1925) declared:
The Germans have been underfed for seven years. They are suffering for want of food, fuel and clothing. Young children and old people are dying from hunger and disease induced by hunger. Emaciated, despairing, they are waiting the end.
A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations – such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler’s rise a reality.
Another article about the despondency in 1920s Germany can be read here…
In 1920 there were many articles celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan’s arrival on Cape Cod. This one writer decried the lack of enthusiasm that marked the modern age following the end of the Great War – a world that stood in contrast to the Pilgrim spirit. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced during the war. Shell shocked and traumatized, the world seemed different: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The author of this column, Preston Slosson, was one of the observant souls to realize that the legacy of the First World War was disillusionment and cynicism.
Our stock of idealism has temporarily run low and a mood of cynicism has replaced the devoted enthusiasm of 1918…
Click here to read a 1916 article about life on the German home front.
Almost twenty years after the First World War reached it’s bloody conclusion, Americans collectively wondered as they began to think about all the empty chairs assembled around so many family dinner tables, Do the French care at all that we sacrificed so much? Do they still remember that we were there? In response to this question, an American veteran who remained in France, submitted the attached article to The American Legion Monthly and answered those questions with a resounding YES.
Click here to read an article by a grateful Frenchman who was full of praise for the bold and forward-thinking manner in which America entered the First World War.
Almost twenty years after the First World War reached it’s bloody conclusion, Americans collectively wondered as they began to think about all the empty chairs assembled around so many family dinner tables, Do the French care at all that we sacrificed so much? Do they still remember that we were there? In response to this question, an American veteran who remained in France, submitted the attached article to The American Legion Monthly and answered those questions with a resounding YES.
Click here to read an article by a grateful Frenchman who was full of praise for the bold and forward-thinking manner in which America entered the First World War.
In the later years of the First World War, the American journalist Alexander Woollcott (1887 – 1943) served as a writer for the Doughboy newspaper The Stars & Stripes. In this roll he was able to travel far afield all over the American sectors of the front where he saw a great deal of the war: flattened villages, ravaged farmland, factories reduced to ruble. In the attached article from 1920, Woollcott reported that the war-torn provinces of France looked much the same, even two years after the Armistice. He was surprised at the glacial speed with which France was making the urgent repairs, and in this article he presented a sort-of Doughboy’s-eye-view of post-war France.
More on this topic can be read here
Here is a column that appeared in the October 15, 1923 issue of Time that reported on the amount of devastation that was inflicted upon the German-occupied areas of Northern France between 1914 through 1918.
More on this topic can be read here
Author and radio commentator Emil Ludwig (1881 – 1948) recalled the economic catastrophe that devastated post-World War I Germany as a result of their inflated currency:
Inflation in Germany really started on the first day of the war in 1914 when the government voted a credit of five billion marks. This was not a loan…I saw the mark, the German monetary unit corresponding to the British shilling or the American quarter, tumble down and down until you paid as much for a loaf of bread as you would have paid for a limousine before inflation started.
Attached is a sad advertisement that ran on the pages of THE NATION for a number of years following the end of the war. Posted by a German charity, the ad pictures -what we can assume to be- a starving German child from one of the more impoverished regions of Saxony or Thuringia. All told, the photo and the accompanying text clearly illustrate the economic hardships that plagued post-World War I Germany.
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
A short notice compiled from figures collected at the end of 1928 showed that Germany was the all-time global-champion when it came to suicide:
In that year 16,036 persons in Germany committed suicide. This is an average of 44 a day or 39 for each 100,000 persons in the country…
