One hundred years ago this month, the most important single event of the 20th century began. This event was so powerful that it shaped the whole history of the world afterward, and its effects continue to this day.
It was also one of the most important events in Jewish history. It significantly contributed to the two most important developments in modern Jewish life: The Holocaust and the creation of Israel. Indeed, without it, these things might not have happened.
This event was World War I. It began with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war upon Serbia on July 28, 1914. It ended Nov. 11, 1918, with some 40 countries involved one way or another, with the Central Powers — primarily Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire — fighting the Entente nations — primarily France, Russia, Great Britain, Italy and eventually the United States.
What makes this war particularly awesome and awful to contemplate is how such an important and world-transforming occurrence was produced by such frequent stupidity.
The war was stupid in how it started. Yes, the big power nations of Europe had rivalries and grievances with each other over colonies, economic development, prestige and other matters; and their leaders prepared plans and armaments for war sometimes out of legitimate concern for self-defense and sometimes out of unjustified paranoia. Even so, very few among the leaders of these nations wanted to go to war, or at least wanted to have a huge, multi-nations war.
Then a Serbian nationalist shot two members of the Austro-Hungarian nobility on June 28, 1914. This crime should have been a minor incident. Yet by a process historians still argue about, it started a seemingly mindless chain reaction leading to declarations of war almost before anybody actually committed an act of war.
This constitutes one of the biggest differences between this war and its successor, World War II. The leaders of Germany and Japan started WWII on purpose, which meant that war had clarity of cause and a meaning that the blundered-into WWI did not.
The war was stupid in how it was fought. U.S. novelist Ernest Hemingway, who served in it as a volunteer ambulance driver, wrote that WWI “was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth.”
The war saw development of numerous modern military technologies — machine guns, airplanes, submarines, tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers. But the military leaders did not know how best to deploy them or couldn’t imagine how to counter them. Nearly ten million military personnel died in the conflict, many in battles and campaigns irrationally planned and ineptly executed — Verdun, the Somme, Gallipoli, Ypres and more. (An estimated seven million civilians also died.)
Finally, the war was stupid in how it ended. Germany by the war’s end was the chief belligerent of the Central Powers, and it was clearly collapsing. Popular demand ousted the Kaiser’s government; a new democratic republic replaced it and sought a negotiated peace.
Yet many German soldiers did not feel they had been truly defeated and blamed a “stab in the back” by civilians for the loss of the war. Leaders of the Entente, especially France, were too bent on vengeance and reparations to regard the new German government as being different from the one at the war’s beginning. Some people even at the time had the insight to foretell that the Treaty of Versailles would lead to a future conflict.
The Entente leaders also drew new borders and created new countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, often in total disregard of the peoples directly affected. One reason much of the Middle East suffers political instability today — see the fighting in Syria and Iraq — is because the nation-states and governments there were not created by the local people; they were imposed upon them by British and French leaders carving up the Ottoman Empire they conquered in World War I.
The results were endless and unforeseen, and produced much death and suffering, not least to Jews. In fact, the terror and bewilderment so many people felt in reaction to the war and its complex effects often made them yearn for simple explanations that involved finding someone to blame and to punish — and that yearning led many, especially in Germany and Eastern Europe, to intensified anti-Semitism. This is one significant reason, I believe, why the Holocaust likely would not have occurred if WWI hadn’t happened.
The Zionist movement likely would not have succeeded in creating Israel either without this war. Leaders of the Muslim Ottoman Empire would have refused to allow a Jewish state in its territory, so defeat of that empire cleared the way.
In addition, much of the Jewish world had ambiguous feelings about the war at first. Many German Jews who had settled elsewhere, including in Wisconsin, were sympathetic to Germany; and many Jews in Entente nations did not want their countries to ally with Czarist Russia, then the most brutally anti-Semitic country in the world. The government of Great Britain issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, promising the development of a Jewish state, as a war measure to attract the sympathy of the Jewish world. That, too, was essential to Israel’s creation.
Perhaps the so-frequent stupidity involved in WWI can be, if not excused, at least understood. Many if not most of the political and military leaders had 19th century minds, but they faced then-unprecedented 20th century situations, forces and developments. No wonder that in hindsight they so often appear clueless.
But have the leaders and peoples of the world today learned anything since? History never repeats itself, but by showing what has happened, it shows the kinds of things that can happen. If we remember World War I, perhaps we can help prevent 21st century governments and peoples from a similar blundering into catastrophe.
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