Outbreak of WWI

As Holger Herwig notes, the end of World War I produced the tensions and environment that would lead to World War II:

By placing the blame for the war on Germany and its allies, and by stipulating that they were to pay for the damages incurred by all combatants, the victorious Allied and Associated Powers crippled the Weimar Republic from birth and provided Adolf Hitler and his fellows with a grand propaganda weapon in their campaign to "revise" the Treaty of Versailles (Herwig 2).

Was Germany responsible as claimed at the end of the war, or was some other force at work in the beginning of the war?

The July 1914 crisis was the immediate reason for the beginning of World War I, and it has been enmeshed in the issue of war guilt, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles with several references to Germany's responsibility for the war. James Joll finds that the reasons for the war may lie in the personalities of those who were part of the crisis and who had to react to it, and he finds that it is understandable that their motives might be muddied and unclear:

When political leaders are faced with the

. . .
war, though perhaps not for precisely the same reasons or through the same series of events. Geiss sees the German people as believing that the only choice for the Reich lay between rising to the position of a full-fledged world power or stagnation: The final logical conclusion was the idea of preventive war against those enemies who tried to block Germany's further rise (Geiss 107). The idea of the preventive war was denied even by the Prussian General Staff, but Geiss believes it was prevalent just the same. Gerhard Ritter, on the other hand, does not accept Fischer's hypothesis, seeing it as a radical position that was not supported by his research. Ritter sees it more likely that German intentions in July 1914 were to maintain its ally, Austria, as a great power, something that was threatened by Russian entry into the Balkans. Ritter points out that the question is whether German actions at that time should be seen as aggressive or defensive. Fischer sees them as aggressive, and Ritter sees them as defensive: The relation of the two allies is so portrayed by Fischer that Austrian policy was fundamentally peacefully oriented, and only through the greatest pressure by Berlin did Austria allow herself to be pushed into w
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Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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