Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History.
So, World War I was a “total war,” meaning
it wasn’t just something that affected soldiers.
All citizens were mobilized to participate
in the struggle—some on the battlefront
and others on the so-called home front.
In fact, the phrase “the home front” was
coined during World War I, as a way of reminding
people that even if they weren’t firing
guns, they were still participating in a war.
[Intro]
The home front is often defined as the site
where battles did not rage but where civilians
produced the goods for those battles.
So factory workers in cities made munitions,
and weapons, and ships, and tanks, and poisonous
gas.
And farmers in rural areas grew food, and
raised animals for meat, and provided other
raw materials.
Also on the home front, government officials
rationed food, and allocated raw materials
to factories, and determined railroad schedules,
and censored newspapers and public speech
as part of the war effort.
Civilians were expected to shift every ounce
of their energy away from everyday concerns--like
about the well-being of their families and
themselves--and into material support for
the battle front.
In the first months of the war, textile and
other factories that produced “luxuries”
were closed and the workers—many of them
women—were fired and were left destitute.
But as the war extended beyond the few weeks
most expected it to last, these closed factories
were converted.
They started making parts for airplanes and
parachutes, for example, or creating the many
new uniforms that were suddenly needed to
replace those of the dead.
And this meant that many of the women who
had been made unemployed by initial factory
closures were rehired to work in munitions
and other jobs that had traditionally been
seen as men’s work .
As the war progressed, governments increased
the number of hours civilians needed to work.
Care for children and the elderly became a
huge problem for the hard-pressed head of
the family—which was often a woman.
To address the women’s struggle to feed
themselves and their families, some local
governments and factory owners set up canteens
to provide food for workers and also day-care
centers for children.
And Civilian work hours were mostly devoted
to fueling the war, not, like, building housing,
or providing medical care, or repairing infrastructure,
and other ordinary things that civilizations
need to grow.
Early on, leaders in all countries called
a political truce on the home front.
Kaiser William announced on August 4, 1914:
“I no longer recognize [political] parties.
I recognize only Germans.”
Which is one of those statements that suspiciously
benefits the person saying it.
Like, Kaiser William was basically saying,
“there’s only one party at this party...my
party.”
But across Europe, people did often leave
behind their internal divisions.
Like, Socialists, for instance, largely put
aside their belief in the international brotherhood
and adopted the “Burgfrieden” or party
truce, also called the “union sacrée”
or sacred union in France and Russia.
Instead of acting on their belief that “the
working man has no country,” socialist men
mostly volunteered for service like men from
other political perspectives.
Feminists, many of whom were pacifists, rolled
up their sleeves and volunteered in hospitals.
Some even served as nurses on the front lines.
One German rabbi reinforced the Kaiser’s
celebration of unity: “In the German fatherland
there are no longer any Christians and Jews,
any believers and disbelievers, there are
only Germans.”
Politicians felt that criticism and normal
complaints from inside communities had to
be put aside, because there was an existential
threat to the community from the outside.
So, to ensure the continuation of unity, they
enacted censorship laws that made certain
types of criticism crimes against the state.
But initially at least, the warm glow of patriotism
and shared sacrifice meant that those laws
were hardly needed.
However, the home front did eventually become
a site of tension around many issues, but
especially gender roles.
Industrialists and government officials had
summoned women out of the home and into factories,
or driving ambulances and trucks, or conducting
streetcars, and serving the war effort in
any way needed.
Many women were elated to have jobs, especially
when their husbands and fathers had left for
war and the family needed funds to survive.
But , some civilians saw the situation as
chaos.
Women were heading households; And by taking
jobs, women in factories were “sending men
to the slaughter,” at least according to
one male worker.
Of course, that’s not how war works.
It doesn’t happen merely because there are
available bodies.
But if there’s one thing we can say about
misogyny: It ain’t rational.
At any rate, instead of calming gender tensions,
war accelerated them.
And that unity and patriotism among civilians
also became complicated because of soaring
inflation across Europe.
Inflation: The Most Underrated Historical
Force.
Furthermore, farmland was turned into trenches
on the western front and into a vast battlefield
stripped of produce and animals on the eastern
front.
So the food allotted to the civilian population
declined, and the British naval blockade of
the Central Powers prevented foodstuffs from
neutral countries reaching workers in cities,
which intensified the shortages.
Anti-Semitism also flourished; So, throughout
history hard times often get blamed on those
considered outsiders, and people standing
in line for ever more expensive food often
wrongly blamed the rising prices on Jewish
people.
Meanwhile, because some countries, notably
Germany, did not tax war profits, some civilians
grew incredibly rich from the war and showed
off that rising wealth.
And the resulting growing class differences
weakened the sense of solidarity that was
supposed to keep all the civilians mobilized
together to sacrifice for the armies at the
front.
I mean, it didn’t seem like the people making
all this untaxed wealthe were sacrificing
much.
I wonder if the workers will ever figure out
that they can seize the means of production
and just take back the excess wealth of the
rich?
What’s that?
Oh, apparently we’re talking about that
next week.
By 1916, east-central and eastern Europe had
become ever more barren battlefields.
In the first year of the war, Russian and
Central Power armies pushed the front back
and forth across hundreds of miles of farmland.
And both pursued a scorched earth policy in
Poland, and parts of Latvia and Lithuania,
and Ukraine.
So, the retreating Russian army in late 1914
and 1915 drove people from their houses, torched
entire villages, burned crops in the fields,
and took all the cattle, so that advancing
Germans would have no resources.
Germans and Austro-Hungarians did the same
to deprive Russians of resources.
And of course in all this, civilians suffered
tremendously. did the center of the world
just open?
Is there a camera in there?
There is!
You may have noticed there are a lot more
images in these episodes of Crash Course European
History than in our early episodes, and the
reason for that is, there were many more images.
Like, today it’s difficult to even process
how common the image has become, and how much
we interact with images in our everyday life.
Like, for instance, you are interacting with
one now...
But the growing proliferation of both still
and moving pictures dramatically shaped people’s
understanding of the world in the early twentieth
century, and also, their understanding of
each other’s suffering.
So remember, when you’re looking at footage
like this, you’re looking at footage that
literally wasn’t available in, for instance,
the Wars of 1848,
OK.
So, amid all of this violence, some six million
people were registered as refugees in Russia,
a number that does not include the many who
were living in forests and deserted areas.
Altogether an estimated two million houses
were burned in the region.
Roads were so clogged with fleeing civilians
that armies had a difficult time advancing
or retreating, a situation that was made more
difficult by the many bodies of those who
did not survive.
Meanwhile other civilians were driven westward,
taking shelter in cities like Vienna, which
was a nightmarish site of disease and starvation.
The Habsburg government was hard-pressed to
offer any help, leaving the task of public
welfare to civilians.
That meant that across multiethnic eastern
Europe, clubs and other organizations took
to tending to refugees of their own ethnicity,
helping to provide food and medical services
and find at least minimal housing.
And all that civilian activism really undermined
the claims and credibility of the imperial
governments of Germany, and Austria-Hungary,
and Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.
Like, if governments don’t provide people
with security, or create stable and just social
orders in which people can live and work and
raise their children in peace and some measure
of prosperity, what’s even the point of
governments?
As one group of ten starving peasant women
wrote to the Ottoman minister of the interior
in 1917: “Either deport us all to another
place or cast us into the sea,” What crops
they grew were often taken by deserters or
the army and their livestock and even pots
and pans were seized by the government.
And so as the war and its miseries dragged
on and on and on, the so-called home front
(which in the case of eastern Europe was often
simultaneously a battlefront) became a site
of uprisings.
And all this expanded beyond Europe as the
war expanded: The Allies inflicted a famine
in Greater Syria (today Lebanon and Syria)
to provoke an uprising.
In Africa, many villages became wastelands.
And so, really, it’s no wonder that the
armistice on November 11, 1918 failed to bring
a true end to the fighting.
In October and November in Germany, citizens
were on the streets demanding the Kaiser’s
ouster; in Vienna, soldiers manned the streets
to keep order among starving civilians who
were demanding change because their lives
literally depended on it.
As the Spanish influenza hit, causing an estimated
100 million deaths worldwide, caregiving and
death added to the tragedies of civilian life
in the early 20th century.
Meanwhile after the armistice, Britain, backed
by the United States, encouraged the Greeks
to invade Turkey, with Britain hoping to gain
Constantinople for itself.
The Turkish countryside went up in flames
as the Greek army and Greek civilians burned
Turkish villages, while Turkish people retaliated
in kind.
Eastern Europe also remained a site of bloodshed
as many soldiers refused to demobilize and
formed paramilitary groups supporting the
rise of new states to replace the defeated
Habsburg Empire.
And many soldiers returned home deeply traumatized,
in ways that often lasted for the rest of
their lives.
So, as Europe remained a militarized powder-keg
of civil war and revolution, in 1919 representatives
from the victorious powers—Britain, France,
Italy, the United States, and their allies--met
in Paris.
Their goal was to determine conditions for
creating a “lasting peace” to end this
“great war.”
Unlike the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s
defeat in which France participated, the meeting
in Paris excluded Germany, Austria-Hungary,
and the Ottomans, as well as Russia, which
was busy having the civil war we’ll be talking
about next week.
All right , Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
The air at the meeting was hardly pacifistic:
2.
“Hang the Kaiser,” had been Prime Minister
David Lloyd George’s recent election slogan.
3.
Some 20 million people had officially been
declared dead in the war,
4.
approximately half soldiers and half civilians.
5.
So, French and British negotiators saw U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points
peace proposal as deeply naive-
6.
-not least because one of the Points involved
colonial rulers and colonies just, like, getting
together and settling their differences.
7.
The Allies also rejected Japan’s drive to
declare an allied opposition to racism.
8.
Instead in six treaties, collectively called
the Peace of Paris
9. and enacted between 1919 and 1923,
10.
the victors dismantled and reduced in size
the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German
Empires.
11.
From the vast, multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire
the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye created
small successor states:
12.
Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
13. and the Balkan states that would eventually
unite to become Yugoslavia.
14.
The Treaty of Trianon drastically shrank the
size of Hungary,
15.
while the Treaty of Neuilly dealt with Bulgaria.
16.
But the centerpiece of the settlement was
the 1919 Treaty of Versailles,
17. which stripped Germany of its colonies,
18.
imposed a massive penalty for warmongering,
19. and forbid it to have an air force or
to build an army bigger than 100,000.
20.
And importantly it also imposed a “war guilt”
clause blaming Germany for the war.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So, heads of state and negotiators also founded
the League of Nations, Point 14 in Woodrow
Wilson’s 14 Points.
Some historians maintain that the League of
Nations should more appropriately be called
the League of Empires.
Indeed, instead of recognizing the promises
made by Britain to give Arab countries their
freedom in exchange for help in the war, Britain
and France expanded their empires by taking
oil-rich regions of the Middle East as “mandates”
because the people were supposedly incapable
of ruling themselves.
And in the end, despite the League of Nations
being an American President’s idea, the
U.S. never actually joined it, which further
weakened its ability to accomplish much on
a global scale.
Many were outraged at the peace settlement,
especially Germans, Hungarians, and Middle
Eastern people, and of course, it would have
further consequences.
When I was a kid, I usually imagined World
War I and World War II as being separated
by generations--my grandparents and many other
people I knew during my childhood had fought
in World War II, while World War I seemed
very distant.
a
But in fact, they were only separated by a
couple decades, and both the nature of World
War I’s violence and the nature of the war’s
peace treaties had a profound impact on the
rest of the 20th century--a reminder that
how you fight a war matters, and how you end
one matters, too.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.
