Causes for Germanies entry to WW1

World War One was caused solely by the aggression of one country and its allies. It was made possible by the political, military and economical environments inside the aggressor country. These all contributed to the initiation of the First World War by the then mayor European power, Germany.

To the credit of the Prussians, Germany had the largest (except for Russia), best equipped and best-trained army of Europe. With their innovative use of the heavy machine gun (the Maxim gun) in protected pillboxes the German quickly had an edge in over the other European armies. To use this military might in an effective way the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alfred Von Schlieffen devised an attack plan appropriately named the Schlieffen plan. According to this plan the bulk of the German army had to march through Belgium and Luxembourg attack France out flanking its armies in the process and after a six-week campaign France would be defeated and the whole German Army could then attack Russia. “The Schlieffen Plan rested on two critical assumptions. The first was the preservation of overwhelming German numerical superiority against France. The second was the inability of the R

. . .

View the whole essay, without interruption

Germany had the potential to economically dominate Europe. The only democratically elected organ of the German government was the Lower House of parliament or Reichstag its only power consisted in denying the government funds for “operating the state”. So in the power elite of the German Reich there was the feeling that the only way Germany was to free herself out of her economic encirclement was by military force. “This formidable concentration of economic power, which united heavy industry, big agriculture, and highfinance, in a close partnership with the government, produced a spectacular spurt of economic growth in the quarter century before the First World War”(Pg. Therefore, if the Kaiser of Germany wanted war then war he will get. For any small war with any of her neighbors would have, and did, activate the alliance systems initiating the First World War; Which the Germans, or more specifically the Kaiser and the Prussians, though they were perfectly capable of winning. Keylor Oxford University Press, New York 1996

. Second, the Franco-Russian alliance system, which also included Balkan states, had not only a great effect in the military side of things but also in the economic facet. At the end of the 1800´s and the beginnings of the 1900’s Germany had become the largest producer of industrial manufactured goods in Europe.

An army, however, does not order itself into war this is done by the state, and the German Government’s political structure in the early 1900´s proved especially prone to war. Although the United States did surpass both Britain and Germany in the production of steel and goods these were largely taken up by the United States huge internal market and therefore the United States did not need to export and played no important role in world trade (Pg.

Approximate Word count = 1255
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.