The Coming of the Third Reich (The Third Reich Trilogy Book 1)

by Richard J. Evans

So high were the stakes for which everybody was playing in 1914-18, that both right and left were prepared to take measures of an extremism only dreamed of by figures on the margins of politics before the war. Massive recriminations about where the responsibility for Germany’s defeat should lie only deepened political conflict. Sacrifice, privation, death, on a huge scale, left Germans of all political hues bitterly searching for the reason why. The almost unimaginable financial expense of the war created a vast economic burden on the world economy which it was unable to shake off for another thirty years, and it fell most heavily upon Germany. The orgies of national hatred in which all combatant nations had indulged during the war left a terrible legacy of bitterness for the future. Yet as the German armies drifted home, and the Kaiser’s regime prepared reluctantly to hand over to a democratic successor, there still seemed everything to play for.