The World in Time: Nicholas Best Discusses the End of the Great War

Get one free trial issue of Lapham's Quarterly!

• Fill out this order form.
• If you like the magazine, get the rest of the year for just $49 (4 issues in all).
• If not, simply write cancel on the bill, return it, and owe nothing.

Canadian subscribers add $10; All other international subscribers add $40.

More Audio & Video

• LQ Podcast: Peter Ackroyd Author and translator Peter Ackroyd talks with Aidan Flax-Clark about his new retelling of Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century tale of knightly romances, Le Morte D'Arthur
• LQ Podcast: Sarah Vowell Historian, radio star, and Daily Show contributor Sarah Vowell reads from LQ's Future issue: Mark Twain's hilarious "Earthquake Almanac," William Safire's preparatory presidential space-disaster speech, and Futurist extraordinaire Filippo Marinetti's, attack on pasta.
• The World in Time: Death is Nothing to Us In "The Swerve," historian Stephen Greenblatt writes of the "'the concentrated force of the buried past" in this National Book Award winner for the best nonfiction of 2011.

Comments Post a Comment »

• The end of the great war was amazing! Thank you Egyptian Symbols

  Posted by Mark Lathun on Tue 6 Dec 1910

• Historians usually avoid "What if?", but I cannot help but wonder - after listening to Nicholas Best - what if a Communist revolution had occurred in Germany at the end of WWI? Germany was not, after all, Russia; it was a country of (once) far more prosperous people, better educated people. I don't think that a revolution would have resulted in a Leninist-type regime. Rather, my guess is that a socialist, non-militarist government would have formed. That seems to me a better outcome than the military-industrial farce that the Weimar regime countenanced. Also, the allies could not have imposed a harsh treaty on such a government. Comments?

  Posted by goedelite on Sun 9 Apr 1911

• Holy cow. Did this Best guy do any research at all on the German leadership actions that led up to the end of the war, or did he pull all of this out of his rear end? Ludendorff and the Kaiser together agreed in 1916 to unlimited submarine warfare, which they knew would bring the Americans into the war. As #1 in the Army, Hindenburg was not involved in strategy. They decided this because Germany was hemmed in and was running out of supplies, and they couldn't let England keep getting supplied by the Americans. The longer the war went on, the more impoverished Germany would become and the more certain the outcome would be unfavorable to Germany. So, that was the solution they chose. That decision led them to another mistake: To help Lenin get to St Petersburg (via the famous "sealed train" - that wasn't actually sealed at all) across Germany. The Kerensky government was continuing the war, and Ludendorff and the Kaiser (again together) concluded that Lenin would overthrown the Kerensky government and sue for peace. If that happened, then the German troops in the East - 50 divisions - could be redeployed in the west, shifting the balance before the Americans arrived at the front. In this, the High Command was correct. Lenin DID overthrow the government, and he DID sue for peace, and the Germans WERE able to redeploy those divisions. But when the "Ludendorff Offensive" took place, the Germans took themselves out of a drawn position - the trench warfare - and exposed themselves. Most of those 50 divisions were chewed up (as any would ahve been) and for nothing. The few hundred meters they won were strategically insignificant - but the balance was LOST, and that allowed the British and French to defeat the German offensive, even before the Americans arrived. Having lost their trench positions, the Germans had no defense for the resulting Allied offensive. Only then it was basically what Best talks about, that the path to the German homeland was wide open. When Ludendorf woke up to this, that all his decisions had come to naught, he couldn't stomache being the one who surrendered the German forces to the Allies, so he told the Kaiser he would have to abdicate and hand the government over to the Reichstag and an apparent "democracy." Then Ludendorf high-tailed it out of Germany - and he very soon accused the civilians (Hitler's "November criminals") of "stabbing the German soldiers in the back." Though the story Americans have always heard is that America won the war for the British and French, but the presence of the Americans had no real effect on the war; the Germans had already been beaten by the British and French

  As to the possibility of a Bolshevik Germany, that was not ever a possibility - though it was immensely feared by the right wing. The monarchists were unhappy with a democracy, and subverted it at nearly every turn. Where Communists had seized the government (Saxony and Thuringia and briefly in spots in Bavaria), the right wing quickly enough dispatched them - in deadly fashion. The years 1918-1923 were the "German Revolution," in which was little but chaos between rival factions. After the hyperinflation of 1923 was solved by economist Hjalmar Schacht, things settled down for the Weimar Republic, even though the monarchistic right did everything it could to try to bring about conditions to reinstate the Empire.

  All the stammering by Best in this audio is because he doesn't really know his subject. He is putting far too much of his own thinking into the accounts he discusses. Best asserts that Ludendorff was sacked, but in reality he was given the chance to resign. He was already ready to tender his resignation, so this gave him what he wanted. All in all, Ludendorff's decisions were not ridiculously wrong - it was just that the German offensive did not work, contrary to all his expectations. But the planning of the offensive was his, and that planning was wrong. The loss of the war was all on him and the Kaiser. He, like a coward, dumped that surrender onto the civilians (who had only been given the government three days before and who didn't have any way of contacting their signees at Compiegne to advise them what not to sign), and then labeled them the destroyers of Germany. In doing so, he directly laid the groundwork for the advent of Hitler - whom he helped in the 1923 failed putsch, even to the point of marching with him. At Ludendorff's feet lies the blame for the German loss in WWI and their later destruction in WWII - the entire European Second World War, really. And the deaths of almost all the 50 million dead in WWII.

  Posted by Steve Garcia on Wed 12 Jul 1911