Young Germans thought war would be an adventure, an escape from the mundane jobs they held
A chance for adventure, for glory, to win medals, was one that couldn’t be missed
The reality, however, was mud of the trenches, the artillery bombardments, gas attacks, and the mass assaults in the face of machine gun fire; approximately two million German soldiers died and many more than that number were badly injured
The British naval blockade made their lives of German civilians miserable too Food supplies were badly affected – the winter of 1916-17 became known as the ‘turnip winter’ because that was almost all there was to eat
Milk supplies were half compared with 1913
Everything was in short supply, coal, electricity, even soap
More than 400,000 civilians died as a result of the war
And in 1918 a deadly flu virus, Spanish Influenza, swept across Europe – in Germany it killed nearly 200,000 civilians and almost as many soldiers
From the summer of 1916, Germany had been under a virtual military dictatorship
Still, there were food riots and major strikes
Post-War Germany
People were starving and the British blockade was still in place
Over 300 000 civilians died in 1918 of either starvation or hypothermia
The War had left 600,000 widows and 2 million children without fathers
Industrial production was two-thirds of what it had been in 1913
National income was one-third of what it had been in 1913
The country was virtually bankrupt
Jobs for the returning soldiers would not be easy to find
The people had been surviving on turnips and bread
On top of everything else, a flu epidemic swept across the country killing thousands