The Current Opinion foreign correspondent filed this short dispatch about the pandemonium unfolding in post-World War I Germany:
"The great fact to the outside world is that a German parliament has actually precipitated a crisis. It threw out the Scheidemann cabinet. It presided over the birth of a Bauer one. It was the German parliament which dictated to the government regarding its composition, instead of meekly obeying the government, as had been the custom..."
More about leftists in Weimar Germany can be read here. Fresh from his trip through post-war Europe, U.S. Senator Robert La Follette (1855 - 1925) declared:
"The Germans have been underfed for seven years. They are suffering for want of food, fuel and clothing. Young children and old people are dying from hunger and disease induced by hunger. Emaciated, despairing, they are waiting the end."
Click here to read about the American invalids of W.W. I.
Author and radio commentator Emil Ludwig (1881 – 1948) recalled the economic catastrophe that devastated post-World War I Germany as a result of their inflated currency:
"Inflation in Germany really started on the first day of the war in 1914 when the government voted a credit of five billion marks. This was not a loan...I saw the mark, the German monetary unit corresponding to the British shilling or the American quarter, tumble down and down until you paid as much for a loaf of bread as you would have paid for a limousine before inflation started." A short notice compiled from figures collected at the end of 1928 showed that Germany was the all-time global-champion when it came to suicide:
"In that year 16,036 persons in Germany committed suicide. This is an average of 44 a day or 39 for each 100,000 persons in the country..." Here is a column that appeared in the October 15, 1923 issue of Time that reported on the amount of devastation that was inflicted upon the German-occupied areas of Northern France between 1914 through 1918.
More on this topic can be read here
"The International Commission of Jurists of the World Court under the Presidency of Professor John Bassett Moore of Columbia University, New York, drew up at The Hague new 'rules of warfare'... Chief among the rules for aircraft in warfare are provisions against bombing private property not of a military character and against attacking non-combatants." |