War Losses (Germany) . Even the German military, in 1. Part of the problem, no doubt was that harried company clerks, armed with pencil stubs and typewriters, were hard- pressed to complete the army’s multitude of standard forms, and their colleagues at each higher headquarters were just as swamped by waves upon waves of reports. However, a greater reason for the confusion was that German soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing in such enormous numbers, and whole units were destroyed so quickly, that no one could hope to tally the losses. John Keegan, for example, notes that during the Ludendorff Offensive, the “Kaiser’s Battle,” which was fought between 2. March – 4 April 1. Germany military suffered 3. Albert Franklin Sarver. Have lost trace of our torpedo boats. In April 1. 91. 8, in Flanders, the German army suffered about 1. For all belligerents in each war, Mazower writes, “in the 1. Franco- Prussian War the death- toll was 1. First World War, it was above 8 million, and more than 4. Europeans – half of them civilians – died in the Second World War.”. John Keegan’s estimates of the wartime dead are. Austria- Hungary. British Empire. Table 1: War Dead, 1. As Keegan notes, this percentage is equally shocking when the numbers of war dead are calculated as a percentage of the relevant male cohort; that is, men born between 1. Of German men from these year groups, approximately 1. Among young French men, the percentage was even higher – 1. Dietrich Orlow counts 1. German dead. Berghahn suggests a much higher figure – 2. Public Broadcasting Service, lists 1,7. German war dead, 4,2. Germany mobilized for the war. Even the German military, in 1918. Verdun was the second bloodiest battle, when the German army lost, killed and wounded some 200,000 troops. The lost diary of WWI hero is found. Woman jailed after having sex with a schoolboy. World War One Diary: Home. Stopped at Pesselont during rain and saw old French woman who had lost her entire family in war. Detailed review of the film Diary of a Lost Girl. The drama begins with a woman's misfortune that grimly foreshadows the fate. Westfront 1918: Vier von der. Vera Brittain's Great War Diary, 1913-1917. This book takes us through the first world war from a woman's. The story of a love nurtured and lost. Helen has brought to life an exquisite young woman who was born to the. Diaries and Letters 1913-1918,” begins with a diary entry. The Lost Lives of the. Buy Diary of a Lost Girl at a low price. Diary of a Lost Girl . Chilling video shows Craiglist killer preparing chains and weapons in dungeon where he tortured a pregnant woman for. Based on these estimates, Germany’s total casualty figure is second only to Russia’s 9,1. Typically, each month, about 2. Boris Urlanis calculates the yearly number of German war dead, by year, as follows. Adjusted total as of 1. Table 2: Cumulative Total German war dead. When these 3. 6,0. A basic source is the Reichswehrministerium’s. Sanit. After the war, the German government argued that approximately 7. German civilians died during the war because of the Allied blockade; another 1. Spanish Influenza. The cases consisted of the following. Number of cases. Cases as a percentage of total cases. Stomach/intestinal disorder. Dermatological disease. Contagious diseases. Orthopedic injuries. Heart/circulatory disorders. Injury to reproductive organs. Eye disease/injury. Ear disease/injury. Neurological disorders. Venereal disease. Table 3: Cases treated by German army doctors during World War I. German losses were worst in 1. September 1. 91. 4 was the bloodiest month of the whole war, when German units suffered losses of about 1. In August and September 1. Sanit. Jewish Germans died at the same rate as non- Jewish Germans (this would become a heated issue in the 1. Jewish Germans died in the war. Death by bayonet was very rare; poison gas, that terrifying new weapon, killed about 3,0. German soldiers. Artillery was by far the greatest killer in the war; about 5. German deaths were caused by artillery and about 4. Verdun was the second bloodiest battle, when the German army lost, killed and wounded some 2. Common soldiers made up most of the army, so it’s not a surprise that they also made up most of the casualties. If one considers percentages, though, a different picture emerges. According to Altrock’s calculations, about 1. Germany’s enemies targeted officers as did the Germans themselves; since German officers, especially junior officers, led from the front, casualties among them were heavy. The worst death rate was among regular officers, the pre- war professional officer corps; about 2. Death is not always simply death. Those peculiarities of death in World War I, so well described by Paul Fussell (1. Western Front’s bizarre moonscape, death become utterly routine, death in shockingly mass numbers – apply not only to Fussell’s British soldiers but also to their Germans counterparts. Soldiers were killed by machine gun fire and especially by artillery; death was anonymous, random, unpredictable, and brutal. Machine guns and artillery do absolutely ghastly things to human bodies. Fussell writes that the grotesque death images typical of German war literature, in the work of Ernst J. At the same time, the German writers’ grotesque death images owe as much to the specific killing machinery of World War I, and the things such machines could do to human beings. They meant, to begin with, a demographic catastrophe for German society. In Germany, as throughout Europe, when men left the factories to go off to war, women replaced them. The shift in workforce was striking. Still, the sudden presence of large numbers of women in the workplace was remarkable. Most of the men returned and wanted their jobs back; battles between men and women over increasingly scarce jobs exacerbated the gender confusion and gender wars of the 1. M. For many young German women in the 1. This, to be sure, produced a kind of autonomy for the women affected, but, for those who had hoped for marriage and family, wartime deaths meant a lifetime alone. In 1. 91. 9, the newly formed Weimar Republic, on the verge of wild inflation, bankruptcy, and political chaos, discovered that it was suddenly responsible for some 2. Simply calculating the cost for war victims’ care was bitterly contentious. How much exactly, in Marks, was a missing leg worth? Was an eye shot out worth more than a shattered hand? Should compensation be based on medical condition alone and ignore social class, so that former bankers and former farmers each received the same pension for the same medical condition, or should compensation take social condition into account and be designed to help keep pensioners in the social class from which they came and thus help stabilize the existing class system? Eventually, the latter became government policy. Eventually the two were merged, much to the outrage of many veterans who thought that being placed in the same category as welfare recipients was demeaning. Did psychiatric illnesses – combat fatigue and what later generations would describe as post- traumatic- stress- disorder – merit compensation? Generally, the answer throughout the 1. Even after the Reichsversorgungsgesetz (National Pension Law) of 1. By 1. 92. 3, for example, the National Pension Court, which was supposed to decide controversies about pensions, had a backlog of 4. Social- Democratic, Communist, and Nationalist groups emerged; sometimes they cooperated with each other; more often, they did not. To be sure, specific casualties had specific military consequences, and those military consequences had dire political outcomes. German losses in the “Kaiser’s Battle” on the Western Front in the spring of 1. German army in the west that fall and Germany’s desperate call for an armistice. Two other consequences of Germany’s wartime losses are just as crucial: Germany’s encounter with mass death and its post- war inability to mourn. While death in large numbers is hardly unprecedented, the industrial scale of 2. Edith Wyschogrod (1. Mass death, the “devastation and dehumanization of World War I,”. Most of the German dead had died outside Germany and were either buried in unmarked mass graves or their graves were, after the war, in the hands of Germany’s former enemies. Innumerable local monuments were erected in honor of the war dead, but creating a national day of mourning with appropriate national rituals and symbols proved impossible in the politically torn Weimar Republic. If deaths by illness and post- war revolutions and civil wars are included, Mazower estimates that some 1. Europeans died during the Great War and Mazower’s figures may be an underestimate. German losses are, of course, a demographic and military phenomenon. To understand German losses, however, one must go beyond military and demographic statistics. One needs to understand the experience of death itself, both for soldiers and the loved ones back home. One needs to understand the medical, social, economic, and political dimensions of those losses. Finally, one needs to understand the symbolic and ultimately metaphysical consequences of those losses, one needs to explore the peculiar “death world” that those losses created, the “death world” which first emerged during the Great War but, alas, did not end there.
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