# Transcript

JOHN RÖHL
The world war, the First World War, for me was an attempt by Germany, by imperial Germany, to dominate Europe by force of arms and yes, of course, France and Russia and to some extent Britain had to respond to that but, my God, we’re not talking about an accidental war that in my view could have been stopped again if it had been an accident in two or three weeks’ time. No – the French bled to death in their millions and the British lost also a million young men and their whole wealth in order to stop their subjugation by a militaristic power in the heart of Europe. And you have Germans saying the same thing – you have Albert Ballin, the industrial leader, the head of the HAPAG shipping line, virtually in tears saying to the German leaders themselves, how could you do this, we’ve built up Germany’s prosperity over two hundred years and you throw it away with this absolutely stupid ridiculous attempt to dominate Europe by force of arms when in fact we would have dominated Europe anyway by economic terms and trade terms within 10 or 15 years. You have the foreign secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, spending a whole night in tears confessing that he’d made a terrible mistake by supporting this policy. Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador, who’s the only one in the German leadership who knows what’s going on, who actually tries to try to stop this idiocy, as he sees it. He calls his own leaders gangsters for starting this war. I mean the evidence is just so overwhelming now of German intent to start a war which of course went terribly wrong, they didn’t want the war they actually got, they wanted a war of five weeks, and then victory over France, plus another six or eight weeks in Russia, walkover, and then they’d be back in Berlin for Christmas with victory in their hands. That was the plan – it went wrong.