The Impact Of Ww1 On Germany

It is useful to recap the impact the war had on German society and how that shaped public opinion.

Class tension:

The war had dramatically worsened the poverty and hardship the working class had always had to deal with and persuaded many in the working class to support the communists, exactly as had happened a year earlier with the Russian revolution. As we shall see, there were multiple uprisings from communist groups determined to overthrow the system of government which they felt oppressed the working class.

Unemployment:

Millions of soldiers returned home to find very few jobs. So they were unemployed. This provided extremist groups on the left (communists) but mostly on the right (Nazis) with men of fighting age who were increasingly disillusioned with a system that couldn’t provide them with a job.

Debt:

In order to finance the war, Germany had got into more and more debt. In order to pay back these debts, and also the massive amounts they had to pay in military pensions (to widows) and disability allowances to the wounded, the government continued a policy of borrowing more and more money. This triggered big rises in prices (inflation) meaning that many people in Germany could barely afford to live and this extreme poverty bred discontent with the government who were unable to solve the problem until late 1923.

Broken industries:

Factories had been converted to produce military equipment during the war and were unable to raise the money they needed to buy the equipment to convert their factories back into being able to produce things the public really needed: clothes, food, medicines etc. This shortage of consumer goods worsened the sense of poverty.


The new Weimar Republic was thus born in the middle of a hugely difficult period of social and economic turbulence for Germany.