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Home | Overview | Controversies | Timeline | Combatants | Biographies | Glossary | Learn More
Combatant States - Central powers | Austro - Hungary | Germany | Turkey (Ottoman Empire) | Bulgaria
Combatant States - Allies | Serbia | Russia | France | Belgium | United Kingdom | Australia | Canada | India | New Zealand | Rhodesia | Union of South Africa | United States of America| Italy | Romania | Greece | Montenegro | Portugal | Japan
Entered War : 1 August 1914 (declared war on Russia).
3 August 1914 (declared war on France).
Political system : Federal empire in which Prussia's monarch was also Kaiser (emperor) of Germany. Although elected on the basis of universal male suffrage, Germany's parliament (Reichstag) was primarily a deliberative chamber. The Kaiser controlled foreign policy, the armed forces and all ministerial appointments.
Leader : Wilhelm II: emperor, 1888-1918
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg: chancellor, 1909-17
Bethmann-Hollweg was succeeded by a number of puppet chancellors until the German (Weimar) republic was declared on 9 November 1918.
Population : 65 million (1914)
Army : 700,000 men (summer 1914). Within a week of war being declared, the German army had expanded to 3.8 million men, and by August 1916, 4.5 million German soldiers were fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts.
Navy : 17 dreadnoughts, 20 pre-dreadnought battleships, 5 battle-cruisers, 25 other cruisers (various classes), 28 submarines and a further 17 under construction (1914). Germany's navy was the second largest in the world.
Air Force : 260 aircraft, 11 airships (1914)
Recent Diplomacy : Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy were all members of the Triple Alliance (1882), a diplomatic arrangement that was designed to protect its members from attack by Russia or France.
Additional information : Germany emerged as a major industrial, military and political power in the late 19th century and began to acquire imperial possessions in Africa, the Pacific and the Far East. The older imperial powers regarded this as a threat to their own status.
Casualties by 1918 : 1.7 million dead, 4.1 million wounded.