Let's not be beastly to the Germans

We’re seven months away from Germany’s declaration of war on Russia 1914 and her invasion of Belgium and France.  As any schoolboy knows this was German’s realisation of almost a decade’s planning to build an empire - the 1905 Schlieffen Plan.  It was, of course, the prelude to the First World War.

Now, as we prepare to commemorate that event (for heaven’s sake, WHY?) our politicians are trying to re-write history.

The Labour Party’s  education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, writing in the Guardian, says it is “crass” and “ugly” to blame the Germans. It was “shocking”, he said to focus on a “militaristic Germany bent on warmongering and imperial aggression”.

Education Secretary Michael Gove, of course, kicked the row off by moaning about the BBC’s portrayal of the British forces as Donkeys led by upper class twits in the manner of Blackadder.

Thankfully Boris Johnson, writing in The Daily Telegraph provides some sense. Skewering the revisionist socialist views, he writes of Tristram’s opinion,

“He deserves a Nobel prize for Tripe – to mount what appeared to be a kind of cock-eyed exculpation of the Kaiser and his generals. He pointed the finger, mystifyingly, at the Serbs. He blamed the Russians. He blamed the Turks for failing to keep the Ottoman Empire together, and at one stage he suggested that we were too hard on the bellicose Junker class. He claimed that “modern scholarship” now believes that we have “underplayed the internal opposition to the Kaiser’s ideas within the German establishment” – as if that made things any better.

Just nine months after the Germans declared war on the world’s greatest powers, one of their submarines sunk a passenger ship, The Lusitania, killing 1,200 people, of whom 100 were children.

Germany celebrated. One newspaper, the Kölnische Volkszeitung, wrote:

"The sinking of the giant English steamship is a success of moral significance which is still greater than material success. With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy. It will not be the last. The English wish to abandon the German people to death by starvation. We are more humane. 

The German government blamed the Lusitania’s owners, Cunard: “the Company thereby wantonly caused the death of so many passengers, they wrote. The “English ship with passengers who, at their own risk and responsibility, entered the zone of operations.”