THE THIRD REICH IN PHOTOS THE INTERIM YEARS 1918-1938

“ONCE THE TRUTH BEHIND THE PROPAGANDA IMAGES BECAME KNOWN, THE CARNAGE OF THE WAR SHOCKED CIVILISATION TO ITS CORE”

ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR STUTTGART, 1916

This image on the cover of the Illustrated History of the World War was published around 1916. Germans in tell-tale spike helmets (Pickelhaube) and their Austro-Hungarian allies are depicted as heroically charging into battle. Once the truth behind such propaganda images became realised, the carnage of the war shocked civilisation to its core, regardless of nationality. In the wake of bloodshed on such a vast scale, long-secure world views of history, humankind, religion, economics and morality were left in ruins.

Whole generations of British, French, Belgian, German, Austrian and Russian young men disappeared into the muddy mayhem of protracted trench warfare, where the term ‘No-Man’s-Land’ took on a whole new meaning for the future of armed conflict. The toxic seeds of a future war lay sown into the bloody mire of the battle-scarred European landscape. Its societies were left festering with open wounds that never properly healed, especially in Germany, which saw itself as a victim of treachery and subject to onerous post-war punishment.

German military and radical political leaders foisted the ‘stabbed in the back’ excuse for Germany’s loss of the war, its loyal