(explosions)
For four years, from 1914 to 1918,
Europe seemed hell bent on self destruction.
(dramatic music)
In 1914, the Germans attacked.
War spread, like the Grim Reaper wielding his scythe,
all over the planet
but mostly in Russia, Belgium, Italy, France,
the near East and the Balkans.
The First World War was a massacre of humanity.
A monstrous crime.
10 million people died.
In France alone, more than a quarter
of all men in their twenties were killed.
In 1915, an anonymous soldier
dares to film a burial brigade at work.
In 1916, a survivor of the Battle of Verdun writes,
"Emotion itself has died."
Widows orphans, desperate mothers number in the millions,
but on November 11th, 1918, Madam Diaz in Bourges, France
learns of the ceasefire.
The Armistice has just been signed.
Corporal Pierre Sellier, sounding his bugle,
is the first to signal an end to the fighting.
For 1,562 days they have waited for this moment.
They dig a makeshift grave
for the last of the war's artillery shells.
A billion shells have been fired.
The First World War costs the equivalent
of $6 trillion in all.
On the 11th of November, 1918,
these men and women dream of another kind of world,
fair and just where their children will be happy.
One of the greatest minds of the 20th century,
Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, writes,
"The war was over but it wasn't over.
We just didn't know it."
(dramatic music)
The soldiers of the British Empire,
the United States,
France and its colonies,
Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Romania, Russia,
and so many other countries have defeated the German empire,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and the Ottoman Empire, pre-cursor of Turkey.
The war is over.
The crowds roar as their leaders proclaim
that the side of the good has won.
Novelist Albert Simonin is witness
to the jubilation in the streets.
He writes, "In the crowd factory girls
and fashionable ladies alike we're caught up in the hugging.
With hands everywhere, on backsides and bodices,
kissing on the lips."
Everyone believes it's the end of what they call
the War to End All Wars.
Private Louis Botas writes,
"I was free.
I had finally escaped the clutches of militarism
for which I'd developed a hatred
that I will instill in my children, my friends, my family.
I will tell them that fatherland, glory, military honor
are but so many words intended to conceal the fact
that war is unspeakably horrible, ugly and cruel."
Which of the great empires will survive?
The war that killed so many people
has also fanned yearnings for independence.
The British Empire has been rocked since 1916
by attacks in Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom.
The English force Irish rebels
to parade through the streets, attached to the British flag.
The defeated empires implode.
The Austro-Hungarian empire and its many peoples
seethe with the fever of independence.
Checks, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes
all want their own state
and are counting on American support.
The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson
has won the war and now wants to win the peace.
He promises national independence
proclaiming the right of peoples to self-determination.
Wilson wants to give everyone the right
to choose their nation, their borders, their government.
Empires collapse, people revolt,
Kings flee.
Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary,
and his beautiful princess, Zita,
give up their palaces for a much less glorious exile.
In Turkey, Sultan Mehmed VI
submits to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
And from its ruins, the Arab world emerges.
Those who resisted return home as heroes.
In Belgium, the soldier King Albert I,
with Elisabeth German born,
but whose war work earned her the title of The Nurse Queen,
are acclaimed by their subjects.
King Albert introduces universal suffrage to men.
On this 11th day of November, 1918,
the Belgians erupt with joy after four years of occupation.
(celebratory music)
They pay tribute to their liberator's, the Canadians,
the principle victors of the Hundred Days Offensive,
The last battle of the war,
which added 2 million wounded and dead to the massacre.
The war seems to come to a sudden standstill.
In Flanders, Scots discover a German train
with thousands of stick hand grenades.
In the North of France, the Germans have withdrawn
leaving an apocalyptic scene behind.
They have methodically destroyed
the factories and their machinery.
Life is reborn after the Armistice.
The numbers from that day are memorable,
November 11th at 11:00 AM,
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
But what is an Armistice?
It's not peace.
Only a suspension of the fighting
while a treaty is being negotiated,
which promises to be difficult.
The novelist Henri Fauconnier writes to his fiance,
"I fear that we are hardly more ready
for peace than we were for war.
We are entering the most critical period.
Fortunately, we are the victors."
But do the Germans really feel defeated?
They must evacuate Belgium and the North of France,
which they've occupied since 1914,
they retreat to the left bank of the Rhine,
abandoning even Alsace Lorraine.
A few days later,
a symbolic demonstration is organized
in Paris' Place de la Concorde
by the far right movement, L'Action Francaise.
Soldiers who fought in the trenches,
scatter dirt from Alsace to honor its return to France.
In 1870, France had lost Alsace, along with part of Lorraine
following a disastrous war with the German Empire.
In Alsace, once again French,
veterans defeated 50 years earlier
demonstrate their loyalty to France.
(singing in foreign language)
And schoolchildren in traditional costume,
along with their mothers, kiss the flag.
(singing in foreign language)
Not everyone shares this enthusiasm
at the return of the French.
The German government protected Catholics
better than the anticlerical French Republic.
And many Alsatians had appreciated Germanic efficiency
and order during the last half century.
But no one asks their opinion.
The President of the French Republic,
Raymond Poincare, is from Lorraine.
When, by late 1914, the death toll had already exceeded
anything that France had ever known,
Poincare should have done everything in his power
to halt what would become the biggest butchery in history.
But all attempts at peace failed
because Germany would not give up Alsace Lorraine
and so the carnage continued.
(dramatic music)
The Germans returned to their country
in strict order and with a smile.
But they will find Germany deeply shaken.
Their Kaiser Wilhelm II, who declared war on France in 1914,
has just abdicated and left
for a comfortable exile in the Netherlands.
His departure is one of the conditions
of the Armistice that, for Germany, is so humiliating.
Returning to their cities and villages,
German soldiers are met by cheering throngs.
They do not feel they have lost the war.
For them, the Armistice is a stab in the back.
A bitterness that Corporal Adolf Hitler
will masterfully exploit.
The soldiers feel betrayed by the politicians
who took power and proclaimed Germany a Republic.
As does the Socialist Phillip Scheidemann.
(speaking foreign language)
The German Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg proclaims,
"Bourgeois society calls itself
order peace and the legal state, but it wades in blood.
It is stained, dishonored.
The Russian Revolution saved the honor
of international socialism."
(singing in foreign language)
In Russia, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
have taken power and launched the Red Terror
and a bloody civil war to eliminate the anticommunists.
In their propaganda films, the Bolsheviks show prisoners,
among them, English, French and American soldiers
who had come to Russia to fight alongside
the anticommunist forces.
Lenin denounces this foreign intervention
in a rare recording.
(speaking foreign language)
Lenin's call rouses an entire generation
in Russia and in Europe.
In Hungary, the rumble of revolution is also swelling.
Ultra violent communists, the Lenin Fiuk,
or Lenin boys will, in a matter of weeks,
be responsible for nearly a thousand deaths.
Funded and organized by the Russians,
they are instructed to make mincemeat
of the counter-revolutionaries,
suffocate them in their own blood
before they stifle the revolution.
An allied intervention will put an end
to their murderous frenzy and to their lives.
Toward the end of 1918, Central Europe is in flames.
After Russia and Hungary, Germany.
The Communists begin their attacks.
They call themselves the Spartacus League
after the rebel slaves of ancient Rome.
Fighting against them are the Freikorps,
paramilitary groups, volunteers recruited from the army
to stamp out the Communist revolt and execute its leaders,
including Rosa Luxemburg.
Some German families still feel nostalgia for the war,
but most want to return to peace and prosperity.
Yet what fate awaits their sons
20 years later at the Battle of Stalingrad
in the snows of Russia?
What fate awaits this Jewish family?
On December 1st, 1918, the Allied Forces,
in accordance with the Armistice Agreement,
enter Germany to occupy the entire region along the Rhine.
The Rhine is a natural border,
the valley of all invasions, the very symbol
of the confrontation between France and Germany.
Many Germans welcome the French troops
with a sense of relief.
Anything is better than chaos.
But soon resentment and hostility resurface.
Among these German children
is the future film director, Max Ophuls.
In his memoirs he recalls his feelings and his tears
at seeing the cruel brutality of the French soldiers.
Some African soldiers are accused of rape.
In 1940, the Germans will exact cruel revenge
on the French colonial POWs.
And Hitler will sterilize the children
born of mixed race unions.
In the Allied occupation of 1918,
the Germans dislike the British army too.
Including the Canadians, whose only wish is to return home.
The war years have seen the rise in Canadians
of a deep national sentiment
against the British empire to which they still belong.
Feelings towards the 100,000 Americans
stationed on the banks of the Rhine are quite different.
Uncle Sam's troops, the Sammies, are much more popular.
One of them writes, "We fought against the krauts,
the sauerkrauts as we called them,
but they didn't invade the United States
and New York had not come under siege.
We had no desire for revenge, all we wanted was peace
and a great many of us were of German origin."
As Christmas of 1918 approaches,
a historic event is announced.
The arrival of the first President of the United States
ever to leave the Americas, Woodrow Wilson,
seen here with Franklin D Roosevelt,
then Under Secretary for the Navy and future president.
Wilson has come for the peace conference.
He arrives in Paris on December 14th, 1918
with his wife, Edith,
the great, great granddaughter
of the Native American princess Pocahontas.
Paris offers him a triumphant welcome.
Wilson says, "We shall build for you
a good and prosperous world
where all nations will enjoy the legacy of freedom
for which France, America, England, and Italy
have so dearly paid."
The future Communist leader Marcel Cachin
writes in his newspaper, L'Humanite,
"Wilson connects deeply with the proletarian.
He is the only politician to have discovered
the language of goodwill and justice."
Wilson, a lawyer and former president of
Princeton University was elected in 1912 as a Democrat,
then reelected in 1916, thanks to the slogan,
He kept us out of the war.
But only weeks into his second term,
he decides to send American forces into the conflict.
By January, 1918, Wilson has outlined
the 14 point plan for negotiating peace.
It calls for a vast program of economic
and political liberalism and the creation
of an assembly of nations to prevent future wars.
In Paris, he will face another political legend,
the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau.
After taking power during the worst period of the war,
Clemenceau led the conflict with an iron fist.
Nicknamed The Tiger, he burns with only one desire,
to humiliate Germany and make the country pay reparations
for the ravages it inflicted on France.
The British and Americans fear this will mean
financial ruin for the defeated powers and push them
towards extremism, Bolshevism and civil war, like in Russia.
On January 3rd, 1919, Woodrow Wilson,
having spent the holidays with the King of England,
travels to Rome to visit the King of Italy,
Victor-Emmanuel III.
The purpose of Wilson's European tour
is to win support for his doctrine,
his program for world peace.
Above all, he wants to recognize
the right of peoples to self determination.
Wilson is pleased by the enthusiasm of the Italians
when, in fact, they are cheering
not for his program, but for the Allied victory.
Nationalist movements fear that Wilson's right of
self determination could lead to the loss of territory.
One of their most fervent militants
is the journalist Benito Mussolini.
The future dictator calls Wilson
a bandit of international plutocracy.
Wilson returns to Paris on January 18th, 1919
for the peace conference that will formally end
the First World War, found a new European order
and establish new international rules.
Even though 27 nations are represented,
only Wilson and the other victors of the war count,
the big four of the era,
France's Clemenceau, who shuns the cameras,
Britain's Lloyd George, who seeks them out,
as does Italy's Orlando.
For six months, they will discuss
the terms of the treaties imposed on the vanquished.
The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and the Ottoman Empire.
None of which have been invited to the negotiating table.
But the Germans trust Wilson.
His doctrine strikes them as moderate and should allow them
to preserve the territory of their homeland.
The Germans fear Clemenceau most of all.
He is obsessed about the security of his borders
with his more populous and more productive German neighbor.
After six months of discussions,
representatives of all countries that fought in the war
are summoned to the palace of Versailles.
June 28th, 1919.
This is no random date, it is a grim anniversary.
Exactly five years earlier on June 28th, 1914, in Sarajevo,
the crown Prince of Austria was assassinated.
(gunshot) (screaming)
That event triggered the First World War.
The setting is itself symbolic and not only for the French.
It was here, in 1871, after France's defeat in the
Franco-Prussian War that the German Empire was proclaimed
and the world witnessed the emergence of Germany's power.
The desire for revenge also explains Clemenceau's decision
to order four gueules cassees, or mutilated faces.
to stand at the entrance as the German delegates arrive.
The Germans report at three o'clock.
They are given only a few minutes to sign.
In the center of the Hall of Mirrors,
on this table, the treaty is laid.
The German army will be slashed to 100,000 men
and stripped of aviation support and heavy artillery.
Germany will lose its colonies
and its naval fleet will be reduced.
Above all, it will have to pay reparations,
a colossal sum for the time, the equivalent of $600 billion.
Germany loses 10% of its territory.
To contain it in the East,
the Allies want to resurrect Poland,
partitioned in the 18th century,
and give Poland access to the Baltic sea.
Thereby dividing Germany in two, a dangerous absurdity
that will make lasting peace impossible.
It is 3:15,
The Treaty of Versailles has just been signed.
The big four will now greet the international press.
Only weeks before Wilson had cautioned,
"Our greatest error would be to give Germany
powerful reasons for wishing one day to take revenge.
Excessive demands would
most certainly sow the seeds of war."
Clemenceau thinks otherwise.
He declares with confidence,
"Germany will pay."
But he is tired, he adds,
"Waging war was easier than making peace."
The truth is that the scale of the disaster
provoked a kind of shock.
One of the great minds of the time, Paul Valery,
writes in 1919, "We civilizations know now
that we are mortal.
We had heard tell of vanished worlds,
Empires gone down with all their men
and all their machines,
but these disasters were none of our affair
and now we see that the abyss of history
is deep enough to hold us all.
We are aware that a civilization
is as fragile as a human life."
July 14th, 1919, Bastille Day this year
is a celebration of victory.
But also of the crushing humiliation of Germany
by the Treaty of Versailles.
It is also a bittersweet celebration
for the widows of France.
Many survivors have trouble turning the page.
In a letter censored by military postal authorities,
a soldier writes,
"You don't celebrate when millions are dead."
(triumphant parade music)
But just six months after the war,
Clemenceau orders a grand parade
on Paris' magnificent Champs-Elysees
of all the armies that fought for four long years.
To cover the event,
the leading American magazine of the time, Outlook,
sends its best journalist, Albert Baldwin.
He writes, "The ample sidewalks are densely crowded.
People are on stepladders and balconies and roofs.
A cannon booms, it's echo taken up
by the cheering thousands.
Here comes Joffre, The Victor of the Marne,
Foch the Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces
and the leader of the American troops, Pershing,
with a severe military air.
In the crowd, someone shouts, "Smile,"
and the Belgians smile.
They are more relaxed.
But the British receive the most applause,
especially the Scots.
And people scream when they see the Japanese,
the Greeks, the Poles,
the tanned Portuguese, the nervous Serbs.
But where are the Russians?
Not the Bolsheviks, but the ally
that sacrificed 2 million men to make this day possible.
And now here comes Petain on his white horse.
I did not imagine him so young, the Hero of Verdun.
A renowned author, Robert de Flers,
writes in the daily paper, Le Figaro,
"All these uniforms, from every country,
were dyed the same color, that of blood.
The mutilated, whose arms and legs were left behind,
hobble in their glory."
After this procession glorifying the victors,
what has become of the real losers?
The 8 million invalids, from every warring country,
who've lost limbs, been gassed, shellshocked, blinded.
(melancholic music)
And what of the men whose teeth, noses, eyes
were obliterated by shells?
A Swiss Red Cross nurse, Henriette Remy, recalls,
"Never in my life had I seen anything so atrocious.
Immersed in a disgusting stench were some 20 monsters,
men who no longer had anything human about them,
with mutilated debris for faces."
Henriette Remy is present as one of these wounded men meets
his young son who screams in terror at the sight of him.
He weeps, saying, "I am so horrible.
To have once been a man and now to be only this,
a terror to my child, a burden for my wife,
a disgrace to humanity, let me die."
He later commits suicide.
And this man who was married in 1914,
the day before he left for the front.
He writes, "The image reflected in the mirror scares me.
I scream in despair, no mouth, but a maw
and from my gaping maw come only
the gruntings of a wild beast."
"The war left us nothing but cemeteries and ruins,"
writes Marcel Capi, one of the women who, for four years,
had replaced the men who worked in munitions factories.
French women demand, in vain, the right to vote,
already granted to British women.
Worse, they are fired from factories
to make room for returning soldiers,
But at least, they implore,
let peace return once and for all.
Now a dedicated pacifist, Marcel Capi writes,
"The so called peace treaties are,
in reality, sources of conflict.
Inspired by revenge, they make injustice a doctrine
and have plunged Europe into chaos.
The Treaty of Versailles is an absurdity."
The Treaty of Versailles will be the foundation
of the vengeful speeches given by Hitler,
filmed here for the first time in 1919
at a far right demonstration.
At this point, he is merely
an anti Bolshevik informant for the army,
but he knows how to use this deeply flawed
peace treaty to his advantage.
He will write, "Versailles was a disgrace
and this dictated peace is an incredible
plundering of our people.
France, the mortal enemy of our people,
is strangling us ruthlessly."
Hitler looks around him and sees only misery.
He says, "Let the shame and rage that lies within
60 million Germans become a torrent of flame."
The Treaty of Versailles requires Germans
to surrender all their weapons
for which they receive compensation.
They see their planes and their artillery
destroyed by order of the Allies.
German military leaders share in the sense of humiliation.
Now commanding a reduced army,
they will transform it into an elite fighting force
to wreak revenge on France and England.
They will fail in their attempts to seize power,
but will pressure successive governments
until they find, in Hitler, the ideal man for their plan.
By 1919, the swastika begins to appear on helmets.
One of these officers, Ernst Junger, writes,
"The war is not the end, but the beginning of violence."
Lieutenant Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz says,
"When they told us the war was over, we laughed
because we are war.
Its flame continues to burn in us."
(marching drum)
(upbeat music)
Respectable society in Germany
supports the army and will support Hitler.
Industrialists who manufactured thousands of machine guns
and millions of uniforms form a new moneyed elite.
Berliners invent a word for them, Rafka,
those who rake in money.
They live surrounded by extreme poverty.
They are intoxicated with cynicism.
In France, the trenches are empty
and the birds have begun to sing again.
But the Allied armies are still struggling,
two years later, to demobilize 9 million men.
Censorship of military mail continues
until all men have returned to civilian life.
A letter intercepted from one of these forgotten men reads,
"Why won't they set us free?
We're sick of this.
Now that the war is over,
let those of us who saved you return to our families."
And wives will be reunited with their men.
Just like the most famous singer of the day, Mistinguett.
(singing in foreign language)
Five million demobilized French soldiers
are entitled to a civilian suit of clothes.
But supplies run short.
Attempts to dye uniforms are considered ridiculous
and so an allowance of about $50 is paid to each man.
Many are farmers who return to their fields,
but factory workers in all countries
have a harder time finding work.
Women have been forced out of their wartime jobs
but arms production has been slashed too.
Industrialists cannot transform their businesses overnight.
Demobilization is hardest of all
for the Australians and New Zealanders, known as the ANZACS.
They linger in filthy transit camps.
Soldiers from distant continents
and their disillusioned officers
now have nothing to kill but time.
They create strange shows
like this skit about death.
After eluding it in the trenches,
they are now stalked by death from the Spanish Flu,
the global epidemic thought to have originated in Spain.
In fact, it is an especially virulent bird flu
that kills over 20 million people, more than the war itself.
Returning soldiers face many challenges.
Earl Sutherland of Toronto writes to his mother,
"I hope you will not condemn me
for marrying a girl whose father was German.
Rosa is a very kind and earnest girl
who has been very kind to me.
Please don't condemn her before you see her."
Lieutenant Arthur Lapointe, of the famous Van Doos,
the mainly French Canadian 22nd regiment,
returns home to Quebec.
He writes, "I feel my heart overflowing with joy
for this land that I never thought I would see again."
Some members of his family have died of the flu.
His neighbor lost her husband in the battle of Vimy in 1917.
Repatriation ends.
A special commission reports,
"Most of the men come back from the war
in a kind of mental lethargy.
There were so long subjected to military discipline,
fed, dressed and accustomed to obeying orders
that they have lost their autonomy."
The Canadian Military Hospitals Commission
confidently states, "What every disabled soldier must know
is that the word impossible is not in our dictionary.
The success he will have later in his work,
depends on the energy and perseverance
he shows during his rehabilitation."
478,000 Americans also leave France,
but not before being disinfected
and cleansed of all parasites picked up in the trenches
and other dangerous places,
like brothels.
But it's the Spanish Flu that especially worries doctors.
African American troops are particularly uneasy.
In France, they didn't encounter racism,
but now they're heading home to the segregation
of the deep South and the growing violence
spearheaded by the sinister and secretive Ku Klux Klan.
(dramatic music)
On the cotton plantations,
life has changed little since slavery
and children sing an old spiritual,
later sung by Louis Armstrong.
♪ One day one day I was walking along ♪
♪ Oh yes Lord ♪
♪ The sky opened up and love came down ♪
♪ Oh yes Lord ♪
♪ Nobody knows the trouble I've seen ♪
♪ Nobody knows but Jesus ♪
♪ Nobody knows the trouble I've seen ♪
♪ Glory hallelujah ♪
♪ Nobody knows the trouble I've seen ♪
♪ Nobody knows but Jesus ♪
♪ Nobody knows the trouble I've seen ♪
♪ Glory hallelujah ♪