Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War, 1914. Part 1: The Battle of the Frontiers and Pursuit to the Marne ed. by Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker (review)

Historians of the First World War have long faced serious difficulties in fully integrating the story of the German army into their narratives. The problem is a lack of access to the documentary record. The main archive of the German land forces was located in Potsdam, and this was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. Instantly, the majority of papers on German military history went up in smoke, meaning that after this date, obtaining first-hand access to key documents was essentially impossible. Even before then, gaining sight of the files about the German army had not been easy. As with all sensitive state papers, there were major restrictions on who could view them and also on which parts of the information contained therein could be made public. This quite normal facet of governmental behaviour was reinforced by the condition of international politics at the time. In the rancorous climate of the interwar years, when many aspects of the First World War were bitterly contested, controversial documents that might have a bearing on who started the war, who authorized or condoned major war crimes, and who was responsible for any failures of morale were not going to be released for general consumption. In short, the bulk of the German documentary record was first unavailable as a matter of policy and then as a consequence of its inadvertent destruction.

The state of the documentary record naturally placed a premium on any sources that did enter the public domain. One such source was the multi-volume German official history of the First World War, Der Weltkrieg. This was produced by the official historians of the German army, partly as a justification of the military’s performance in the First World War, but also as a distillation of the lessons of that conflict. To this end it was based on and regularly quoted from official documents, the vast majority of which now no longer exist. On its release, it was therefore potentially a major means of plugging the lacunae in the archival record, assuming, of course, that one was confident of its reliability. Most people were (and are). Undoubtedly, the authors had an agenda and some recognizable biases, but the genuine need to learn the lessons of the war would have ensured that no fundamental distortions worked their way deliberately into the text. Consequently, it quickly established itself as an invaluable work for historians interested in the German army. The only requirements for access to it were finding an available copy and being able to read German.

Neither of these points could always be taken for granted. Although a lot of copies of this work were printed, there are still major research libraries that lack this essential work. There are also numerous historians in the anglophone world who lack a working knowledge of German, especially in its most technical form. This new edition will remedy both of these issues. It brings Der Weltkrieg back into print and does so in an excellent English translation. On both counts, this is a substantial contribution to the scholarly world. The quality of the editorial work enhances this judgment. The volume under review here combines sections from volumes 1 and 3 of Der Weltkrieg and weaves them into a continuous narrative about operation in the west in the first weeks of the war. The opening campaign can now be read as one.

This new edition adds scholarly interjections (mainly in the form of footnotes) that allow the reader to relate the original interpretations of the German official historians to debates in the current historiography. Thus, for example, there are footnotes on the Zuber debate into the origins and meaning...