> he bought a dimension of suffering into the world that is almost unimaginable.

You mean Kaiser Wilhelm and his Austrian buddies, of course.

No one was threatening Germany, Austria, or the Ottoman Empire with attack in 1914. No one.

There is *no* reputable historian, now or then, German or otherwise, who disagrees.

Even the Germans claimed they'd been forced to wage a quasi-pre-emptive war on four sovereign nations (five if you throw in Luxembourg) because they'd given Austria a blank check to invade and overthrow Serbia, whose threat to the Dual Monarchy was minimal by any standard. When Berlin saw what was happening to Europe before the end of 1914 with a million dead in five months, it was incumbent upon them to call for a cease-fire and negotiations, which they had not the least desire to do. Because they were winning.

Without Germany's pledge of support, Serbia would undoubtedly have been deterred; if not, the war would almost certainly have been confined to the east, and probably could not have been sustained for four long years.

Hence the victors' insistence on "German war-guilt." It added insult to injury from the German perspective, but it was morally justified if politically myopic.