Aufgabe 3 · Abitur NRW Geschichte GK · Nachtermin · bilingual Englisch 2021

Aufgabenstellung:

1.

Analyse the text.

[26 Punkte]

2.

Explain the historical references that are relevant to the text (16 Punkte) and critically examine the position the authors take on the question of war guilt (12 Punkte).

[28 Punkte]

3.

Assess the claims made by the authors.

[26 Punkte]

Materialgrundlage:

Gerry Docherty; Jim Macgregor: Hidden History. The Secret Origins of the First World War. London 2013, S. 9 – 10. (Rechtschreibung und Hervorhebungen wie im Original)

Hinweise zu den Autoren:

Gerry Docherty (*1948): a former school teacher from Scotland and author of several historic plays.

Jim Macgregor (*1947): a former medical doctor from Glasgow/Scotland, now occupied with the history of wars as an interested layman.

Introduction

1 THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR is a deliberately concocted lie. Not the sacrifice,

2 the heroism, the horrendous waste of life or the misery that followed. No, these were very

3 real, but the truth of how it all began and how it was unnecessarily and deliberately prolonged

4 beyond 1915 has been successfully covered up for a century. A carefully falsified history was

5 created to conceal the fact that Britain, not Germany, was responsible for the war. Had the

6 truth become widely known after 1918, the consequences for the British Establishment would

7 have been cataclysmic.

8 At the end of the war Britain, France and the United States laid the blame squarely on

9 Germany and took steps to remove, conceal or falsify documents and reports to justify such

10 a verdict. In 1919, at Versailles near Paris, the victors decreed that Germany was solely

11 responsible for the global catastrophe. She had, they claimed, deliberately planned the war

12 and rejected all of the proposals for conciliation and mediation. Germany protested

13 vehemently that she was not responsible and that it had been, for her, a defensive war against

14 the aggression of Russia and France.

15 To the victors go the spoils, and their judgment was immediately reflected in the official

16 accounts. What became the generally accepted history of the First World War revolved

17 around German militarism, German expansionism, the kaiser’s bombastic nature and

18 ambitions, and Germany’s invasion of innocent, neutral Belgium. The system of secret

19 alliances, a ‘naval race’, economic imperialism, and the theory of an ‘inevitable war’ later

20 softened the attack on Germany, though the spurious notion that she alone had wanted war

21 remained understood in the background.

22 […] In Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War we debunk the notion

23 that Germany was to blame for this heinous crime against humanity, or that Belgium was an

24 innocent, neutral nation caught unawares by German militarism. We clearly demonstrate that

25 the German invasion of Belgium was not an act of thoughtless and indiscriminate aggression,

26 but a reaction forced upon Germany when she faced imminent annihilation. From the day of

27 its conception, the Schlieffen Plan was a defence strategy and the last desperate act open to

28 Germany to protect herself from being overrun simultaneously from east and west by the

29 huge Russian and French armies massing on her borders.

30 What this book sets out to prove is that unscrupulous men, whose roots and origins were

31 in Britain, sought a war to crush Germany and orchestrated events in order to bring this about.

32 1914 is generally considered as a starting point for the disaster that followed, but the crucial

33 decisions that lead to war had been taken many years before.

34 A secret society rich and powerful men was established in London in 1891¹ with the long-

35 term aim of taking control of the entire world. These individuals, whom we call the Secret

36 Elite, deliberately fomented the Boer War of 1899-1902 in order to grab the Transvaal’s gold

37 mines, and this became a template for their future actions. Their ambition overrode humanity,

38 and the consequences of their actions have been minimised, ignored or denied in official

39 histories. The horror of the British concentration camps in South Africa, where 20,000

40 children died, is conveniently glossed over; the devastating loss of a generation in a world

41 war for which these men were deliberately responsible has been glorified by the lie they died

42 for ‘freedom and civilization’. This book focuses on how a cabal of international bankers,

43 industrialists and their political agents successfully used war to destroy the Boer Republics

44 and then Germany, and were never called to account.

45 […]

46 The members of this Secret Elite were only too well aware that Germany was rapidly

47 beginning to overtake Britain in all areas of technology, science, industry and commerce.

48 They also considered Germany to be a cuckoo in the Empire’s African nest and were

49 concerned about its growing influence in Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East. They

50 set out to ditch the cuckoo. […]

¹ Reference to a group of British colonialists and politicians who supposedly formed a secret society in 1891 to extend British rule worldwide. The idea was expressed by Cecil Rhodes in his second will in 1877.

1.

2.

3.