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153-697: The [...] limiting factor in Russian overseas supply [in World War I ] was not ocean shipping. Rather, effective use of imports was dependent on the thin line of transportation from the ports to the inland areas. Goods delivered to Vladivostok [...] faced the single, speed- and weight-limited track of the Trans-Siberian railway. Goods that made the tortuous passage to the Murman Coast had even more limited options. The primary Russian port, Arkhangel'sk ,

306-645: A blue-water navy was vital for global power projection; Tirpitz had his books translated into German, while Wilhelm made them required reading for his advisors and senior military personnel. However, it was also an emotional decision, driven by Wilhelm's simultaneous admiration for the Royal Navy and desire to surpass it. Bismarck thought that the British would not interfere in Europe, as long as its maritime supremacy remained secure, but his dismissal in 1890 led to

459-592: A grenade at the Archduke's car and injured two of his aides. The other assassins were also unsuccessful. An hour later, as Ferdinand was returning from visiting the injured officers in hospital, his car took a wrong turn into a street where Gavrilo Princip was standing. He fired two pistol shots, fatally wounding Ferdinand and his wife Sophie . According to historian Zbyněk Zeman , in Vienna "the event almost failed to make any impression whatsoever. On 28 and 29 June,

612-540: A guerrilla warfare campaign and only surrendered two weeks after the armistice took effect in Europe. Before the war, Germany had attempted to use Indian nationalism and pan-Islamism to its advantage, a policy continued post-1914 by instigating uprisings in India , while the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition urged Afghanistan to join the war on the side of Central Powers. However, contrary to British fears of

765-737: A single genocide rather than separate genocides, based on their belief that all of these genocides were part of the planned ethnoreligious purification of the Turkish state, a policy which was implemented and advanced by the Young Turks . This joint statement stated, "[i]n view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of

918-408: A change in policy and an Anglo-German naval arms race began. Despite the vast sums spent by Tirpitz, the launch of HMS  Dreadnought in 1906 gave the British a technological advantage. Ultimately, the race diverted huge resources into creating a German navy large enough to antagonise Britain, but not defeat it; in 1911, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg acknowledged defeat, leading to

1071-408: A crime against humanity, rather than genocide. Lithuania began holding trials for genocide in 1997. Latvia and Estonia followed in 1998. Latvia has since convicted four security officers and in 2003 it sentenced a former KGB agent to five years in prison. Estonia tried and convicted ten men and is investigating others. In Lithuania by 2004 23 cases were before the courts, but as of the end of

1224-613: A direct threat. The 1908–1909 Bosnian Crisis began when Austria annexed the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina , which it had occupied since 1878. Timed to coincide with the Bulgarian Declaration of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, this unilateral action was denounced by the European powers, but accepted as there was no consensus on how to resolve the situation. Some historians see this as

1377-471: A gap between the German armies as they closed on Paris. The French army, reinforced by the British expeditionary corps, seized this opportunity to counter-attack and pushed the German army 40 to 80 km back. Both armies were then so exhausted that no decisive move could be implemented, so they settled in trenches, with the vain hope of breaking through as soon as they could build local superiority. In 1911,

1530-525: A genocide by multiple governments. The famine was caused by a variety of factors with different explanations depending on the scholar . According to Simon Payaslian , the scholarly consensus classifies the Soviet famine (at least the famine in Ukraine) as a genocide , but some scholars say that it remains a significant issue in modern politics and they do not believe that Soviet policies would fall under

1683-472: A genocide. The Osage Indian murders was a plot by William King Hale and others to kill full-blood Osage to gain the mineral rights for their reservation. The events have been characterized as a genocide due to the intentions of its perpetrators to destroy the Osage nation. While some label the murders themselves as an instance of genocide, others include the murders in a longer process of genocide against

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1836-651: A half million. The genocide began on 24 April 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople . Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march hundreds of miles, without food or water, to the desert of what is now Syria . The Armenians were massacred regardless of their age or gender, with rape and other acts of sexual abuse being commonplace. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as

1989-576: A list of Soviet policies that "meet the standard of genocide." On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. Canadian Parliament passed

2142-414: A motion on 10 June 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 as a genocide perpetrated by Stalin, designating 18 May to be a day of remembrance. Genocide scholar Raz Segal considers the coercive Magyarisation policy and violent actions of Miklos Horthy 's Kingdom of Hungary towards all inhabitants of Transcarpathia considered non-Hungarian (including Rusyns and Jews) to constitute

2295-498: A population of around three million. Peter Holquist states that the overall number of executions which were carried out is difficult to establish. In some regions hundreds were executed. In Khoper, the tribunal was very active, with a one-month total of 226 executions. The Tsymlianskaia tribunal oversaw the execution of over 700 people. The Kotel'nikovo tribunal executed 117 in early May and nearly 1,000 were executed overall. Others were not quite as active. The Berezovskaia tribunal made

2448-548: A possibility. This was accentuated by British and Russian support for France against Germany during the 1911 Agadir Crisis . German economic and industrial strength continued to expand rapidly post-1871. Backed by Wilhelm II, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz sought to use this growth to build an Imperial German Navy , that could compete with the British Royal Navy . This policy was based on the work of US naval author Alfred Thayer Mahan , who argued that possession of

2601-554: A reduction in famine mortality, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine along with 77% of famine deaths in parts of Russia and Belarus can be explained by the fact that there was systematic bias against Ukrainians. The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses being Kyiv and Kharkiv which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of

2754-648: A result of these events. Mass killings continued to be committed by the Republic of Turkey during the Turkish–Armenian War phase of the Turkish War of Independence . Modern Turkey succeeded the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and since then, it has denied the fact that a genocide occurred . In recent years, it has resisted calls to acknowledge the crime by scholars, countries and international organizations. The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon, also known as Kafno,

2907-834: A revolt in India, the outbreak of the war saw a reduction in nationalist activity. Leaders from the Indian National Congress and other groups believed support for the British war effort would hasten Indian Home Rule , a promise allegedly made explicit in 1917 by Edwin Montagu , the Secretary of State for India . In 1914, the British Indian Army was larger than the British Army itself, and between 1914 and 1918 an estimated 1.3 million Indian soldiers and labourers served in Europe, Africa, and

3060-583: A separate study to calculate meticulously how many were deported". A few decades later deportations continued. The Dersim massacre for example refers to the depopulation of Dersim in Turkish Kurdistan , in 1937–38, in which approximately 13,000–40,000 Alevi Kurds were killed and thousands more of them were driven into exile. A key component of the Turkification process was a policy of massive population resettlement. The main document,

3213-516: A significant escalation, ending any chance of Austria cooperating with Russia in the Balkans, while also damaging diplomatic relations between Serbia and Italy. Tensions increased after the 1911–1912 Italo-Turkish War demonstrated Ottoman weakness and led to the formation of the Balkan League , an alliance of Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro , and Greece . The League quickly overran most of

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3366-538: A total of 1,236 pogroms were committed against Jews in 524 towns in Ukraine . Estimates of the number of Jews who were killed in these pogroms range from 30,000 to 60,000. Of the recorded 1,236 pogroms and excesses, 493 of them were carried out by Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers who were under the command of Symon Petliura , 307 of them were carried out by independent Ukrainian warlords, 213 of them were carried out by Denikin 's army, 106 of them were carried out by

3519-689: A total of 8.7 million deaths across the entire Soviet Union, including 3.9 million in Ukraine, 3.3 million in Russia, and 1.3 million in Kazakhstan, plus a lower number in other republics. According to the All-Union census of 1926–1937, the rural population in the North Caucasus decreased by 24%. In the Kuban alone, from November 1932 to the spring of 1933, the number of documented victims of famine

3672-647: A total of twenty arrests in a community of 13,500 people. Holquist also notes that some of the White reports of Red atrocities in the Don were consciously scripted for agitation purposes. In one example, an insurgent leader reported that 140 were executed in Bokovskaia, but later provided a different account, according to which only eight people in Bokovskaia were sentenced to death, and the authorities did not manage to carry these sentences out. This same historian emphasises he

3825-478: A war on two fronts; the Schlieffen Plan envisaged using 80% of the army to defeat France, then switching to Russia. Since this required them to move quickly, mobilization orders were issued that afternoon. Once the German ultimatum to Russia expired on the morning of 1 August, the two countries were at war. At a meeting on 29 July, the British cabinet had narrowly decided its obligations to Belgium under

3978-402: A weak Ottoman government, rather than an ambitious Slav power like Bulgaria . Russia had ambitions in northeastern Anatolia while its clients had overlapping claims in the Balkans. These competing interests divided Russian policy-makers and added to regional instability. Austrian statesmen viewed the Balkans as essential for the continued existence of their Empire and saw Serbian expansion as

4131-455: A whole, the Somme offensive led to an estimated 420,000 British casualties, along with 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans. The diseases that emerged in the trenches were a major killer on both sides. The living conditions led to disease and infection, such as trench foot , lice , typhus , trench fever , and the ' Spanish flu '. At the start of the war, German cruisers were scattered across

4284-662: Is "not seeking to downplay or dismiss very real executions by the Soviets". Research by Pavel Polian from the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of forced migrations in Russia shows that more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported from the Terek province to Ukraine. Their land was distributed among pro-soviet Cossacks and Chechens. The genocide of the Ingrian Finns ( Finnish : Inkeriläisten kansanmurha )

4437-482: Is any conflict that the International Criminal Court has so designated. Mohammed Hassan Kakar argues that the definition should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator. He prefers the definition from Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, which defines genocide as "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by

4590-643: Is known as the Sürgünlik in Crimean Tatar . A total of more than 230,000 people were deported (the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population), of which more than 100,000 were killed via starvation or disease. Many activists, politicians, scholars and historians go even further and consider this deportation a crime of genocide . Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since

4743-453: Is known, however, that from 1908 to 1913, military spending by the six major European powers increased by over 50% in real terms. The years before 1914 were marked by a series of crises in the Balkans, as other powers sought to benefit from the Ottoman decline. While Pan-Slavic and Orthodox Russia considered itself the protector of Serbia and other Slav states, they preferred the strategically vital Bosporus straits to be controlled by

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4896-624: The Imperial war effort. The northern part of the line, between Petrozavodsk and Kola , was built in 1915–1917: due to a lack of workers the Tsarist authorities deployed more than 40,000 German and Austrian prisoners of war to the construction. During World War II the line re-asserted its military importance as a link between the Arctic convoys and the Eastern Front . In 1941–1943

5049-574: The Schutzkorps was established, and carried out the persecution of Serbs. The assassination initiated the July Crisis, a month of diplomatic manoeuvring between Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and Britain. Believing that Serbian intelligence helped organise Franz Ferdinand's murder, Austrian officials wanted to use the opportunity to end their interference in Bosnia and saw war as

5202-641: The World War . In August 1914, the magazine The Independent wrote "This is the Great War. It names itself". In October 1914, the Canadian magazine Maclean's similarly wrote, "Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War." Contemporary Europeans also referred to it as " the war to end war " and it was also described as "the war to end all wars" due to their perception of its unparalleled scale, devastation, and loss of life. The first recorded use of

5355-487: The 1934 Law on Resettlement , was used to target the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population. Many Kurds and some ethnic Turks consider the events which took place in Dersim a genocide. A prominent proponent of this view is İsmail Beşikçi . Under international laws, the actions of the Turkish authorities were arguably not genocide, because they were not aimed at

5508-861: The Allied Powers sent a letter to the government of the Ottoman Empire , a member of the Central Powers , protesting massacres that were taking place within the Empire. On 24 May 1915, the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Russia) jointly issued a statement which for the first time ever explicitly charged a government, the Ottoman Empire , with committing a " crime against humanity " in reference to that regime's persecution of its Christian minorities, including Armenians , Assyrians and Greeks . Many researchers consider these events

5661-695: The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force landed on the island of New Britain , then part of German New Guinea . On 28 October, the German cruiser SMS  Emden sank the Russian cruiser Zhemchug in the Battle of Penang . Japan declared war on Germany before seizing territories in the Pacific, which later became the South Seas Mandate , as well as German Treaty ports on

5814-545: The Great Purge ; however, this claim is not supported by evidence. The Soviet view was shared and supported by many diverse countries, and they were also in line with Raphael Lemkin's original conception, and it was originally promoted by the World Jewish Congress . In 1915, during World War I , the concept of crimes against humanity was introduced into international relations for the first time when

5967-510: The Kazakh famine of 1932–33 to have been a genocide of Kazakhs. The Soviet authorities undertook a campaign of persecution against the nomads in the Kazakhs, believing that the destruction of the class was a worthy sacrifice for the collectivization of Kazakhstan. Europeans in Kazakhstan had disproportionate power in the party which has been argued as a cause of why indigenous nomads suffered

6120-744: The Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania, which opened on 14 October 1992 in the former KGB headquarters, chronicles the imprisonment and deportation of Lithuanians . The ethnic cleansing and deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea was ordered by Joseph Stalin as a form of collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in Taurida Subdistrict during 1942–1943. The state-organized removal

6273-784: The Nanjing Massacre which was committed during the early months of the Second Sino-Japanese War , the Japanese committed mass killings against the Chinese population of the city, during which at least 200,000 people were killed. Bradley Campbell described the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide, because the Chinese were unilaterally killed en masse by the Japanese during the aftermath of the battle for

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6426-750: The Ottoman Government , as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres." The Greek genocide refers to the fate of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire both during and after World War I (1914–18). Like the Armenians and the Assyrians, the Greeks were also subjected to massacres , expulsions , death marches and various other forms of persecution by the Young Turks . The mass killing of Greeks continued to occur under

6579-418: The Red Army and 32 of them were carried out by the Polish Army . During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks engaged in a genocidal campaign against the Don Cossacks . University of York Russian specialist Shane O'Rourke states that "ten thousand Cossacks were systematically slaughtered in a few weeks in January 1919" and he also states that this mass-slaughter "was one of the main factors which led to

6732-591: The Rüstungswende or 'armaments turning point', when he switched expenditure from the navy to the army. This decision was not driven by a reduction in political tensions but by German concern over Russia's quick recovery from its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent 1905 Russian Revolution . Economic reforms led to a significant post-1908 expansion of railways and transportation infrastructure, particularly in its western border regions. Since Germany and Austria-Hungary relied on faster mobilisation to compensate for their numerical inferiority compared to Russia,

6885-400: The Sayfo or the Seyfo ; Aramaic : ܩܛܠܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܐܬܘܪܝܐ or ܣܝܦܐ , Turkish : Süryani Soykırımı ) was committed against the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by the Young Turks. The Assyrian population of northern Mesopotamia ( Tur Abdin , Hakkari , Van , Siirt region in modern-day southeastern Turkey and Urmia region in northwestern Iran)

7038-403: The United States entered the war on the Allied side following Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare against Atlantic shipping. Later that year, the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian October Revolution , and Soviet Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers in December, followed by a separate peace in March 1918. That month, Germany launched an offensive in

7191-423: The hydrophone and depth charges were introduced, destroyers could potentially successfully attack a submerged submarine. Convoys slowed the flow of supplies since ships had to wait as convoys were assembled; the solution was an extensive program of building new freighters. Troopships were too fast for the submarines and did not travel the North Atlantic in convoys. The U-boats sunk more than 5,000 Allied ships, at

7344-496: The legal definition of genocide . Several scholars have disputed the belief that the famine was a genocidal act which was committed by the Soviet government, including J. Arch Getty , Stephen G. Wheatcroft , R. W. Davies , and Mark Tauger. Getty says that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives ... is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan." Wheatcroft says that

7497-421: The nation state yet with key differences to the latter such as Soviet repression reflecting more the weakness of said state rather than its strength. There have also been more selective discussions of collectivization as a project of colonialism in regard to Ukraine and Kazakhstan . On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin , passed

7650-442: The tank . After the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, Allied and German forces unsuccessfully tried to outflank each other, a series of manoeuvres later known as the " Race to the Sea ". By the end of 1914, the opposing forces confronted each other along an uninterrupted line of entrenched positions from the Channel to the Swiss border. Since the Germans were normally able to choose where to stand, they generally held

7803-531: The "Polish Operation", as ethnic cleansing and "ethnic terror". According to Martin, the singling out of diaspora nationalities for arrest and mass execution "verged on the genocidal". Historian Timothy Snyder called the Polish Operation genocidal : "It is hard not to see the Soviet "Polish Operation" of 1937-38 as genocidal: Polish fathers were shot, Polish mothers sent to Kazakhstan, and Polish children left in orphanages where they would lose their Polish identity. As more than 100,000 innocent people were killed on

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7956-588: The 1839 Treaty of London did not require it to oppose a German invasion with military force; however, Prime Minister Asquith and his senior Cabinet ministers were already committed to supporting France, the Royal Navy had been mobilised, and public opinion was strongly in favour of intervention. On 31 July, Britain sent notes to Germany and France, asking them to respect Belgian neutrality; France pledged to do so, but Germany did not reply. Aware of German plans to attack through Belgium, French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre asked his government for permission to cross

8109-431: The 1879 Dual Alliance , which became the Triple Alliance when Italy joined in 1882. For Bismarck, the purpose of these agreements was to isolate France by ensuring the three Empires resolve any disputes between themselves. In 1887, Bismarck set up the Reinsurance Treaty , a secret agreement between Germany and Russia to remain neutral if either were attacked by France or Austria-Hungary. For Bismarck, peace with Russia

8262-441: The 1913 Treaty of London , which had created an independent Albania while enlarging the territories of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. However, disputes between the victors sparked the 33-day Second Balkan War , when Bulgaria attacked Serbia and Greece on 16 June 1913; it was defeated, losing most of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece, and Southern Dobruja to Romania. The result was that even countries which benefited from

8415-598: The Armenians were often particularly singled out for immediate destruction". During the Armenian genocide , many Yazidis were killed by Hamidiye cavalry . According to Aziz Tamoyan , as many as 300,000 Yazidis were killed with the Armenians, while others fled to Transcaucasia . Concurrent to the Late Ottoman genocides most sources suggest that as many as 700,000 Kurds were deported during World War I, although there are no reliable statistics. Safrastian (1945) estimates that half of these deported Kurds died. Genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör writes that "it would require

8568-409: The Austrians and Serbs clashed at the battles of the Cer and Kolubara ; over the next two weeks, Austrian attacks were repulsed with heavy losses. As a result, Austria had to keep sizeable forces on the Serbian front, weakening their efforts against Russia. Serbia's victory against Austria-Hungary in the 1914 invasion has been called one of the major upset victories of the twentieth century. In 1915,

8721-593: The Austrians briefly occupied the Serbian capital, Belgrade . A Serbian counter-attack in the Battle of Kolubara succeeded in driving them from the country by the end of 1914. For the first 10 months of 1915, Austria-Hungary used most of its military reserves to fight Italy. German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats scored a coup by persuading Bulgaria to join the attack on Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian provinces of Slovenia , Croatia and Bosnia provided troops for Austria-Hungary. Montenegro allied itself with Serbia. Bulgaria declared war on Serbia on 14 October 1915 and joined in

8874-493: The Balkan Wars, such as Serbia and Greece, felt cheated of their "rightful gains", while for Austria it demonstrated the apparent indifference with which other powers viewed their concerns, including Germany. This complex mix of resentment, nationalism and insecurity helps explain why the pre-1914 Balkans became known as the " powder keg of Europe ". On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , heir presumptive to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria , visited Sarajevo ,

9027-480: The CPPCG. The event began on 23 February 1944, when the entire population of Checheno-Ingushetia was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker trucks and sent to Siberia. The mass deportations of up to 17,500 Lithuanians , 17,000 Latvians and 6,000 Estonians carried out by Stalin's government marked

9180-404: The Central Powers. However, the pro-German King Constantine I dismissed the pro-Allied government of Eleftherios Venizelos before the Allied expeditionary force arrived. The Macedonian front was at first mostly static. French and Serbian forces retook limited areas of Macedonia by recapturing Bitola on 19 November 1916 following the costly Monastir offensive , which brought stabilisation of

9333-410: The Chinese Shandong peninsula at Tsingtao . After Vienna refused to withdraw its cruiser SMS  Kaiserin Elisabeth from Tsingtao, Japan declared war on Austria-Hungary, and the ship was sunk in November 1914. Within a few months, Allied forces had seized all German territories in the Pacific, leaving only isolated commerce raiders and a few holdouts in New Guinea. Some of the first clashes of

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9486-548: The German High Seas Fleet was confined to port. German U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Britain. The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival. The United States launched a protest, and Germany changed its rules of engagement. After the sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915, Germany promised not to target passenger liners, while Britain armed its merchant ships, placing them beyond

9639-465: The German Army increased in size from 1908 to 1914, he changed the allocation of forces between the two wings to 70:30. He also considered Dutch neutrality essential for German trade and cancelled the incursion into the Netherlands, which meant any delays in Belgium threatened the viability of the plan. Historian Richard Holmes argues that these changes meant the right wing was not strong enough to achieve decisive success. The initial German advance in

9792-462: The German right wing would sweep through the Netherlands and Belgium , then swing south, encircling Paris and trapping the French army against the Swiss border. The plan's creator, Alfred von Schlieffen , head of the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, estimated that this would take six weeks, after which the German army would transfer to the East and defeat the Russians. The plan was substantially modified by his successor, Helmuth von Moltke

9945-426: The Germans bled heavily as well, with anywhere from 700,000 to 975,000 casualties between the two combatants. Verdun became a symbol of French determination and self-sacrifice. The Battle of the Somme was an Anglo-French offensive from July to November 1916. The opening day on 1 July 1916 was the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army , which suffered 57,500 casualties, including 19,200 dead. As

10098-589: The Kazakhs themselves. Historian Sarah Cameron argues that while Stalin did not intend to starve Kazakhs, he did see some deaths as a necessary sacrifice to achieve the political and economic goals of the regime. However, Sarah Cameron believes that while the famine combined with a campaign against nomads was not genocide in the sense of the UN definition, it does comply with Raphael Lemkin's original concept of genocide, which considered destruction of culture to be as genocidal as physical annihilation. Historian Stephen Wheatcroft criticizes this view because he believed that

10251-461: The Kazakhs. A monument for the famine's victims was constructed in 2017. The Turkic Council has described the famine as a "criminal Stalinist ethnic policy". A genocide remembrance day is held on 31 May for the victims of the famine. Several scholars write that the killing, on the basis of nationality and politics, of more than 120,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1938 was genocide. An NKVD official remarked that Poles living in

10404-405: The Kirov Railway became part of the October Railway . The line was electrified in 2005. [REDACTED] Media related to Murman Railway at Wikimedia Commons This Russian rail transport related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War ,

10557-565: The Middle East. In all, 140,000 soldiers served on the Western Front and nearly 700,000 in the Middle East, with 47,746 killed and 65,126 wounded. The suffering engendered by the war, as well as the failure of the British government to grant self-government to India afterward, bred disillusionment, resulting in the campaign for full independence led by Mahatma Gandhi . Pre-war military tactics that had emphasised open warfare and individual riflemen proved obsolete when confronted with conditions prevailing in 1914. Technological advances allowed

10710-629: The Osage nation. Estimates vary widely as to the percentage of the Osage nation killed in the murders, with the lowest estimate being 10% of 591 full-blood Osage being killed. The Kantō Massacre was a mass murder in the Kantō region of Japan committed in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake . With the explicit and implicit approval of parts of the Japanese government , the Japanese military, police, and vigilantes murdered an estimated 6,000 people: mainly ethnic Koreans , but also Chinese and Japanese people mistaken to be Korean, and Japanese communists, socialists, and anarchists. During

10863-436: The Ottoman war effort. The situation was exacerbated by Jamal Pasha , commander of the Fourth Army of the Ottoman Empire, who deliberately barred crops from neighbouring Syria from entering Mount Lebanon, in response to the Allied blockade. In 1915, a genocide was committed in Diyarbekir vilayet , claiming the lives of most Armenians , Syriac Christians , Greek Orthodox , and Greek Catholics living there. The genocide

11016-905: The Ottomans joined the Central Powers in November. Germany's strategy in 1914 was to quickly defeat France, then to transfer its forces to the east, but its advance was halted in September , and by the end of the year the Western Front consisted of a continuous line of trenches stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland. The Eastern Front was more dynamic, but neither side gained a decisive advantage, despite costly offensives. Italy , Bulgaria , Romania , Greece and others joined in from 1915 onward. In April 1917,

11169-558: The Ottomans' territory in the Balkans during the 1912–1913 First Balkan War , much to the surprise of outside observers. The Serbian capture of ports on the Adriatic resulted in partial Austrian mobilisation, starting on 21 November 1912, including units along the Russian border in Galicia . The Russian government decided not to mobilise in response, unprepared to precipitate a war. The Great Powers sought to re-assert control through

11322-721: The Russian Stavka agreed with the French to attack Germany within fifteen days of mobilisation, ten days before the Germans had anticipated, although it meant the two Russian armies that entered East Prussia on 17 August did so without many of their support elements. By the end of 1914, German troops held strong defensive positions inside France, controlled the bulk of France's domestic coalfields, and inflicted 230,000 more casualties than it lost itself. However, communications problems and questionable command decisions cost Germany

11475-646: The Saratov Oblast, the total number sent to forced internal exile was about 950,000, of which 30% died during deportation (285,000), and most never returned to the Volga Region. On 26 February 2004 the plenary assembly of the European Parliament recognized the deportation of Chechen people during Operation Lentil (23 February 1944), as an act of genocide, on the basis of the 1907 IV Hague Convention: The Laws and Customs of War on Land and

11628-650: The Serbian retreat toward the Adriatic coast in the Battle of Mojkovac on 6–7 January 1916, but ultimately the Austrians also conquered Montenegro. The surviving Serbian soldiers were evacuated to Greece. After the conquest, Serbia was divided between Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria. In late 1915, a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece to offer assistance and to pressure its government to declare war against

11781-598: The Soviet Union were to be "completely destroyed". Under Stalin the NKVD's Polish operation soon arrested some 144,000, of whom 111,000 were shot and surviving family members deported to Kazakhstan. According to historian Michael Ellman , "The 'national operations' of 1937–38, notably the 'Polish operation', may qualify as genocide as defined by the UN Convention, although there is as yet no legal ruling on

11934-508: The Soviet Union when it was under the rule of Joseph Stalin . The causes of these unnatural mass deaths include Union-wide famines in the early 1920s and early 1930s and deportations of ethnic minorities. Stalin declared a need to extract a "tribute" or a "tax" from the peasantry due to his factional struggles with the Bukharin wing of the party, peasant resistance to the NEP under Lenin , and

12087-408: The Soviet government's policies during the famine were criminal acts of fraud and manslaughter, though not outright murder or genocide. While Wheatcroft rejects the genocide characterization of the famine, he states that "the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainisation ." A 2020 Journal of Genocide Research article by Oleh Wolowyna estimated

12240-472: The Soviets in the Great Terror of 1937–1938 targeted "a national group as an enemy of the state." During their Polish operation against party enemies the NKVD hit "Soviet Poles and other Soviet citizens associated with Poland, Polish culture, or Roman Catholicism. The Polish ethnic character of the operation quickly prevailed in practice... ." Stalin was pleased at "cleaning out this Polish filth." Among

12393-704: The West was very successful. By the end of August, the Allied left, which included the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was in full retreat , and the French offensive in Alsace-Lorraine was a disastrous failure, with casualties exceeding 260,000. German planning provided broad strategic instructions while allowing army commanders considerable freedom in carrying them out at the front, but von Kluck used this freedom to disobey orders, opening

12546-485: The Younger . Under Schlieffen, 85% of German forces in the west were assigned to the right wing, with the remainder holding along the frontier. By keeping his left-wing deliberately weak, he hoped to lure the French into an offensive into the "lost provinces" of Alsace-Lorraine , which was the strategy envisaged by their Plan XVII . However, Moltke grew concerned that the French might push too hard on his left flank and as

12699-589: The ages of 16 and 45 were forced to work in the forests and mines of Siberia and Central Asia under conditions similar to those prevailing in the slave labor camps of the Gulag. The expulsion of the Germans from the Volga ended in September 1941. The number sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan totaled approximately 438,000. Together with 27,000 evicted in the same ethnic cleansing of the Stalingrad Oblast and 47,000 of

12852-446: The aggressor, German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg delayed the commencement of war preparations until 31 July. That afternoon, the Russian government were handed a note requiring them to "cease all war measures against Germany and Austria-Hungary" within 12 hours. A further German demand for neutrality was refused by the French who ordered general mobilization but delayed declaring war. The German General Staff had long assumed they faced

13005-474: The attack by the Austro-Hungarian army under Mackensen's army of 250,000 that was already underway. Serbia was conquered in a little more than a month, as the Central Powers, now including Bulgaria, sent in 600,000 troops in total. The Serbian army, fighting on two fronts and facing certain defeat, retreated into northern Albania . The Serbs suffered defeat in the Battle of Kosovo . Montenegro covered

13158-543: The best way of achieving this. However, the Foreign Ministry had no solid proof of Serbian involvement. On 23   July, Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, listing ten demands made intentionally unacceptable to provide an excuse for starting hostilities. Serbia ordered general mobilization on 25   July, but accepted all the terms, except for those empowering Austrian representatives to suppress "subversive elements" inside Serbia, and take part in

13311-483: The border and pre-empt such a move. To avoid violating Belgian neutrality, he was told any advance could come only after a German invasion. Instead, the French cabinet ordered its Army to withdraw 10 km behind the German frontier, to avoid provoking war. On 2 August, Germany occupied Luxembourg and exchanged fire with French units when German patrols entered French territory; on 3   August, they declared war on France and demanded free passage across Belgium, which

13464-600: The campaign saw the first use of anti-aircraft warfare after an Austrian plane was shot down with ground-to-air fire, as well as the first medical evacuation by the Serbian army. Upon mobilisation, in accordance with the Schlieffen Plan , 80% of the German Army was located on the Western Front, with the remainder acting as a screening force in the East. Rather than a direct attack across their shared frontier,

13617-649: The capital of the recently annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina . Cvjetko Popović , Gavrilo Princip , Nedeljko Čabrinović , Trifko Grabež , Vaso Čubrilović ( Bosnian Serbs ) and Muhamed Mehmedbašić (from the Bosniaks community), from the movement known as Young Bosnia , took up positions along the Archduke's motorcade route, to assassinate him. Supplied with arms by extremists within the Serbian Black Hand intelligence organisation, they hoped his death would free Bosnia from Austrian rule. Čabrinović threw

13770-669: The central part between Svir and Petrozavodsk was occupied by the Finnish Army under orders from Marshal Mannerheim during Continuation War phase of the Second World War . Originally called the Murman Railway , the line was renamed the Kirov Railway in 1935 in honor of Sergei Kirov (a prominent Bolshevik leader in the 1917 October Revolution ), who had been assassinated the year before. In 1959

13923-578: The chance of a decisive outcome, while it had failed to achieve the primary objective of avoiding a long, two-front war. As was apparent to several German leaders, this amounted to a strategic defeat; shortly after the First Battle of the Marne , Crown Prince Wilhelm told an American reporter "We have lost the war. It will go on for a long time but lost it is already." On 30 August 1914, New Zealand occupied German Samoa (now Samoa ). On 11 September,

14076-474: The city , despite its successful and certain outcome. However, Jean-Louis Margolin does not believe that the Nanjing atrocities should be considered a genocide because only prisoners of war were executed in a systematic manner and the targeting of civilians was sporadic and done without orders by individual actors. Yuki Tanaka argues that while the Japanese government did not endorse a clear policy of genocide,

14229-477: The city of Guangzhou by ferry along the Pearl River . They were stopped at Nanshitou for physical examinations. A former soldier of Unit 8604 stated that the unit was instructed to poison Chinese refugees with the pathogens of typhoid and paratyphoid , which they put into the thin porridge and drinking water prepared for the refugees, causing a large number of deaths. Additionally, survivors claimed that

14382-520: The cost of 199 submarines. World War I also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with HMS  Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in July 1918, as well as blimps for antisubmarine patrol. Faced with Russia in the east, Austria-Hungary could spare only one-third of its army to attack Serbia. After suffering heavy losses,

14535-522: The country. Oleh Wolowyna comments that peasant resistance and the ensuing repression of said resistance was a critical factor for the famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia populated by national minorities like Germans and Ukrainians allegedly tainted by "fascism and bourgeois nationalism" according to Soviet authorities. Ukraine's Yuschenko administration recognised the Holodomor as an act of genocide and it also pressured international governments to do

14688-629: The crackdown of 1916 in which 100,000 to 270,000 Kyrgyzstanis were killed a genocide , though Russia rejected this characterization. Russian sources put the death toll at 3,000. The Whitaker Report of the United Nations cited the massacre of 100,000 to 250,000 Jews in more than 2,000 pogroms which occurred during the White Terror in Russia as an act of genocide . During the Russian Civil War , between 1918 and 1921,

14841-522: The creation of new independent states, including Poland , Finland , the Baltic states , Czechoslovakia , and Yugoslavia . The League of Nations was established to maintain world peace, but its failure to manage instability during the interwar period contributed to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Before World War II , the events of 1914–1918 were generally known as the Great War or simply

14994-449: The creation of strong defensive systems largely impervious to massed infantry advances, such as barbed wire , machine guns and above all far more powerful artillery , which dominated the battlefield and made crossing open ground extremely difficult. Both sides struggled to develop tactics for breaching entrenched positions without heavy casualties. In time, technology enabled the production of new offensive weapons, such as gas warfare and

15147-965: The crowds listened to music and drank wine, as if nothing had happened." Nevertheless, the impact of the murder of the heir to the throne was significant, and has been described by historian Christopher Clark as a "9/11 effect, a terrorist event charged with historic meaning, transforming the political chemistry in Vienna". Austro-Hungarian authorities encouraged subsequent anti-Serb riots in Sarajevo . Violent actions against ethnic Serbs were also organised outside Sarajevo, in other cities in Austro-Hungarian-controlled Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia. Austro-Hungarian authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina imprisoned approximately 5,500 prominent Serbs, 700 to 2,200 of whom died in prison. A further 460 Serbs were sentenced to death. A predominantly Bosniak special militia known as

15300-494: The deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire which occurred both during and just after World War I . It was implemented through extensive massacres and deportations , with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions which were designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and

15453-596: The disappearance of the Cossacks as a nation." The late Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev , head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, notes that "hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were killed". Historian Robert Gellately claims that "the most reliable estimates indicate that between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20" out of

15606-403: The epitome of human evil , and has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence. The debate continues over what legally constitutes genocide . One definition

15759-695: The expansion of the French colonial empire . In 1873, Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors , which included Austria-Hungary , Russia and Germany. After the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War , the League was dissolved due to Austrian concerns over the expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans , an area they considered to be of vital strategic interest. Germany and Austria-Hungary then formed

15912-570: The extermination of a people, but at resettlement and suppression. A Turkish court ruled in 2011 that the events could not be considered genocide because they were not directed systematically against an ethnic group. Scholars such as Martin van Bruinessen , have instead talked of an ethnocide directed against the local language and identity. In 1916 in the territory which is currently named Urkun , Kyrgyzstan launched an uprising against Tsarist Russia. A public commission in Kyrgyzstan called

16065-731: The failure of the Soviet authorities to provide them with suitable clothing and housing after they reached their destination, led some sources to label the affair an act of genocide. Based on the Martens Clause and the principles of the Nuremberg Charter , the European Court of Human Rights held that the March deportation constituted a crime against humanity . According to Erwin Oberlander, these deportations are

16218-400: The first time on the Western Front. Several types of gas soon became widely used by both sides and though it never proved a decisive, battle-winning weapon, it became one of the most feared and best-remembered horrors of the war. In February 1916, the Germans attacked French defensive positions at the Battle of Verdun , lasting until December 1916. Casualties were greater for the French, but

16371-408: The following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within

16524-595: The front. Serbian and French troops finally made a breakthrough in September 1918 in the Vardar offensive , after most German and Austro-Hungarian troops had been withdrawn. The Bulgarians were defeated at the Battle of Dobro Pole , and by 25 September British and French troops had crossed the border into Bulgaria proper as the Bulgarian army collapsed. Bulgaria capitulated four days later, on 29 September 1918. The German high command responded by despatching troops to hold

16677-542: The globe, some of which were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping . These were systematically hunted down by the Royal Navy, though not before causing considerable damage. One of the most successful was the SMS ; Emden , part of the German East Asia Squadron stationed at Qingdao , which seized or sank 15 merchantmen, a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. Most of the squadron

16830-515: The group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." The preamble to the CPPCG states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", and it also states that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Genocide is widely considered to be

16983-403: The high expectations of central planners were sufficient to demonstrate their ignorance of the ultimate consequences of their actions. Wheatcroft views the state's policies during the famine as criminal acts, though not as intentional murder or genocide. Niccolò Pianciola argues that from Raphael Lemkin's point of view on genocide, all nomads of the Soviet Union were victims of the crime, not just

17136-549: The high ground, while their trenches tended to be better built; those constructed by the French and English were initially considered "temporary", only needed until an offensive would destroy the German defences. Both sides tried to break the stalemate using scientific and technological advances. On 22 April 1915, at the Second Battle of Ypres , the Germans (violating the Hague Convention ) used chlorine gas for

17289-470: The investigation and trial of Serbians linked to the assassination. Claiming this amounted to rejection, Austria broke off diplomatic relations and ordered partial mobilisation the next day; on 28 July, they declared war on Serbia and began shelling Belgrade . Russia ordered general mobilization in support of Serbia on 30 July. Anxious to ensure backing from the SPD political opposition by presenting Russia as

17442-405: The lack of favored industries were the primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against. Lewis Siegelbaum , Professor of History at Michigan State University , states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest

17595-493: The law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide ." During the Soviet famine of 1930–1933 , Ukraine , Kazakhstan and some densely populated regions of Russia were all affected, but the highest number of deaths occurred in Ukraine. The events which occurred there are referred to as the Holodomor and they are also recognised as

17748-629: The line, but these forces were too weak to re-establish a front. Genocides in history (World War I through World War II) Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part . The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin . It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of

17901-785: The long-standing balance of power in Europe, as well as economic competition between nations triggered by industrialisation and imperialism . Growing tensions between the great powers and in the Balkans reached a breaking point on 28 June 1914, when a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand , heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Austria-Hungary held Serbia responsible, and declared war on 28 July. After Russia mobilised in Serbia's defence, Germany declared war on Russia and France , who had an alliance . The United Kingdom entered after Germany invaded Belgium , whose neutrality it guaranteed, and

18054-430: The matter". Karol Karski argues that the Soviet actions against Poles are genocide according to international law. He says that while the extermination was targeting other nationalities as well and according to the criteria other than ethnicity, but as long as Poles were singled out basing on their ethnicity, that makes the actions to be genocide. The historian Terry Martin, refers to the "national operations", including

18207-623: The military campaign in China was "undoubtedly genocidal", with Nanjing being a typical example of a genocidal massacre. The Three Alls policy was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three "alls" being "kill all, burn all, loot all". This policy was designed as retaliation against the Chinese for the Communist -led Hundred Regiments Offensive in December 1940. According to American historian Herbert Bix ,

18360-475: The need for industrialization. This idea was supported by most of the party in the 1920s. The tribute collected by the party took on the form of a virtual war against the peasantry that would lead to its cultural destruction and the relegating of the countryside to essentially a colony homogenized to the urban culture of the Soviet elite. This campaign of "colonizing" the peasantry had its roots both in old Russian Imperialism and modern social engineering of

18513-465: The ocean, even to neutral ships. Since there was limited response to this tactic, Germany expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare. The Battle of Jutland in May/June 1916 was the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war, and one of the largest in history. The clash was indecisive, though the Germans inflicted more damage than they received; thereafter the bulk of

18666-453: The passage of supplies to Russia, and some limited shiopments were made. [...] More promising was the effort to build a seven hundred-mile railway from the ice-free Kola Inlet to the northern terminus of the Russian rail system. The Russian Council of Ministers had funded the effort in December 1914, and construction on each of the three major sections began in 1915. [...] The line was eventually opened on November 28, 1916, too late to impact

18819-548: The perpetrator." In literature, some scholars have popularly emphasized the role that the Soviet Union played in excluding political groups from the international definition of genocide, which is contained in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in particular they have written that Joseph Stalin may have feared greater international scrutiny of the political killings that occurred in the country, such as

18972-801: The protection of the " cruiser rules ", which demanded warning and movement of crews to "a place of safety" (a standard that lifeboats did not meet). Finally, in early 1917, Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare , realising the Americans would eventually enter the war. Germany sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the United States could transport a large army overseas, but, after initial successes, eventually failed to do so. The U-boat threat lessened in 1917, when merchant ships began travelling in convoys , escorted by destroyers . This tactic made it difficult for U-boats to find targets, which significantly lessened losses; after

19125-594: The prototype of the Three Alls policy policy were the "annihilation campaigns" launched in late 1938 by the North China Area Army to "pacify" the Hebei province, which was a hotbed of guerrilla resistance. Emperor Hirohito gave his approval of the "annihilation campaign" in an order he signed on 2 December 1938. In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls policy

19278-688: The rule of the Turkish National Movement during the Greco-Turkish War phase of the Turkish War of Independence. George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, among other diplomats, documented the massacres and deportations of Greeks during the post-Armistice period. Estimates of the number of Anatolian Greeks who were killed range from 348,000 to 900,000. The Assyrian genocide (also known as

19431-441: The same. This move was opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament, especially the Communists . A Ukrainian court found Joseph Stalin , Vyacheslav Molotov , Lazar Kaganovich , Genrikh Yagoda , Yakov Yakovlev , Stanislav Kosior , Pavel Postyshev , Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich posthumously guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010. As of 2010, the Russian government's official position

19584-403: The sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland". Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Pyotr Grigorenko both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in

19737-432: The several different nationalities targeted in the Great Terror (e.g., Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Belarusians), "ethnic Poles suffered more than any other group." In 1940 the Soviets also killed thousands of Polish POWs , among about 22,000 Polish citizens shot in the Katyn forest and other places. The decree on the deportation of Volga Germans was published on 28 August 1941. Men aged 15–55 and later women between

19890-421: The spurious grounds that theirs was a disloyal ethnicity, Stalin spoke of "Polish filth"." Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s "genocidal" but did not consider the entire Great Purge genocidal since it targeted political opponents as well. Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a similar opinion. In practice abandoning its 'official socialist' ideology of the "fraternity of peoples",

20043-419: The start of another genocide. Added to the killing of the Forest Brethren and the renewed Dekulakization which followed the Soviet reconquest of the Baltic states at the end of World War II , the total number of people who were deported to Siberia consisted of 118,559 Lithuanians , 52,541 Latvians, and 32,540 Estonians . The high death rate of the deportees during their first few years in exile, caused by

20196-415: The term First World War was in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel who stated, "There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word." For much of the 19th century, the major European powers maintained a tenuous balance of power , known as the Concert of Europe . After 1848, this

20349-584: The threat posed by the closing of this gap was more important than competing with the Royal Navy. After Germany expanded its standing army by 170,000 troops in 1913, France extended compulsory military service from two to three years; similar measures were taken by the Balkan powers and Italy, which led to increased expenditure by the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary. Absolute figures are difficult to calculate due to differences in categorising expenditure since they often omit civilian infrastructure projects like railways which had logistical importance and military use. It

20502-429: The war ended with the Armistice of 11 November 1918 . The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 imposed settlements on the defeated powers, most notably the Treaty of Versailles , by which Germany lost significant territories, was disarmed, and was required to pay large war reparations to the Allies. The dissolution of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires redrew national boundaries and resulted in

20655-413: The war involved British, French, and German colonial forces in Africa. On 6–7 August, French and British troops invaded the German protectorates of Togoland and Kamerun . On 10 August, German forces in South-West Africa attacked South Africa; sporadic and fierce fighting continued for the rest of the war. The German colonial forces in German East Africa , led by Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck , fought

20808-418: The west , which despite initial successes left the German Army exhausted and demoralised. A successful Allied counter-offensive from August 1918 caused a collapse of the German front line. By early November, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary had each signed armistices with the Allies, leaving Germany isolated. Facing a revolution at home , Kaiser Wilhelm   II abdicated on 9 November, and

20961-435: The worst part of the collectivization process rather than the European sections of the country. Regarding the Kazakh catastrophe, Michael Ellman states that it "seems to be an example of 'negligent genocide' which falls outside the scope of the UN Convention". However, historian Robert Kindler refuses to call the famine a genocide, claiming that doing so masks the culpability of lower-level cadres who were locally rooted among

21114-404: The year none had been convicted. In 2007 Estonia charged Arnold Meri (then 88 years old), a former Soviet Communist Party official and highly decorated former Red Army soldier, with genocide. Shortly after the trial opened, it was suspended because of Meri's frail health and then abandoned when he died. A memorial in Vilnius, Lithuania, is dedicated to genocidal victims of Stalin and Hitler, and

21267-400: Was 62,000. According to other historians, the real death toll is many times higher. For example, one paper estimates over 14% of the Krasnodar Oblast which roughly includes the Kuban perished due to the famine. The self-identification of the Ukrainian population of Kuban decreased from 915,000 in 1926, to 150,000 in 1939. According to some scholars, collectivization in the Soviet Union and

21420-410: Was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers . Fighting took place mainly in Europe and the Middle East , as well as in parts of Africa and the Asia-Pacific , and in Europe was characterised by trench warfare ; the widespread use of artillery , machine guns, and chemical weapons (gas); and the introductions of tanks and aircraft . World War I

21573-402: Was a period of mass starvation on Mount Lebanon during from 1915 to 1918 that resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people, most of whom were Maronite Christians . Natural as well as man-made factors both played a role. Allied forces blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, in order to strangle the economy and weaken

21726-493: Was a series of events triggered by the Russian Revolution in the 20th century, in which the Soviet Union deported, imprisoned and killed Ingrians and destroyed their culture. In the process, Ingria , in the historical sense of the word, ceased to exist. Before the persecution there were 140,000 to 160,000 Ingrians in Russia and today approximately 19,000 (including several thousand repatriated since 1990. ). Multiple documented instances of unnatural mass death occurred in

21879-488: Was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians . The Nanshitou Massacre was large-scale unnatural deaths among the refugees detained by the Imperial Japanese Army and Wang Jingwei regime at the Nanshitou Refugee Camp in Guangzhou , China, between 1942 and 1945. The event was triggered by the Japanese expulsion of Chinese residents from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong in 1942, which resulted in refugees crowding into

22032-403: Was challenged by Britain's withdrawal into so-called splendid isolation , the decline of the Ottoman Empire , New Imperialism , and the rise of Prussia under Otto von Bismarck . Victory in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War allowed Bismarck to consolidate a German Empire . Post-1871, the primary aim of French policy was to avenge this defeat, but by the early 1890s, this had switched to

22185-561: Was forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman ( Turkish and allied Kurdish ) forces between 1914 and 1920. This genocide paralleled the Armenian genocide and Greek genocide . The Assyro-Chaldean National Council stated in a 4 December 1922, memorandum that the total death toll is unknown, but it estimated that about 750,000 Assyrians were murdered between 1914 and 1918. The Armenian genocide ( Armenian : Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն , translit.: Hayots' Ts'eġaspanout'youn ; Turkish : Ermeni Soykırımı and Ermeni Kıyımı ) refers to

22338-415: Was one of the deadliest conflicts in history , resulting in an estimated 10 million military dead and more than 20 million wounded , plus some 10 million civilian dead from causes including genocide . The movement of large numbers of people was a major factor in the deadly Spanish flu pandemic. The causes of World War I included the rise of Germany and decline of the Ottoman Empire , which disturbed

22491-414: Was ordered by governor Mehmed Reshid , partly with the backing of the CUP Central Committee . According to historian David Gaunt , "These figures indicate that although the eradication of the Assyrian [Syriac] population was extreme, it was still not as total as for the Armenians." According to historian Uğur Ümit Üngör , "all Christian communities of Diyarbekir were equally hit by the genocide, although

22644-568: Was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian , regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which were correlated to

22797-654: Was refused. Early on the morning of 4   August, the Germans invaded, and Albert I of Belgium called for assistance under the Treaty of London . Britain sent Germany an ultimatum demanding they withdraw from Belgium; when this expired at midnight, without a response, the two empires were at war. Germany promised to support Austria-Hungary's invasion of Serbia, but interpretations of what this meant differed. Previously tested deployment plans had been replaced early in 1914, but those had never been tested in exercises. Austro-Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover its northern flank against Russia. Beginning on 12 August,

22950-600: Was returning to Germany when it sank two British armoured cruisers at the Battle of Coronel in November 1914, before being virtually destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December. The SMS Dresden escaped with a few auxiliaries, but after the Battle of Más a Tierra , these too were either destroyed or interned. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Britain began a naval blockade of Germany . This proved effective in cutting off vital supplies, though it violated accepted international law. Britain also mined international waters which closed off entire sections of

23103-444: Was served by a single narrow gauge line, which resulted in tremendous backlogs of stores. While the closure of the port each year during the late winter offered the opportunity to clear out the accumulation, the excess continued to grow. [...] The Allies desperately wanted to avoid the White Sea closure by using the warm water ports of the western Murman Coast or Norway. Throughout the war, the British government pressured Sweden to permit

23256-432: Was that the famine took place, but it was not an ethnic genocide; former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych supported this position. A ruling of 12 January 2010 by Kyiv's Court of Appeal declared the Soviet leaders guilty of "genocide against the Ukrainian national group in 1932–33 through the artificial creation of living conditions intended for its partial physical destruction." Some historians and scholars consider

23409-586: Was the foundation of German foreign policy but in 1890, he was forced to retire by Wilhelm II . The latter was persuaded not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty by his new Chancellor , Leo von Caprivi . This gave France an opening to agree the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894, which was then followed by the 1904 Entente Cordiale with Britain. The Triple Entente was completed by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention . While not formal alliances, by settling long-standing colonial disputes in Asia and Africa, British support for France or Russia in any future conflict became

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