For those who enjoyed iDose’s full interview with Dr. Susan Kingsley Kent, we’ve provided a bonus question that is a must read for anyone interested in the political consequences of the 1918/1919 Influenza.

Aly Kamadia: There were many political consequences that resulted from the 1918/1919 Influenza. In no course that I ever took on the subject of World War 1 and 2 (whether in high school or University), was the Pandemic mentioned to any significant degree, let alone noted as a factor that may have led to Hitler’s rise. Do you mind commenting on some of the consequences in the interwar period?

Susan Kingsley Kent: The major politicians charged with creating the peace settlement after World War 1 —Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and George Clemenceau—all fell victim to the flu.  The physical and mental debilitation suffered by Wilson, in particular, played an important role in producing the kind of peace enshrined in the Versailles Treaty, whose punitive nature contributed to the acceptance of fascism in Germany.  

In January 1918, Wilson had issued his Fourteen Points, principles according to which peace between the belligerent countries should be forged; it was on the basis of the Fourteen Points that Germany had signed the Armistice in November 1918.  Clemenceau and Lloyd George had different ideas about peace terms, looking to impose on their defeated enemy measures that would (1) require German to pay reparations:  that is, pay the Allies for the costs they had incurred in prosecuting the war; and (2) permit the Allies to occupy the Rhineland and the Saar Basin, resource-rich areas of Germany.  Wilson determined to defeat such punitive measures and to ensure the creation of a just peace.

When delegates to the peace conference arrived in Paris in the spring of 1919, the third wave of the flu had just peaked.  Many of the chief actors and their behind-the-scenes aides fell ill with the disease.  Disease continued into April, and struck Wilson at a particularly difficult moment in negotiations.  He and Clemenceau had parted ways over the issues of reparations and French annexation of the Saar Basin, and on April 3, it appeared that Wilson might walk out of the talks.  That night, he suddenly came down with the flu, producing a temperature of 103 degrees, a cough so extreme that he could hardly breath, and debilitating diarrheal cramps.  His physician, Admiral Cary Grayson, feared he might lose him that night.  He didn’t, but over the next five days, Wilson lay prostrate, unable to get out of bed.

Ten days after he fell ill, the difficulties standing in the way of an Anglo-American-French agreement on reparations, occupation of the Rhineland, and annexation of the Saar Basin were resolved.  France did not get all that it had asked for—the occupation of the Rhineland would last only fifteen years; the annexation of the Saar would be administered by the League of Nations for a period of fifteen years—but of all the concessions that had been granted, Wilson lost by far the greatest number.  Virtually none of his Fourteen Points save the establishment of a League of Nations survived, and the treaty that was forced upon the Germans contained a number of harsh terms.  

The loss of the Rhineland and the Saar meant that Germany’s economic recovery would be considerably hampered.   Article 231, the so-called “war guilt” clause, compelled Germany to accept “the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies,” legitimating the imposition of heavy reparations payments.   Germany was forced to demilitarize and to cede significant amounts of territory containing German populations.  German colonies were ostensibly placed under the “mandate” of the League, but were effectively handed over to Britain and France.   Wilson’s “peace without victory” lay in tatters.

People close to Wilson attributed his failure to insist upon his principles to the effects of the flu.  Not only did the disease weaken him physically, it seems also to have produced the same mental symptoms of depression, disorientation, and delusion we saw above.  “I never knew the President to be in such a difficult frame of mind as he is now,” wrote his secretary, Gilbert Close, on April 7, 1919.  “Even while lying in bed he manifested peculiarities.”  Wilson’s Secret Service agent observed that “he never did regain his physical strength, and his weakness of body naturally reacted upon his mind.  He lacked his old quickness of grasp.”  Lacking the energy, the intellectual capacity, and even the interest to continue his battle with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, he simply gave in, and assented to a peace so unjust that, he told an aide in early May, “if I were a German, I think I should not sign it.”  

Faced with the prospect of a continuing Allied blockade that had reduced the German civilian population to starvation, German officials had no choice but to sign.  The humiliations and material deprivations forced upon the German people by the Versailles Treaty gave ammunition to anti-democratic forces in Germany that would ultimately allow for the rise of Nazism and the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

This is not to suggest that the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 brought about the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II.  That would be far too direct a connection and cannot be sustained by the evidence.  But the epidemic may well have had a significant effect on the outcome of the peace settlement following World War I, and its potential role should not go unremarked.

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Dr. Susan Kingsley Kent is Arts and Sciences Professor of Distinction in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder (also current Chair of the Department of Religious Studies)

Aly Kamadia is the Editor-In-Chief of iDose. To read selected articles by Kamadia, click here.  

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