Often enough to make it worthy of attention, one encounters the assertion that the annual peacetime turnover of enlisted men in the eighteenth-century Prussian army amounted to 20 percent or more of the total. As put by Robert Ergang in his recently reprinted biography of Frederick William I: “The enlistment, it is true, was for life, not for a short period. Frederick William's soldier was a miles perpetuus. … Accordingly the number of those mustered out each year was not overwhelming. Nevertheless, the aged and sick who were dismissed each year amounted to about 20 percent of the standing army.” In addition, “the number of deserters … was large. … The total for the entire reign was 30,216, the lowest number in any one year being 401 in 1739.” The same figures can be found in Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army: “In no single year of this reign did fugitives from the army number fewer than 400, and the total number of desertions between 1713 and 1740 was 30,216. More important sources of attrition were age and sickness which led annually to the discharge of 20 per cent, of the effective force.”

The German industrial revolution that transformed the unified Reich into the leading European economic power by the eve of the First World War was accompanied by an equally notable demographic revolution. In 1871 less than a third of the country's population lived in urban areas (population over two thousand); by 1910 more than 60 percent of Germans were city dwellers. That urban growth was brought about by a great internal migration. Among the millions who forsook the countryside for the expanding industrial centers were large numbers of Poles, Reich subjects native to the eastern provinces of Prussia. Thousands of them—perhaps as many as half a million—attracted by jobs in foundries and mines and courted by labor recruiters, migrated to the prototypical German industrial complex, the Ruhr (Ruhrgebiet). There the Poles not only experienced the universal problems of adjustment from rural to urban and preindustrial to industrial patterns, but were also threatened with the loss of ethnic identity.

In August 1914 Kurt Riezler accompanied Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the Supreme Headquarters in Koblenz and Luxembourg. His duties were not clearly defined and included a variety of things: He worked on war aims, parliamentary speeches, revolutionary movements, and domestic political questions. He helped interpret the chancellor's policies to the press, establish guidelines for censorship, and write anonymous articles supporting Bethmann Hollweg's policies. He could be called Bethmann Hollweg's assistant for political warfare.

Unlike most Germans Riezler sensed from the beginning that a German victory was not assured. On August 14, 1914, in his first diary entry after the outbreak of war, he noted that although “everybody was apparently happy to be able for once to dedicate himself unreservedly to a great cause, … no one doubts or appears to consider even for an instant what a gamble war is, especially this war.” Riezler also realized that the “ideas of 1914” would not retain their strength forever. “Just as the storm frightens the vermin out of the air—when it becomes quieter again, everything crawls out of its refuge—and emerges again in the state as well as in individual human beings.” This realization protected Riezler from the naive belief that Germany could bear a long war without an obvious effort to achieve a negotiated peace, without a new European order which at most allowed Germany indirect control, and without domestic political concessions to the German masses.

Among the organizations of the National Socialist Party the Hitler Youth has long been regarded as unique because of its large working-class membership, estimated as high as seventy percent, its egalitarianism, and its espousal of social revolutionary doctrines. The NSDAP, we know, was overwhelmingly a lower Mittelstand entity, being composed principally of small shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants, lower civil servants, and white-collar workers. With the onset of the depression there occurred a fairly large influx of new members from the upper Mittelstand, consisting of independent businessmen and executives, middle and higher ranking civil servants, and members of the academically trained free professions. The arrival of these groups gave the party a somewhat more conservative but also considerably more respectable complexion and contributed much to bring Hitler to power.