World War I
Read this overview of World War I. One of the important areas it covers is the "social trauma" brought on by the war and the difficulty of recovery from the conflict.
End of War
Front page of the New York Times on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.
The collapse of the Central Powers came swiftly. Bulgaria was the first to sign an armistice (September 29, 1918). Faced with the opening of a second front in the Austrian rear, Ludendorff and Hindenberg demanded that the government pursue a negotiated peace. On October 3 Germany and Austria-Hungary appealed to President Wilson for an immediate armistice. The sailors of Germany's High Seas Fleet mutinied starting October 29, and rebellion quickly spread throughout western Germany. On October 30 the Ottoman Empire capitulated. On November 4 the Armistice with Austria was granted to take effect at 3:00 in the afternoon. Austria and Hungary signed separate armistices following the overthrow of the Habsburg monarchy and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Following the outbreak of the German Revolution, a republic was proclaimed on November 9, marking the end of the monarchy. The Kaiser fled the next day to the neutral Netherlands, which granted him political asylum.
On November 11 an armistice with Germany was signed in a railroad carriage at Compiègne in France where Germans had previously dictated terms to France, ending the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, a ceasefire came into effect and the opposing armies on the Western Front began to withdraw from their positions. Canadian George Lawrence Price is traditionally regarded as the last soldier killed in the Great War: he was shot by a German sniper and died at 10:58 a.m.
A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months until it was finally ended by the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, with Germany, and the following treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and The Ottoman Empire signed at St. Germain, Trianon, Neuilly, and Sèvres respectively. However, the latter treaty with the Ottoman Empire was followed by strife (the Turkish Independence War) and a final peace treaty was signed between the Allied Powers and the country that would shortly become the Republic of Turkey, at Lausanne on July 24, 1923.
Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles treaty was signed in 1919; by contrast, most commemorations of the war's end concentrate on the armistice of November 11, 1918. Legally the last formal peace treaties were not signed until 1923.