4.32 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 5/27)

In spite of all, many groups still worked for the unification of Germany. Some 600 delegates from various states met at Frankfurt in 1848, but the delegates got bogged down in too many problems of nationality, cross-purposes, etc. and this, as well as the revolutions, failed at that time. Because of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Karl Marx was stimulated to write the Communist Manifesto, with the help of Engles. Actually the final unification of Germany involved three wars. The first was Prussia against Denmark. In 1861 King Wilhelm I came to the throne of Prussia and chose Count Otto von Bismarck-Schonhousen as his chief minister. In 1862 Bismarck dismissed the Prussian parliament, allied with Austria and attacked Denmark, taking Schleswig-Holstein in 1864. The "Seven Weeks War" followed in 2 years, with three theaters: (1) Italy, in which the Italians were defeated on both land and sea; (2) Germany, involving defeat of the Hanoverians; and (3) Bohemia, where the Austrians came to the Bohemians' aid. (Ref. 119 ) In that war Helmut von Moltke showed how the aristocratic General Staff planners could speed up and control deployment of vast numbers of men by carefully calculating everything ahead of time. In addition, the use of breech-loading rifles for the first time (after 26 years of transition) and the probable use of Alfred Krupp's breech-loading steel artillery must have played large roles. The Austrians, however, had 736 new rifled cannon and 58 smooth-bores to the Prussians' 492 rifled and 306 smooth-bores. The Austrians lost the Battle of Koenig-graetz because they had their infantry charge the foe in dense columnar formations. (Ref. 279 ) At the end of that conflict Prussia annexed Hanover and other German states, abolishing the Bund and forming a new North German Confederation. Bohemia, Austria, Bavaria, Wuerttemburg, Hohenzollern Baden, Palatinate and Alsace-Lorraine were not included in that confederation. Bismarck and Moltke shared the glory of that political reorganization of Germany with King Wilhelm. (Ref. 279 )

The third war was the Franco-German War of 1870-71 which was easily won by Bismarck