Installment #63: The new military spending bill presented to the German Reichstag on March 1, 1913, arrived in a climate of growing fear. In a speech urging the Reichstag to vote for the bill on April 7, 1913, German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg (pictured) warned that Austria-Hungary – Germany’s only real ally – faced an existential threat from the rise of Slavic power in the Balkans in the First Balkan War, and predicted a “life and death struggle” between “Germanism” and “Slavism.”... READ ON