Read the German row twice. The Germany that built the High Seas Fleet spent about 4% of its economy on its military. The Germany of 1938 spent seventeen. Today’s Germany spends 2.3% — still below the Kaiser’s.

Sources. 1910–13: Max-Stephan Schulze, ‘Austria-Hungary’s economy in World War I’, in Broadberry & Harrison (eds), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 78, as tabulated by Felix Butschek in 1914-1918-online — defence expenditure as a share of gross national product, averaged over 1910–13. Japan and the United States: Jari Eloranta, doctoral dissertation (European University Institute, 2002), Table 10, period means. 1938: Richard Overy, The Origins of the Second World War, Table 1; Mark Harrison, Economic History Review 41:2 (1988); Eloranta. 2025: SIPRI, April 2026.

The pre-1914 column is a four-year average, not a single year. No annual military-burden series for the great powers is available in open sources; the only published one sits in David Stevenson’s Armaments and the Coming of War (1996), p. 6, which we could not obtain. Averaging 1910–13 also avoids the Boer War and Russo-Japanese War distortions that make 1900–05 unusable.

Germany before 1914 is contested, and the range runs 3% to 4.7%. Richard Overy puts it at 3% of GNP; Schulze’s series gives 4.2% for 1910–13; Lutz Köllner gives 4.7% of net national product for 1913 alone. The differences are about coverage — whether military pensions, debt service on military loans and strategic railways are counted. We print Schulze’s 4.2% because it is the only figure derived on a consistent basis across all six European powers. Every number in the range is comfortably above today’s 2.3%.

The 1938 German figure is disputed too. Published estimates run from 14.6% to 19–20%: Eloranta gives 14.6% in 2017 and 18.9% in 2005 from the same dataset; Harrison gives 17%; Overy 17.2%; Adam Tooze 19–20%. We print 17%, the middle of the range.

Denominators differ between sources — GDP, GNP, net national product and, for the Soviet Union, net material product are not the same thing, and pre-1945 national income estimates are themselves reconstructions.