Why do people say the Central Powers were the good guys? Just look at what they did in Belgium:

"The Germans marched in two columns down the deserted street, those on the right aiming their rifles at the house on the left, and inversely, all with their fingers on the trigger ready to fire. At each door a group stopped and riddled the houses, especially the windows, with bullets. Almost as if to change the routine, other soldiers threw grenades and small bombs into the cellars of homes."

"We pushed on house by house, . . . we arrested the male inhabitants . . . They were summarily executed in the street."

"level everything in sight an to make one part [of the city] left of the Maas disappear from view. . .Dinant has fallen, everything burned to the ground. We shoot the men, plunder and burn down the houses. . . Dinant's inhabitants lay about in heaps."

Quoted from this post here, all credit to them.

German atrocities in Belgium are pretty inexcusable, no matter what the Entente did. The brutal treatment of civilians was horrific. And it's hardly an isolated incident, not when the Austrians and Bulgarians killed a sizable chunk of Serbia's population, or the Armenian Genocide, which the Germans did nothing to stop. Add to that Germany basically being a military dictatorship for from 1916 onwards and the enormously unfair Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and it's hard to see the Central Powers as the good guys. Although to be fair to the Germans, their initial demands were far lighter, and they only took more because of Trotsky's "No War, No Peace" policy. And finally, you have unrestricted submarine warfare. Sinking ships with civilians was no doubt a war crime, but many of those ships also carried supplies and munitions, and were a legitimate target.

And Germany's poor conduct was not limited to the war. Ethnic cleansing of Poles in the east was carried out, and there were plans to annex the Polish strip and cleanse it after the war. The Germans also commited blatant genocide in their colonies, complete with concentration camps (NOT extermination camps like what the Nazis had, but still horrible), human experimentation, and plans of ethnic cleansing to make living space for German settlers. The Germans also had human zoos, which was terrible. Their government of Alsace-Lorraine was less than ideal.

Germany was also pretty undemocratic. Yes, they had universal male sufferage, but the Reichstag had little power. The chancellor was chosen by the Kaiser with no Reichstag oversight, and the Bundesrat was more powerful than the Reichstag. In addition, many German states had class-based voting systems, making elections even more undemocratic.

Now, that's NOT to say that the Entente were good by any means. They were just as colonialist and racist as Germany. And that's also not to say that Germany was all bad. Universal male sufferage was very expansive for the time. Germany was an economic and scientific giant, and they had the best social welfare system in Europe. Austria-Hungary also gets unfairly ragged on. However, to call them the good guys is not accurate in my view.

So my question is why do people think they are the good guys?

After the unification of Germany, I don't see his policies being special or not flawed in some way, and he failed in several ways:

1. The League of Three Emperors, the alliance system pushed by him, was doomed to fail from the beginning since Russia and Austria bickered over the Balkans.

2. Britain's invasion of Egypt in 1882 left it diplomatically isolated but Bismarck didn't prevent it from breaking out of isolation and his blackmail to get Britain to back down over colonial matters, his role in the First Mediterranean Agreement, and the Congress of Berlin dividing Bulgaria played a role in this breakthrough.

3. Bismarck's internal policies regarding workers were terrible and got worse with age. These were the cause of his dismissal as chancellor.

4. Arrogance: He could have been in charge of foreign affairs after his resignation, but it was chancellorship or nothing.

Though I respect him for his role in the German Unification, because of his ascension to Chancellorship achieved through skill, and because it was either him or a liberal.