GERMANY: THE TRAGEDY OF PROFESSIONAL MILITARISM
THE IMPERIAL BALANCE, 1871–1914. Imperial civil-military relations between 1871 and 1914 reflected an extraordinary degree of objective civilian control and military professionalism founded upon a high level and restricted scope of military authority, a broad and gradually changing base of military political influence, and a sympathetically conservative national ideology. In the last decades of this era, however, changes in the national environment began to undermine this balance, and eventually it was completely destroyed in World War I.
Military Professionalism. Modern Germany inherited from Prussia the most professional officer corps in Europe. Its central elements were the General Staff, with its scientific and rational approach to military operations, and the Kriegsakademie where officers were trained in the science of war for the staff corps and high command. Supporting these were the systems of entry and initial training requiring both specialized and general education. Nowhere was war taken more seriously and studied more carefully than in the German military schools and staff offices. Superb technical competence, high intellectual achievement, unwavering devotion to duty — these were the characteristics of the General Staff Corps in particular and, to a greater or lesser degree, of the officer corps as a whole. The preëminence of German professionalism was conceded by the soldiers and statesmen of other powers, large and small, advanced and primitive, who eagerly attempted to model their own military institutions upon the German original.
German institutional professionalism had its counterpart in the dominance of the professional ethic in the German military mind. On War was the bible of the officer corps. The two outstanding military leaders of the Empire — von Moltke who was Chief of Staff from 1857 to 1888 and von Schlieffen who occupied the same post from 1891 to 1905 — were both disciples of Clausewitz. Their thinking, writing, and behavior set the intellectual and moral tone of the officer corps. Under their influence the values and attitudes of the German military probably came closer to approximating the ideal-type military ethic than those of any other officer corps in history. The strength of these professional values was reflected in the views of the officers on the two cardinal points of civilian control and the role of war in national policy.
It was accepted gospel in the officer corps that war was an instrument of politics and that therefore the soldier was the junior partner of the statesman. Even von Bernhardi, more politically oriented than most officers, adhered to this basic dogma. Both Moltke and Schlieffen recognized the separate identity and close relationship of politics and war. Moltke was more politically aware than Schlieffen but he had no political ambitions and restricted himself to vigorous presentation of the military viewpoint. His guiding ideal was that of an unpolitical army.
The commander in his operations [Moltke declared] has to keep military victory as the goal before his eyes. But what statesmanship does with his victories or defeats is not his province. It is that of the statesman.1
Even more than Moltke, Schlieffen avoided politics and devoted himself and the General Staff to strictly military matters. He was the military technician par excellence. The rationalism of German military thought also did not permit the glorification of war as an end in itself. War was inevitable — no one would dispute that — but it was also undesirable. Man simply had to endure it: “want and misery,” said Moltke, “disease and suffering and war are all permanent elements in man’s destiny and nature.”2 Along with most of his military associates, Moltke believed that war for Germany would be a “national misfortune.” Yet, in 1875 and 1887 he supported war with France and Russia respectively as necessary to protect German military security. He always viewed the issue from this vantage point; his approach was that of the rational pessimist rather than the utopian romantic. Elements in the naval officer corps, which had been born of imperialistic yearnings and which, as a younger service, had not yet been completely differentiated from the society which created it, were at times inclined toward bellicosity and imperialism. The army leaders, however, almost unanimously opposed both tendencies. The army was, as Vagts says, “non-aggressive before 1914 except in its strategy.” That strategy was designed to cope with what the military viewed as the nightmare situation of a two-front war which would require a quick and decisive victory on one front. As the General Staff declared in a confidential statement of 1902:
We want to conquer nothing, we merely want to defend what we own. We shall probably never be attackers but rather always be the attacked. The necessary quick success can be brought us with certainty only by the offensive.3
The German military indeed manifested an almost pathological concern for national security. Far from advocating war, the military leaders generally viewed it as the last resort of policy and looked forward to it with gloomy forebodings and feverish preparations.
Governmental Authority. The structure of governmental authority which helped maintain German professionalism was a unique combination of three elements. First, the scope of military authority was strictly limited to military affairs. The military played no role in determining domestic economic policies. Foreign policy was the concern of the Chancellor and Foreign Minister. The General Staff stuck to strictly military matters. As was natural and proper, the Chief of Staff and War Minister presented the military view on foreign policy. As was also natural and proper, their opinions usually differed from those of the civilian authorities. In the end, however, the civilians, not the generals, made the decisions. Bismarck, for instance, rejected Moltke’s advice on the peace treaties with Austria and France and on Russian policy in the 1880’s. The only officer who continually exceeded a professional role in foreign policy was Admiral von Tirpitz, and he was generally viewed by the other admirals as an essentially political figure. On the whole, however, the military were confined to their own sphere by the horizontal control of other vigorous offices and officials occupying the areas into which they might be tempted to expand their power.
A second factor restricting military power was the relative unity of civilian and military authority. Civilian power was concentrated in the hands of the Kaiser and his Chancellor while military authority was divided among a multiplicity of offices. The Reichstag never played more than a mildly harassing role in military affairs, and its efforts to increase parliamentary control over military policy were never strong enough to undermine civilian control. The officer corps, moreover, was unconditionally pledged to the Emperor, and, by so binding itself, foreswore the possibilities of enhancing its power by playing executive off against legislature. Military authority, on the other hand, was divided first between the army and navy and then further subdivided within each service. Each had a tripartite headquarters organization consisting of: (1) a ministry, normally headed by a professional officer, and concerned with the administrative, political, and logistical aspects of the service; (2) a cabinet, also headed by an officer, and occupied with personnel matters; and (3) a staff, devoted to the planning of military operations. None of these headquarters had command authority over the fleets and army corps. Consequently, the six chiefs of the headquarters offices, plus the commanding generals and commanding admirals, all reported directly to the Kaiser, who was thus able to pick and choose from the military advice offered him. In addition, there was considerable rivalry in the army among the War Ministry, the Military Cabinet, and the General Staff. The Ministry had initially been the dominant institution, but in the course of the nineteenth century, first the Military Cabinet and then the General Staff acquired preëminence. Eventually, of course, the General Staff was to dominate completely. But, until World War I, an uneasy balance of authority existed among these three military offices.
The effects of the limited scope and multiplicity of military authority were counterbalanced by the high level of that authority. All the top military leaders had the right of direct access (Immediatstellung) to the Kaiser as Supreme War Lord which weakened vertical controls over the military. Since the Kaise
r was dependent upon their advice, the military chiefs, except to the extent that they disagreed among themselves, possessed almost complete autonomy and could run their institutions without external interference. While the limited scope of military authority and the unity of civilian power kept the military out of politics, the direct access of the military to the Kaiser kept the politicians out of the military. All in all, given the ideological climate of the times, the entire pattern of authority was uniquely suited to maximize civilian control and military professionalism.
Political Influence. The political influence of the imperial officer corps had three significant aspects: (1) the gradual weakening of the affiliations of the corps with the Junker aristocracy; (2) the temporary incursion of military leaders into politics in the years from 1888 to 1897; and (3) the widespread popularity of the military leaders and the prestige of the military career among the German people.
In the decade of the wars of unification, over two-thirds of the officer corps had been drawn from the aristocracy. The Empire witnessed a steady decline in this proportion as the middle classes successfully asserted their claim to the military career. In 1905, of 102 officers serving with the General Staff, 44, including such future lights as Ludendorff and Gröner, were bourgeois in origin. By 1913 these elements furnished 70 per cent of the entire officer corps.4 The tremendous naval expansion undertaken after 1890 also increased the size and influence of the naval officer corps, which was much more closely linked with bourgeois than aristocratic groups. The weakening of the ties between the officer corps and the aristocracy aided professionalism, on the one hand, in that it reduced the likelihood that the military interests would be subordinated to class interests. On the other hand, the Junker outlook was highly conservative and sympathetic to the military viewpoint, and the decrease of military affiliations with that group made the military more dependent on general public opinion which was less definitely conservative and more susceptible to change.
During the Empire few individuals crossed the line between the military profession and politics in either direction. The significant exceptions to this occurred in the years from 1888 to 1897 when a vacuum of civilian political leadership developed which various military figures moved in to fill. This situation was caused by the coincidence of the death of the Kaiser in 1888, the retirement of Moltke in the same year, and the retirement of Bismarck in 1890. The new young monarch had a predilection for personal rule, little respect for the responsibilities and functions of his constitutional advisers, and an intense personal fondness for soldiers and military folderol. Moltke’s place was taken by Waldersee, one soldier with political skills and political ambitions, and who, as a favorite of the new monarch, was only too anxious to exert his influence in a variety of fields. He was instrumental in bringing about Bismarck’s fall in 1890 and his replacement by another general, Leo von Caprivi. Significantly, it was Waldersee, soldier turned politician, who rejected the two fundamental elements of the military ethic. He was the leading advocate of preventive war and he also entertained the idea of a military coup d’état. However, it was not long before he lost favor with the Kaiser; he was fired at the beginning of 1891, and retired to nurture dreams of returning to power as a military strong man. His thirty months as Chief of Staff contrast with the thirty-two years Moltke held the job and the fourteen years of his successor Schlieffen. He was fundamentally out of place in the imperial officer corps, but he was the forerunner of military politicians such as Schleicher, Reichenau, and Blomberg in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Caprivi, who actively opposed much of Waldersee’s wildness, was replaced as Chancellor in 1894, and by 1897 civilian statesmen had resumed political leadership. With Schlieffen’s exclusive concern with technical matters the influence of the military retired within professional boundaries.
Decreasing affiliation with the aristocracy was more than compensated for in the years after 1871 by the great popularity of the military with the people as a whole. This stemmed from the great victories of 1866 and 1870 which made Moltke a national hero and permitted a steady increase in military budgets down to World War I. In no other modern western society for such an extended peacetime period have the military career and the military officer had the popular prestige which they had in Wilhelmine Germany. The soldier was “without any challenge, the first man in the State,” and the General Staff was held in awe as the oracle of military wisdom and guarantor of state security. “The military man now seemed to be a consecrated spirit — the lieutenant moved through the world as a young god and the civilian reserve lieutenant as a demigod.”5
Popular Attitudes. The widespread popularity of the military furnished a firm basis for military professionalism so long as the popular mind remained sympathetic to the military ethic. The military were as popular in 1914 as they had been in 1880. The intellectual climate of 1914, however, differed significantly from that of 1880. Subtle forces had drastically altered the value structure of the German nation. As a result, military popularity became a threat rather than an aid to professionalism. A limited and conservative ideology had given way to one which was nationalistic and aggressive. Materialism, bellicosity, the glorification of violence and war, worship of naked Macht superseded the more reasonable, idealistic, and humane elements in the German spirit. Mommsen, Droysen, Sybel, Treitschke, Nietzsche supplanted Goethe, Schiller, Kant — and Clausewitz. War and power became ends in themselves and the man of power consequently was viewed not as the servant of the state but rather as the embodiment of the state. The state was power, and power alone; war was, in Treitschke’s phrase “political science par excellence,” the mainspring of progress and national realization. “Germany,” as Paulsen observed, “has been called the nation of poets and thinkers, but to-day it may be called the nation of masterful combatants, as it originally appeared in history.”6
The ideology of bellicosity was spawned by the universities and embraced by the German people. Its influence was felt in all segments of society. Only the intense adherence of the officers to the military ethic rendered the corps relatively immune down to World War I. Nonetheless the new ideas did make themselves felt about the fringes of the military profession. The navy was a product of the age and susceptible to philosophies of nationalism and expansion. Military officers turned popular writers such as von der Goltz and Bernhardi catered to the bellicose sentiments of the people. They found support with the latter which they did not find with the General Staff, which rejected them and their views. The bulk of the army officer corps, however, was true to the military ethic and rejected the power ethic. In the face of the intellectual and moral deterioration of Germany, it adhered to the old ideas and, in Rosinski’s phrase, remained like a “monolithic block in a changing landscape.”7 It was in many respects the last social institution to abandon the conservative morality. Yet the new popular ideology was undermining that balance of power and professionalism which had been the essence of its existence.
WORLD WAR I: MILITARY DICTATORSHIP, 1914–1918. The First World War saw the complete destruction of the imperial balance in civil-military relations. By the end of the war the General Staff was running the German government. Coincidentally, the military leaders abandoned their adherence to military ideals. This German experience well illustrated the difficulties which arise from the conduct of a major war by a nonconservative state. Battle transforms generals into heroes; the heroes transform themselves into politicians; and the result is a loss of professional military restraint and caution.
The involvement of the General Staff in politics began during von Falkenhayn’s tenure as its chief from the fall of 1914 to August 1916. During this period a slow but continuous expansion of military authority and influence took place. This was, however, merely a prelude to the virtually absolute power which Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised in the last two years of the war when the former replaced Falkenhayn and the latter became First Quartermaster General. The fundamental element in this tremendous expansion of military control was t
he unprecedented popularity of the victor of Tannenberg with the German people. He was a national idol whom the Germans trusted implicitly to bring them success. The Hindenburg adulation far surpassed that accorded any other military or political figure in German history, including Moltke and Bismarck. Consequently, he was the ideal fulcrum for Ludendorff and the General Staff to use in increasing their power throughout the government. The threat of resignation was sufficient to control the Kaiser. By brandishing this weapon, Ludendorff was able to force the Emperor to acquiesce to the military views in most of the conflicts between the General Staff and civilian officials. In the summer of 1917 he secured the ouster of Bethmann-Hollweg as Chancellor and his replacement by Michaelis who was acceptable to the military. A few months later Michaelis proved himself incapable of functioning to the satisfaction of his military masters. He was dropped and, upon the recommendation of the High Command, his place was taken by Count von Hertling. Subsequently, in January 1918 Hindenburg and Ludendorff were able to secure the dismissal of the chief of the Emperor’s Civil Cabinet. The other military offices were similarly subordinated to the will of the General Staff.
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