Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The shift in the attention of the German public from Russia to Britain was also a symptom of fear; the imperial superpower was, quite simply, by far the most frightening of the Reich’s opponents. The threat that Britain posed was regarded as qualitatively different and far more difficult to overcome than the military challenge from Germany’s continental neighbours. Anxious newspaper columnists, as well as intellectuals, saw the British not as fighters, but rather master puppeteers able to manipulate the European peoples for a quick profit. As the conservative Kölnische Zeitung argued on 30 October, not only was it ‘England’ that had ‘from sheer selfishness stirred up the peoples of the continent into this terrible war’, but Germans, French and Russians had been duped into ‘tearing each other to pieces so that England can rob and steal undisturbed’.80 Moreover, Britons were soon seen to be using their vast empire and international standing to turn the rest of the world against Germany. When Japan declared war on the Reich on 23 August, Britain was widely blamed, and the fall of the Reich’s naval base at Tsingtao in China to Japanese forces at the beginning of November sparked indignation, particularly on the political right. One outraged official publicly suggested that, in protest, newspapers should for a fortnight substitute the words ‘Englishman’ or ‘Japanese’ for ‘murderer’ and ‘murderous bandit’ in their columns.81 While the general public did not participate in such hysteria, events in this hemisphere did not pass unnoticed. The exploits of the German commerce raider, the Emden, which had been stationed at Tsingtao, were followed with enthusiasm. The story of the plucky cruiser, which sank one Russian and one French warship and sixteen British steamers before being hunted down by vastly superior Entente forces, resonated with a public that saw itself as the underdog in the struggle with the global hegemon.82

  The German public’s particular animus against Britain was ensured by the Royal Navy’s long-range, ever-tightening and, by contemporary international law, illegal trade blockade. On its entry into the war, Britain restricted access to the North Sea, instituting checks on shipping passing through the English Channel and posting a force, the X Cruiser Squadron, to patrol between the Shetland islands and Norway. German maritime trade was confined to the Baltic. On 20 August 1914 the British additionally warned that they would stop not only vessels destined for German ports but also any neutral ship carrying so-called ‘conditional contraband’, including food, which was suspected of being ultimately intended for the Reich. This was highly threatening to Germany, for in peacetime its population had been reliant on imports for 19 per cent of the calories it consumed. The country had an even greater need for external sources of protein and fats, 27 per cent and 42 per cent of which respectively came from abroad.83 Two and a half months later, on 5 November, an even more radical step was taken when the British Admiralty attempted to force all commerce through the Straits of Dover, where it could easily be controlled, by declaring the entire North Sea a war zone. When the Germans foolishly attempted to respond in February 1915 by announcing that their U-boats would sink shipping in the seas around the British Isles, they simply antagonized neutrals and gave their enemy a justification for further tightening the blockade. On 11 March all German goods, regardless of whether or not they were classed as contraband and including exports that had previously been exempt, became liable for seizure.84

  The British blockade was legally dubious for two reasons. First, the 1856 Declaration of Paris, still in force in 1914, had permitted blockades but only with the proviso that ‘to be binding, [they] must be effective’. This was generally understood to mean that they should take the form of a cordon of ships off an enemy port or coast; distant blockades like that of the British during the war, which attempted to close an entire sea, were inadmissible. Second, more recent rules on the types of item that could be confiscated, and the circumstances in which this was allowed, were also violated. The 1909 London Declaration, the result of negotiations called by the British, had divided goods into three categories: unambiguously militarily useful ‘absolute contraband’, mixed-purpose ‘conditional contraband’, including food, and a free list. Britain had long held to a doctrine of continuous voyage, which had insisted on the right of belligerents to stop ships carrying goods to a neutral port when those goods were then to be re-exported to the enemy, but under the London agreement this was abandoned for ‘conditional contraband’. The Royal Navy was never bound by these 1909 rules, as Britain’s Parliament had refused to ratify the Declaration. Still, the decision, made less than three weeks into the war, to reinstate the doctrine of continuous voyage looked hypocritical and placed Britain outside the pre-war moral consensus on how naval warfare should be conducted. The Germans can, in this light, be forgiven a certain amount of scepticism towards their enemy’s much-vaunted concern for international law.85

  The blockade did more than any other action to radicalize the conflict. While the act of restricting access to the entire North Sea, and therefore to both enemy and neutral ports across northern Europe, was drastic, most damaging was the blockade’s erosion of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. At first, the British did attempt to limit such erosion. The London Declaration’s prescriptions about handling goods differently, depending on their military or civil use, were largely followed. Nonetheless, already on 26 August 1914, the Royal Navy was ordered to halt all ships taking food to Rotterdam, continental Europe’s premier port, on the assumption that unless guaranteed by the Dutch government, their cargo was destined for Germany. When unrestricted blockade was imposed in March 1915, distinctions of ‘absolute’ and ‘conditional contraband’ were abandoned. New mechanisms for tightening the stranglehold on German soldiers and civilians alike were also introduced. The continental neutrals were pressured to accept import quotas sufficient for their own needs but not for re-export to the Central Powers. Later, they were blackmailed into selling part of their own surplus produce to the Entente at prices lower than those offered by starving Germany. The British also exploited their control of the world’s coaling stations to deny fuel to ships trading with the Reich. In 1916 a new ‘navicert’ system streamlined cargo inspection and blacklists of firms regarded as agents of the Central Powers were drawn up. Those on the lists were unable to do business with British companies and their ships were subject to immediate detention.86

  The German reaction to these measures was apoplectic. The British were denounced for waging a ‘starvation war’. A hugely influential study undertaken by a group of scientists headed by the nutrition expert Professor Paul Eltzbacher, and published at the beginning of 1915 under the eye-catching title The German People’s Food Supply and the English Starvation Plan, portrayed in dire terms the threat faced by Germany’s population. The enemy’s intention, readers were told, was to ‘seal [the Reich] hermetically from the rest of the world and . . . vanquish our people through hunger’. The eminent professor did not mince his words: ‘The concentration camps of the Boer War were final evidence that the English gentleman does not disdain a fight against women and children. Now he wants to use the tested means of fighting in the absolute greatest measure and ideally make of all Germany a single concentration camp.’87 Even in a world before ‘concentration camp’ had acquired its association with Nazi genocide, this was explosive stuff. Fourteen years earlier, 28,000 Boer women and children had perished from malnutrition, neglect and epidemics in British South African camps. The British army’s strategy of suppressing guerrillas by burning their farms and herding their families into holding centres, where callousness and administrative incompetence rather than genocidal intentions caused mass death, had deeply shocked continental Europe. In Germany, the press had condemned the brutality, thousands had attended protest meetings, and flyers publicizing ‘the hell’ in South Africa had circulated. Eltzbacher’s suggestion that the Reich could now suffer similarly was terrifying.88

  This was all the more the case because the alarming rise in the cost of food and the disappearance of basic items from shops in big cities
gave credibility to the propaganda. In actuality, the blockade was at first ineffective in stopping the import of goods into Germany. The British Foreign Office was anxious not to alienate neutrals with measures too draconian, the navy found it difficult to ascertain the final destination of ships’ cargos, and while neutral governments did issue guarantees that goods were solely for domestic consumption, re-export to Germany was often unpreventable. Denmark’s import figures give some indication of the extent to which this was practised: the country’s imports, worth 178 million Danish kroner in the last year of peace, had rocketed to 487 million by the end of 1915.89 In fact, the Reich’s initial food supply difficulties owed more to the war’s outbreak and mobilization, the absence of any peacetime stockpiling and official mismanagement. The Interior Ministry had received warnings about Germany’s inadequate agricultural base and the risk of a naval blockade, but had dismissed them as scaremongering. Failing to recognize the country’s heavy reliance on imported fertilizers, it had argued complacently that cereal yields could easily be increased in wartime. Fodder requirements had been overlooked and the Ministry had little understanding that as domestic stocks diminished and foreign imports declined, humans and animals would be competing for nutrition.90

  After war broke out, the interventions of German authorities into the market were reluctant, halting, and reflected a total lack of understanding about the complexity of the domestic economy. At first, the Deputy Generals commanding the Reich’s twenty-four army corps districts, or the civilian officials under them, imposed price controls locally. The regional price variations that resulted prompted farmers to shift their produce to wherever they were permitted to charge most, leading to dearth elsewhere. In October 1914 general price controls were therefore introduced to overcome this, first on bread cereals, but later that year on potatoes, sugar and cattle feed, and, in 1915, on butter, fish, milk, pork, fruit and vegetables. However, the gradual manner in which these controls were implemented inadvertently added perverse incentives to agricultural production, worsening the shortages. Farmers used grain urgently needed for bread to feed their livestock, as selling it to mills or wholesalers at fixed prices was less profitable than dealing in pork, on which for most of 1915 there was no maximum price enforced. The notorious Schweinemord, the slaughter of nine million pigs, a third of Germany’s porcine population – ordered by the government on the advice of Eltzbacher’s experts in the spring of 1915 in order to try to divert grain consumption from animals to humans – only encouraged this behaviour as, after a brief glut, meat became even scarcer and more expensive. When pork did finally become subject to centrally set maximum prices in November 1915, producers withdrew their pigs from the official market, and sold them instead through illegal channels. False steps and a lack of coordination bedevilled German food administration throughout the war, even after attempts were made to impose unity and order, first with the establishment of price supervisory boards in September 1915 and subsequently with the setting up on 22 May 1916 of a War Food Office (Kriegsernährungsamt).91

  The ‘starvation war’ rhetoric helped to hide the authorities’ inefficiency and prepare the public to accept some necessary but literally unpalatable measures to stretch Germany’s diminishing food stocks. Eltzbacher’s experts had argued that Britain’s threat to the food supply, although serious, could be overcome if Germans economized. Bread and flour rationing, entitling each adult to a daily 250-gram portion, was introduced first in Berlin in January 1915 and then extended across the Reich. In the spring, cake baking was forbidden and Tuesdays and Fridays were declared ‘meatless days’.92 As well as bans and controls, there was also innovation, of a sort. In October 1914 one of the war’s iconic foodstuffs, K-Brot, was launched on the German public. It was never openly stated whether the ‘K’ stood for ‘Krieg’ (war) or ‘Kartoffel’ (potato), but this bread, in its first incarnation at the end of October 1914, was rye or ‘grey’ (rye and wheat) bread with 5 per cent potato flour. The proportion of potato was soon raised to 10 per cent due to the growing scarcity of grains and, in January 1915, so-called KK-Brot containing 20 per cent potato flour was introduced.93 The attack on an item so fundamental to normal life as bread was a daily reminder to Germans that, as sixteen-year-old Hilde Götting wrote in her diary in February 1915, ‘England’s greatest and most fervent wish is to starve us out!’94

  The land war also contributed to the particular animosity against the British. This was surprising, as the British army was, for all the importance of its contribution on the Marne in September and defence of Ypres in October and November 1914, still tiny compared to the great conscript armies of France and Russia. Even in 1915, just 20,090 German soldiers, less than 10 per cent of the fatalities suffered that year by their entire army, were killed facing the British on the Western Front.95 Yet from early in the war, partly in response to British accusations of German barbarism in Belgium, the British were presented to the Reich’s public as dishonourable adversaries. First, reports were issued of British troops using explosive or dumdum bullets, cut across the nose so that they shattered on impact, causing horrendous injuries. The story may have originated from shock at the awful damage inflicted on the human body by ordinary modern high-velocity bullets. However, the Prussian General Staff promoted it, informing the press in early September that troops ‘constantly’ found such bullets on British and French prisoners of war, allegedly still in their ‘factory wrapping’. There was no truth to this claim, but it was widely believed in 1914.96 In the autumn the deployment of Indian army units on the Western Front caused further anger among the German population. Ironically, given conditions already prevailing there, brown-skinned colonials were accused of having brought savagery to Europe’s battlefields. The German government issued an official protest against their participation as a crime against civilization.97

  The German authorities naturally also made much of the genuine contraventions of international law by British forces. The Briton’s most notorious crime, which at the time caused international scandal, the sinking of the German submarine U27 and murder of its crew by HMS Baralong. On 19 August 1915 the U27 had stopped a British steamer, the Nicosian, carrying American mules for the British army, 70 nautical miles south of Ireland. The submarine had let the Nicosian’s crew evacuate in their lifeboats and was shooting at the abandoned freighter when the Q-Ship Baralong, a heavily armed submarine trap disguised to look like an American cargo ship, approached under the Star-Spangled Banner and signalled for permission to pick up the forlorn seamen. The British warship was allowed to approach and, when directly in front of the U-boat, dropped the screens hiding its weaponry, opened fire, and ran up the Royal Navy’s ensign. All but eleven of the crew of U27 went down with their vessel. Six of the survivors were immediately shot dead in the water. The remainder managed to swim to the Nicosian, where they were ruthlessly hunted down by Baralong’s marines, who had orders from their captain to ‘take no prisoners’. One of the five, U27’s Lieutenant Commander Bernd Wegener, dived back into the sea and, according to American crew members of the Nicosian who spoke out on their return to the United States, was killed while raising his hands in surrender.98 Germany’s government issued an official complaint based on the Americans’ sworn testimony, and its newspapers indignantly condemned the enemy’s ‘bestial viciousness’. The Britons had ‘placed themselves outside of civilized humanity . . . with the Indians, the savages, the Huns’, went typical press commentary. The point was clear: ‘Their actions prove who the Huns really are.’99

  Accusations that ‘England’ had planned the Reich’s encirclement, accounts of the unfair and brutal fighting methods of its forces, and the ‘starvation war’ that it conducted against civilians, all gave rise to a very public hatred within Germany. Already before August 1914 was out, ardent patriots were offering bounties for successful strikes against the British. Particularly desired was the capture or sinking of a large British warship. Private individuals and businesses offered bounties worth thousa
nds of marks for such a triumph. One anonymous German-American put up as much as 6,000 marks.100 Such gestures were obviously confined to the very rich. A manifestation among the broad middle classes was the slogan ‘Gott strafe England!’, which briefly even became a form of address. As Hilde Götting explained in her diary in February 1915: ‘one is terribly bloodthirsty – the favourite greeting is: “God punish the English!” – Answer: “and soon!” ’101 That it should have achieved particular popularity among children like Hilde is unsurprising, for the hatred was cultivated fervently in schools. Teachers, ordered at the outbreak of war by Prussia’s education minister ‘to make room everywhere to exploit the great events of the times for education and instruction’, embraced new methods of war pedagogy and set their pupils essays like ‘Why Do We Hate England?’ or ‘England’s Jealousy’.102 Still, adults shared in the loathing. Over-zealous patriots stuck labels printed with ‘Gott strafe England’ on their envelopes, prompting Swiss postal authorities to warn that letters bearing such marks would not be handled. Soldiers, even those heading to the Eastern Front, chalked the slogan on their railway wagons.103 Plays and poems too were published, the most notorious of which was Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Hymn of Hatred’: