Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Bethmann’s recognition that working-class Germans would not willingly die or labour for a war of conquest did act as a major deterrence from open commitment to annexationist aims. The SPD’s deputies, despite the official party line, were a less effective check. The dominant centre and right of the party prioritized preserving the Burgfrieden and during the first year of war avoided confronting annexationist propagandists. Only in August 1915 did the SPD agree on its own list of war aims. These rejected annexations and demanded the restoration of Belgium, but they also displayed an unsocialist preoccupation with the preservation of national territory, categorically opposing French claims to Alsace-Lorraine. The patriotic, moderate attitude of the SPD was summarized by its Reichstag faction chairman, Philipp Scheidemann, in October 1916: ‘what is French should stay French, what is Belgian should stay Belgian and what is German should stay German’. Yet while most SPD parliamentarians firmly advocated the status quo in the west, they were eager to see radical change in the east, in what they regarded as a war to liberate subject peoples and working-class Russians from Tsarist oppression. In the SPD’s leftist minority, there was mounting frustration and alienation at the refusal of the party leadership to demand from the government an explicit promise of no annexation as a precondition of support. In December 1914, Karl Liebknecht was the first Reichstag deputy to vote against further war credits. Over the course of 1915 almost a third of party deputies, including one of the SPD’s chairmen, Hugo Haase, followed him. In a vote at the end of that year, 22 of the party’s 110 deputies abstained and another 20 opposed granting further war credits. Disagreement over war aims and over relations with the government grew increasingly bitter, and in 1917 it split the SPD.11

  Along with very limited Socialist parliamentary pressure, strategic considerations also acted as some small restraint on official German war aims. Leftist Social Democrats would have been surprised, given the antagonistic relationship between the army and the SPD before the war, that their greatest ally against annexations was the Chief of the General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn. In November 1914, after Moltke’s defeat on the Marne and his own failure to restore the situation with a breakthrough in Flanders, a worried Falkenhayn had warned Bethmann that the army could not beat the whole Entente. He advised that a separate peace be concluded with France or, preferably, Russia, so that resources could be focused on defeating Britain. To tempt Russia to parley, Falkenhayn was willing to relinquish hopes of annexation and ask only for reparations. From France, he wished for no more than compensation and the destruction of its Belfort fortress. These were the most moderate aims advocated by the military during the war. However, they led nowhere for two reasons. First, Britain, France and Russia had agreed at the start of September 1914 not to conclude peace separately and, as neutral attempts to mediate the following year revealed, they were no less determined than Germany to continue hostilities. Second, Bethmann considered Falkenhayn’s strategic assessment too negative and politically impossible. Popular passions were inflamed. Bethmann understood that any separate peace in the east or west would be difficult to justify to a public that had not and, without risking a total collapse in morale, could not be told about the seriousness of the defeat on the Marne. He was also reluctant to abandon the prospect of winning extensive continental gains.12

  Bethmann was, by contemporary standards, a moderate annexationist. To keep the Socialists on side, he continually stressed the defensive purpose of the war, while insisting that ‘defence is no feeble goal exhausting itself in the maintenance of the status quo’. He was determined to create ‘a strong and untouchable Germany’.13 The retention of the valuable mines at Briey, possibly in exchange for some worthless Alsatian villages as a sop to French pride, was a constant on his war aims wish lists. However, the core of his vision, and the only point in the September programme that he considered non-negotiable, was the Mitteleuropa project of an economic association in central Europe.14 Informal domination was to be achieved through customs treaties and, in some cases, military pacts. A ‘United States of Europe’ under German control would, in the longer term, offer the opportunity to compete with the world’s other great economic blocs: the United States and the British and Russian Empires. Moreover, it would permit the neutralization of Belgium as an invasion channel, without having to annex the country and dilute the ethnic homogeneity of the German nation state. This was a major preoccupation, even though the Kaiser’s army, not the French, had used Belgium as a channel in 1914. The Mitteleuropa strategy was one of the ‘diagonal’ paths so favoured by Bethmann between the polarized aims of the German right and left, offering substantial national economic and political gain to satisfy the former while superficially avoiding the war of conquest that the latter found unacceptable. Finally, Mitteleuropa was attractive as a means to suborn not only the Reich’s continental opponents but also her allies. The customs federation with Austria-Hungary mentioned in September eventually became the plan’s centrepiece.15

  Although developed behind the Reich Chancery’s closed doors, the Mitteleuropa ideal received considerable publicity. In Germany, the Progressive Liberal Friedrich Naumann attracted interest in the concept with his best-seller Mitteleuropa, which sold over 100,000 copies after its release in October 1915.16 However, it was among Austrian German nationalists that the idea won greatest support. For them, the attraction of a closer bond with the Reich was that it would improve their position against Austria’s other nationalities and strengthen the Habsburg Empire. The historian Heinrich Friedjung, who formulated the most influential Austrian version of the plan, envisaged Germany acting ‘like a heavy stone holding together the centrifugal elements in our Monarchy’. A customs union with the northern ally would abolish tiresome decennial negotiations with Hungary. Military agreements would halt the Magyars’ undermining of the Common Army. The scheme would be complemented with a reorganization of the Empire, enlarged through the annexation of Serbia and formerly Russian-ruled Poland. The newly expanded Habsburg Polish territory would be given its own parliament for internal affairs, leaving the Germans to rule over Czechs and South Slavs in the rest of Austria.17 Bethmann was impressed by Friedjung’s ideas. They appeared to present a solution to the dilemma of what to do with the Polish territories captured that summer and seemed to have popular backing in Austria, for the Chancellor’s office had been inundated by suggestions from Austrian German organizations and private individuals for closer economic union. Bethmann’s vision of Mitteleuropa, which had been conceived in September 1914 as a means of dominating western Europe and combating Britain, developed into an even more ambitious scheme, the centre point of which was further east, in an Austro-German customs union. On 10 and 11 November 1915, Bethmann put before Baron István Burián, Berchtold’s successor as Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, a thirty-year customs alliance resting on preferential tariffs as a precondition for allowing the Tsar’s Polish territories to come under Habsburg control.18

  The Mitteleuropa plan helped Bethmann to manoeuvre between Germany’s conquest-hungry elites and defence-minded working classes, but for all the effort invested it yielded no concrete result. Within the German government, there were doubts about the economics of what was first and foremost a political project. The Reich’s Interior Minister, Clemens Delbrück, believed it unlikely that the Reichstag would support a customs union. There were concerns that German agriculture could not compete without tariffs against cheap Habsburg produce and worries that the signing of even a diluted version, in the form of a most preferential trade agreement, would provoke retaliatory measures from other powers.19 Austro-Hungarian leaders were reluctant to commit. In particular Tisza, Minister President of Hungary, was rightly suspicious of Mitteleuropa schemes and condemned Naumann’s book as ‘a cleverly concealed vassal state offer’. The Emperor also refused any limitation on his power. Burián’s response to Bethmann’s proposal in November 1915 was superficially positive, but careful to stress that closer economic ties should not impin
ge on sovereignty, it warned of likely problems and was studiously vague about when negotiations might begin. Austria and Hungary’s own decennial economic agreement was in any case nearly due for renewal, and the Hungarians’ insistence on a reduction in their contribution to the Empire’s common budget caused long argument and delayed a return to talks with the Germans. Only in October 1918 were the outlines of a tariff and trade deal agreed, but the war ended before it could be put before the German, Austrian and Hungarian parliaments.20

  Germany’s war aims in western and central Europe were thus extensive but not limitless. The Reich government coveted France’s Longwy-Briey mines. After any German victory, Belgium would have lost much of its independence. Nonetheless, Bethmann, who in the war’s early years was the figure with most influence over the Reich’s war aims policy, favoured a path of indirect domination. Mitteleuropa lay at the centre of his vision for German hegemony in Europe. It was a compromise policy. It tempered the desire of Reich elites for absolute security and economic gain with recognition that Austria-Hungary must agree to an alliance and that the absorption of large numbers of resentful foreigners into Germany was undesirable. Domestically, it permitted the Reich government to balance precariously between the rabid demands of the political right for extensive conquest and the willingness of the left and wider public to fight only a war of defence. However, in the east different calculations prevailed. There, German strategists, like other belligerents, imagined much more radical plans. Annexation, settlement and population movements were all part of visions for eastern multi-ethnic borderlands.

  EASTERN UTOPIAS

  The land to the east was not a natural site for German expansion in 1914. Imperialist energies in the pre-war period had been directed towards Africa and China. In their own eastern borderlands, a region that today is in Poland, German officials had felt themselves on the defensive. In Posen and West Prussia, two provinces in which Poles were a majority, the state had spent 400 million marks since the mid-1880s settling Germans and had also introduced obtrusive assimilationist measures, all in the cause of strengthening Germandom. Yet despite the enormous expense and effort, this had achieved little except sharpen racial antagonism. The prospect of expanding eastwards into Russian-ruled Congress Poland and bringing yet more Poles, as well as another detested group, Orthodox Jews, into the Reich would make anyone in government blanch.21 At the outset of war, the Kaiser had hoped that these Poles might liberate themselves by rising up against the Tsar and had vaguely pondered the establishment of a satellite Polish state.22 However, there was no Polish revolution and German decision-makers remained indecisive. It would be war itself that pushed policy in radically new directions.

  Initially, not only the negative experience of Germany in its own eastern borderlands but also international factors prompted its leaders to take a moderate attitude to the east. The Habsburg Foreign Minister in 1914, Count Leopold von Berchtold, had strong views on Poland’s future and acted early to stake out the territory for his monarch. On 12 August, just three and a half weeks after he and other Habsburg leaders had promised Tisza there would be no substantial annexations, Berchtold began lobbying for the attachment of Congress Poland to Galicia. Neither Berchtold’s Austro-Polish solution nor a satellite state were especially attractive options to German decision-makers, but they offered the most plausible means to realize the September programme’s aim of ‘thrusting Russia back as far as possible’. However, everything remained in flux and in the autumn of 1914, after Falkenhayn privately announced that the combined Entente powers could not be beaten, the option of returning any land won to Russia in return for a separate peace gained in appeal. It was entirely plausible that Germany might end the war against Russia empty-handed.23

  In the event, German war planning in the east did come to embrace radical ideas of annexation and settlement. This was not because, as the historian Fritz Fischer famously argued, there was an ingrained aggression built into the fabric of Reich state and society; nor, as more recent scholars have assumed, was it a result of conquest and occupation. The radicalization began before Russia’s Polish and Baltic borderlands were overrun in the summer of 1915. The initial drive was instead defensive: the radicalization of eastern plans came about in reaction to the traumatic defensive experience of beating off Russian invasion.24 The attack on East Prussia in the summer of 1914 prompted calls from right-wing intellectuals for annexations in the east. However, it was only at the start of December that the government began seriously to consider the question. On 6 December, Bethmann asked Hindenburg to propose adjustments to the frontier in order better to protect the Reich’s eastern provinces. This request was made in the immediate aftermath of military crisis, after the Tsarist army had launched its second invasion of the province and further south briefly reached the outskirts of Cracow. The possibility of attack on the Reich’s key industrial region of Silesia and an advance on Posen, the gateway to Berlin, had been real and frightening. This narrowly averted mortal peril was what focused minds on how Germany’s eastern border could in the future be secured.25

  In this context, it was only natural that the first detailed, official scheme for a border strip should be drawn up by the President of beleaguered East Prussia, Adolf von Batocki. His memorandum, ‘On World Peace 1915. From an East Prussian’, completed on 20 December 1914 and sent to the Reich Chancery, illustrates how defensive fears rather than aggressive ambitions could drive radical actions. Batocki was convinced that the recent invasion had proven the need for a stronger frontier. His solution was to shift the border eastwards onto easily fortified river lines. The defensive glacis that he envisaged was not large: at around 36,000 square kilometres, it was in fact only two-thirds the area of the eastern territories that Germany would forfeit to Poland, Lithuania and the League of Nations at the war’s end.26 Rather, Batocki’s plan was radical because of what it proposed to do with the 2.4 million inhabitants of the annexed territory. The majority, 1.3 million, were Poles, while the remainder comprised 300,000 Lithuanians, 230,000 Jews, 130,000 Germans and 40,000 Russians. For Batocki, none of these people, except the small German minority, would be welcome additions to the Reich. Instead, he advocated a population exchange as the best means of ensuring regional stability. Chillingly, he argued that peoples of undesirable race should be expelled and their land resettled with Russia’s own ethnic German subjects, who at the time were being forcibly deported by the Tsar’s army from the sensitive western provinces deep into the Russian Empire.27 The racialized solution had an alluring symmetry about it that obscured the immense individual suffering it would have caused. Batocki forestalled moral objections by insisting that the transfer could be carried out humanely. ‘Man,’ he speciously argued, ‘even at his most home-loving, is attached less to the place than to the community of people.’ Providing that villages and districts could be kept together, he was sure that transfer need entail no hardship. Indeed, the people themselves might actually benefit if they were sent to more fertile regions.

  It was no coincidence that this proposal originated with the President of East Prussia. Batocki not only felt vulnerable as a result of Russian attacks, but the experience of the invasions directly inspired the idea of moving populations that would finally be realized brutally by Hitler and Stalin in this very region thirty years later. Batocki argued that the mass flight of East Prussians from the Russian army demonstrated that whole communities could be quickly shifted with little damage: ‘If in East Prussia in August 1914 far more than 100,000 inhabitants on wagons with horses and cattle could travel over land, with no possibility of any official organization, thirty to forty miles in one direction and just as much during the six-week-long return with no substantial damage to persons or livestock, that is proof that with the correct preparation large-scale resettlement is possible without harming the rural population.’ The urban population, Batocki wrote with confidence, would be even easier to move. His certainty was doubtless grounded on his own administrative experienc
e. In November he had organized a successful evacuation of 200,000 East Prussian civilians from the borders hundreds of kilometres into the interior of Germany. The fact that these people had been desperate to leave, whereas the population of the border strip would likely resist being forced out of their homes to unknown destinations, was passed over in Batocki’s plan.28

  If the defence of East Prussia against Tsarist invasion in the summer and autumn of 1914 was the first impetus to new, extreme and racialized action, advance and conquest in the east from the early summer of 1915 acted as a second impetus and swelled the ambitions of both Central Powers. The joint offensive at Gorlice-Tarnów at the beginning of May not only caused a Russian military collapse in the south, liberating most of Galicia, but forced a general retreat of between 250 and 400 kilometres from the Russian-ruled territory known as Congress Poland. On 5 August, Warsaw fell to German troops. Further north, Lithuania and Courland were in German hands by the autumn. The invaders’ arrival probably came as a relief to much of the population, especially Jews. The Russians had conducted a vicious scorched-earth retreat, callously celebrated in the western Entente press as ‘a masterpiece of strategy’. Cattle was taken, cities were stripped of all valuables and burned. In Poland, nearly 20 per cent of all war damage was inflicted by the Tsar’s army in this short period.29 Worst of all was the rounding up of the population, especially military-aged men and people of ethnicities condemned as unreliable, who were forced into a miserable march eastwards with the retreating army. In total, 3.3 million civilians were brought back in the catastrophic withdrawal, in which no preparations had been made to feed or quarter them. Advancing into the deliberately devastated landscape, encountering scattered, desperate and dispossessed inhabitants, German soldiers could be left in no doubt that they faced an evil empire.30