Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The GGW administration played an iniquitous role in ensuring the continued flow of workers to Germany. Forced labour was held over the population’s head as a threat. In October 1916, when it was briefly introduced, the German Chief of Police in Warsaw, Ernst Reinhard von Glasenapp, informed citizens that the measure could be halted only if sufficient volunteers for work came forward.104 More important was ruthless economic pressure. The GGW’s economy was plundered by the War Raw Materials Agencies working under the Reich Ministry of the Interior, lowering living standards and leaving the unemployed little option but to emigrate or starve. Congress Poland’s industry was destroyed. Textile manufacture collapsed: the 39,000 looms of 1914 declined to 33,000 in 1916 and then, as the occupying authorities stepped up their requisition of machines for use in Germany or as scrap, to just 12,000 by 1918.105 Polish milling also suffered, as the Germans did not permit grain to be milled locally but sent it to the Reich. Other industries fared no better: one Polish contemporary described with horror how ‘factories were dismantled, copper boilers, driving belts and machines removed’. The measures benefited German industrialists, who not only saw prospective competitors eliminated but also gained their equipment at little or no cost. The GGW authorities, although initially opposed to the depredation, strove to ensure that the industrialists received the workers too. Warsaw and Łódź, the main industrial centres, were ordered to suspend all emergency works and free meals for the unemployed, with the clear intention of forcing the desperate to emigrate. These efforts were, from a German perspective, highly successful. By the spring of 1916, there were barely any skilled labourers left in the GGW. Overall, between 200,000 and 240,000 Poles were recruited for work in Germany during the war, which, taken with the 300,000 Poles trapped in the country in August 1914, made them far and away the most numerous of the Reich’s foreign civilian labourers.106

  The Germans may have been successful in mobilizing labour and ruthlessly extracting resources from Poland, but the overt economic exploitation and thinly veiled desire for political domination hobbled their ambition to reshape eastern Europe. Reich leaders competed with their Habsburg ally to determine the future of Poland. Bethmann had soon regretted his offer of November 1915 to cede it to Austria in exchange for participation in the Mitteleuropa project, and at a second meeting with Habsburg Foreign Minister István Burián in April 1916 he had withdrawn from the tentative agreement and instead had demanded a buffer state attached to Germany. He was encouraged by Governor General Beseler, who was already engaged in limited state-building, intervening in municipal government and schooling. The German administration’s most symbolically powerful act was to authorize the re-establishment of Warsaw University in the autumn of 1915. The Tsarist regime had Russified the institution, and its return as a seat of Polish learning was enthusiastically welcomed by local elites. The Germans’ support could be understood as a mark of their cultural superiority over the Russians and a willingness to permit the training of a Polish leadership capable, within limits, of managing its own national affairs.107

  Burián still wished to acquire the whole of Congress Poland for the Habsburgs and was dismayed by Bethmann’s reversal. The deadlock between the two Central Powers might have continued indefinitely had it not been for the combined Entente offensive that summer. First, the Brusilov offensive so damaged the Habsburg Empire militarily and politically that the Germans were able to impose their vision of a Polish buffer state. In August, Burián assented reluctantly to an independent Kingdom of Poland with a hereditary monarchy and constitution. The state was not to be established until the war’s end and no firm decision was made about its size. However, the Germans would get their border strip, and it was agreed that the new state’s foreign policy and army would remain in the hands of the Central Powers, although in the latter case a primary role was given to the Germans.108

  Second, the heavy fighting in the summer of 1916 prompted a frantic search for new sources of military manpower. Poles had been considered as possible soldiers before; Falkenhayn had raised the possibility of recruiting in Congress Poland as early as September 1915, but Bethmann had at that time questioned the legality and practicality of such action. In mid-July, Falkenhayn and Ludendorff, concerned at the Austro-Hungarian military collapse during the Brusilov offensive but impressed by the Polish Legion, one of the few formations to emerge with credit from the debacle, urgently clamoured for replacement manpower to be drawn from Poland. This brought the dilemma about the country’s future to a head. As Governor General Beseler pointed out, recruitment was hardly likely to succeed while no decision on Polish independence had yet been reached. He estimated optimistically that if Poles were offered a modicum of freedom, at first three divisions of 30,000 men and later an army of 100,000 soldiers might be raised. Bethmann was inclined to stall, for he was aware of the drawbacks of establishing a new Polish state and did not wish to close off a separate peace with Russia. Yet even once the Brusilov offensive was fading, the appointment of the radical Third OHL ensured that there was no slackening of the pressure on him. Ludendorff’s calculation was simple: ‘Everything comes down to power, and we need men.’109

  The Central Powers’ manifesto of 5 November 1916 was undermined by the differences in German and Habsburg political visions for Congress Poland and the secret intention among Reich leaders to annex a large border strip, and it was stamped by the military priorities that had called it into existence. The manifesto offered no immediate change and, as the Central Powers did not agree, only vague commitments for the future. It held out an ‘autonomous state with hereditary monarchy and constitutional regime’, yet without any indication of who that monarch might be or where the borders of this state would lie. What it did make clear was that a Polish army should be the new kingdom’s priority. To underline this central message, the German and Austro-Hungarian Governor Generals published a second proclamation just four days later opening recruitment. ‘The struggle with Russia is still going on and is not yet completed,’ the generals observed, ‘so stand by our side as volunteers and help us complete our victory over your persecutor.’ To Poles, the self-serving motives behind the offer could scarcely have been more obvious, and its political cynicism increased the distrust already instilled by the occupiers’ economic rapacity. In under twenty-four hours most of the appeals in Warsaw had pasted next to them posters with the slogan ‘No Polish Army without the Polish Government!’ Recruitment was a total failure: even before the year’s end, Beseler rued the entire endeavour as a ‘great disappointment’. In contrast to the expected minimum of three divisions, a mere 3,200 men had come forward by February 1917.110

  The Germans overreached themselves in Poland. The November proclamation was a historic moment, for it was the first concrete promise made by heads of state to restore the country after more than 120 years of partition. Bethmann was able to talk the talk of freedom. In April 1916 he had vowed before the Reichstag that Germany and Austria-Hungary would ‘solve’ the Polish question. The Reich, he had pledged, would never ‘voluntarily surrender to the rule of reactionary Russia the peoples . . . between the Baltic and the marshes of Volhynia whom she and her ally have liberated’.111 Yet the Germans’ desire for political control was too naked and their economic exploitation had gone too far in alienating Poles, and the proclamation consequently won them few friends.112 Instead, the Third OHL, Bethmann and Beseler soon found that they had fashioned a rod to beat themselves. The 5 November proclamation opened an international bidding war for the hearts and minds of east-central Europeans. Once President Wilson of the United States began to take part in January 1917, and especially after the Russian revolution the following spring, the Central Powers had no hope of winning this ideological contest. The proclamation also undermined the stability of the GGW’s occupation regime. The Germans had hurriedly conceded a Provisional Council of State once they had recognized the patent inadequacy of the 5 November offer. Although this was powerless and failed to satisfy Polish national asp
irations, it and its successor, a Regency Council formed in the autumn of 1917, provided weak but alternative sources of authority to the Governor General. Józef Piłsudski, the founder of the Polish Legions, sat as chairman of its Military Commission and used his position to agitate for a national government and army. The Third OHL learned nothing from the fiasco. Ludendorff’s insistence that the Polish Legions, transferred to the GGW as the basis of a Polish army, swear an oath to the German Kaiser, destroyed what little remained of the Central Powers’ credibility and the plans to create a military ally from occupied Poland.113

  The Third OHL brought a new ruthlessness but not efficiency to the Central Powers’ war efforts. Ludendorff and Hindenburg sought to impose centralization, control and rationalization, yet they pursued goals that were complete fantasies: their rearmament plan was an emotional and propaganda response to Entente material might, not the product of a reasoned assessment of the Reich’s capabilities. Most profoundly, they tried to change the basis on which their country’s war effort rested. Compulsion was to replace the consent that for the first half of the war had stood Germany in good stead. The best expression of how totally the duo wished to subordinate society and economy to their war effort was Hindenburg’s demand that ‘he who does not work shall not eat’. The inspiration for this model of waging conflict came from their own creation in the east, the military state of Ober Ost. There, humans were enslaved and the land pillaged of its wealth, all for the German military machine.

  The Germans were not unique in their ruthless exploitation and programmes of forced labour for enemy subjects. Habsburg military authorities liked to present themselves as the benevolent occupier, in contrast to brutal Teutons or rapacious Bulgarians, but in practice they were similarly single-minded about extracting resources from their occupied territories. Requisitioning Honvéd troops, villagers in Congress Poland discovered, ‘were not open to negotiation. At even the weakest protest or pleading, they reached for sabre or revolver.’ In Poland, the Austro-Hungarian army introduced civilian forced labour before its German ally. Some 122 civilian worker divisions, into which around 30,000 men were impressed, were formed to mend roads and work on rivers. However, the village riots that this provoked halted the practice by July 1916.114 The Germans, by contrast, expanded their reliance on forced labour, culminating in the terrifying ZAB battalions that circulated in Ober Ost and the area behind the Western Front. The urgent need for resources tended even in the Germans’ more moderate occupation regimes to encourage compulsion, which, regardless of human suffering, proved effective for short-term plunder. Yet even abroad, it was a miserable way to run a war effort. Ruthless and coercive exploitation could not mobilize production and, as the Central Powers found in Poland in 1916, could also have significant political and strategic costs.

  The Third OHL’s vision for Germany was certainly less violent and coercive than that in the occupied territories but the level of compulsion it envisaged would have been enough to shatter the fragile Burgfrieden consensus. Despite Ludendorff’s disgust, the hijacking of the Auxiliary Service Bill by the Social Democrats and unions was thus probably the best outcome for the Reich’s war effort. Yet even if the OHL’s bid to control labour was thwarted, its attempted armament drive put severe strains on German and, as the Habsburgs also took part, Austro-Hungarian society. New exertion was demanded of people: for a time at least, scarce food was made available to armaments workers rather than the vulnerable, and overtime was enforced. Remaining stocks of metals were requisitioned: even church bells were sacrificed to Mars, contributing over three-quarters of the copper alloy at the disposal of the Habsburg war effort in 1917.115 Yet despite all the extra hardship, the Hindenburg Programme brought no increase in weapons production. With deprivation on the home front, rapidly increasing levels of exhaustion in the army and no sign of the demanded jump in armaments production, the OHL grasped other means to intensify violence. To end the war, it placed all bets on Germany’s most popular, controversial and riskiest weapon: the U-boat.

  10

  U-Boats

  THE WORST DECISION OF THE WAR

  A material and morale crisis seized the Central Powers at the turn of 1916–17. Their populations were shivering through a miserable winter of deprivation and their armies were exhausted by the summer’s heavy fighting. A negotiated peace ending the war on favourable terms appeared very distant; the Entente categorically rejected as ‘empty and insincere’ the December Peace Proposal of German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg.1 The Third OHL, although shaken by the summer battles, was resolved to continue the fight, yet its massive rearmament drive was not only failing to produce the expected results but actually worsening conditions, overstraining the railways and consequently disrupting rhythms of production and the urban food supply. With the army adopting a defensive stance in the west, there was no prospect of relief through a land victory, merely more gruelling static combat. In a mix of desperation and determination, Germany’s rulers turned to their navy. The possibility of flouting international law and unleashing its submarines in a ruthless ‘unrestricted’ campaign to starve the British Isles into submission had been widely discussed since the end of 1914. Only fear of America, which insisted on the right of its ships and citizens to travel unharmed where they wished, had deterred German leaders. On 9 January 1917 what the Chancellor called ‘the last card’ was finally played: legal and diplomatic reservations were cast aside and the leadership resolved to launch an unrestricted U-boat campaign.2

  This was the worst decision of the war. Unbeknown to the Germans, the exertions of the past year had almost bankrupted the British. Paying for food and raw materials such as steel, as well as semi-finished or finished armaments, was costing the Treasury two million pounds a day, and British gold reserves and securities were on course to be exhausted by March 1917.3 Meanwhile the French army, even more than its German opponent, was demoralized after the bloodletting at Verdun and on the Somme. Its disillusionment with its commanders would break out in a mass strike in the spring and summer of 1917. Most ominous, the Russian Empire was on the edge of revolution. Little over a month after the unrestricted submarine campaign started on 1 February, the Tsar was overthrown by a popular uprising, an event that could have upturned the strategic situation and gifted the Central Powers a real chance of triumph. Instead, as one great enemy gradually collapsed, another, thanks to the U-boat campaign, entered hostilities. Entirely predictably, the United States broke off diplomatic relations in response to the campaign. On 6 April, a couple of weeks after the first American ships had been sunk, the mighty power across the Atlantic placed its formidable wealth and resources in the service of the Entente and declared war on the Reich.

  How could Germany’s leaders have been so extraordinarily stupid? Was their decision a result of militarism run wild? Did it reflect a parochial, nationalist arrogance towards the new power over the seas? Or was it a logical response to a strategic situation that appeared near hopeless? The Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, was certainly audacious in his claims for what the U-boats could achieve. ‘I do not hesitate to declare,’ he had written in a memorandum dated 22 December 1916 and circulated among decision-makers before the key Crown Council on 9 January 1917, ‘that we can, in the current circumstances, force England through unrestricted submarine war to make peace in five months.’4 This was no impulsive boast. To research how Britain could be defeated, the Admiralty Staff’s Department B-1 had recruited an impressive group of financial, industrial, commercial and agrarian experts. Nemesis takes strange forms in a people’s war, and the two figures central to plotting Britain’s demise in Department B-1 were an ex-bank manager, Dr Richard Fuss, and a Heidelberg professor of economics, Dr Hermann Levy. Fuss had been responsible since March 1915 for collecting data on British trade. As early as August 1915, Levy had identified Britain’s wheat supply as a point of vulnerability. He noticed that unlike continental powers, Britain neither grew nor stored large stocks of wheat,
but instead fed its population through constant imports. A determined attack on this maritime supply thus had excellent chances of forcing Germany’s most dangerous enemy to sue for peace. Department B-1 produced a series of Admiralty Staff memoranda over the following sixteen months that developed and added to this argument. Supplying copious statistics, charts and graphs, their papers ‘proved’ that unrestricted submarine warfare would inevitably lead to a German victory.5

  Holtzendorff’s memorandum of 22 December 1916 was the culmination of this Admiralty Staff series of papers. Following the earlier research, it analysed Britain’s shipping and economy in order to support its primary claim that the world’s greatest maritime power could be vanquished by 1 August 1917. The paper estimated that the British had access to 10.75 million tons of cargo space, after deducting roughly 10 million tons dedicated to military supply, under repair, in the service of other Entente powers or employed solely on coastal trade. Some 6.75 million tons of this shipping was British, a little under a million belonged to other Entente powers and the remaining three million tons was owned by neutral countries. Extrapolating from experience, the memorandum argued that an unrestricted submarine campaign could sink 600,000 tons of merchant shipping per month and scare from the seas another 1.2 million tons of neutral freighters, around 40 per cent of the total. After five months, the tonnage on which Britain’s supply rested would thus be reduced by 39 per cent, to little over 6.5 million tons. ‘England would not be able to bear this,’ Holtzendorff insisted. She would be unwilling to lose the merchant fleet on which her peacetime prosperity depended and so would be incapable of continuing to wage war.