Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The second, contrary trend, and a prime cause of conservative fears, was the increased influence and assertiveness of Germany’s most important representative institution, the Reichstag, and particularly the unprecedented cooperation between its left and centre parties. The power of Reichstag deputies to vote through war credits raised the parliament’s importance. In peacetime it had scrutinized and voted on budgets, but war credits were different because they were requested so often – no fewer than sixteen times up to February 1919 – and because the votes were invested with great symbolism.22 The Burgfrieden had first been sealed on 4 August 1914 with effectively a unanimous vote for war credits, and thereafter the readiness of the Social Democrats, who had always abstained as a party in peacetime budget votes, to support the credits was seen as proof of the continuance of German unity. From the third war credit in March 1915, almost a third of the SPD’s 110 deputies abstained. At the fifth vote in December, twenty, including one of its chairmen, Hugo Haase, opposed the credits and a further twenty-two abstained.23 However, the fact that the majority of the party continued to support them helped to maintain the Burgfrieden and keep the Reich’s working classes acquiescent. As a result, even though Socialist deputies, who occupied about one-third of the 397 seats in the Reichstag, were not numerous enough to block the credit, the Chancellor was committed to maintain the SPD’s cooperation and unusually willing to hear, if not act upon, its views.24

  The Reichstag’s bourgeois majority wished at heart for a total victory and hoped for some gains for their country once it was won. It had exerted its influence in the autumn of 1916, when its deputies had followed their constituents’ enthusiasm and severely restricted Bethmann’s freedom of action by urging him to heed the advice of the Third OHL to launch the U-boat campaign. After the spring of 1917, however, majority opinion in the house began to move leftwards. Partly, the Russian revolution encouraged greater sympathy among the moderate middle-class parties for immediate democratic reform. The really big shift, however, came with the realization of Matthias Erzberger, the influential Centre Party deputy, in the summer that the U-boat campaign would not defeat Britain. His speech in the Reichstag Steering Committee on 6 July 1917 smashed the navy’s argument that ruthless submarine warfare could work and radically proposed that the Reichstag take the initiative in preparing the groundwork for a peace of understanding with Russia: ‘If in the Reichstag an enormous majority or possibly even all deputies could bring themselves to agree on the idea of 1 August 1914 – we stand for a war of defence . . . we strive for a peace of reconciliation, which recognizes the power constellation that has come about through the war, a peace which brings no forcible oppression of peoples or border areas – if the Reichstag could say this to the Reich government, this would be the best way to bring about peace.’25

  Erzberger’s speech cemented the shift to the left in the Reichstag that had begun with the reform question and triggered the most acute political crisis experienced to this point in the war by Germany. On the same day, deputies of the Centre, Progressives, National Liberals and Social Democrats established an Inter-Party Committee, which agreed on the need for universal suffrage in Prussia and a parliamentary government formed from party representatives, and decided to issue a declaration for ‘no annexations, no reparations’ in the Reichstag.26 This was a historic moment; the coming together of the Centre, Progressives and Social Democrats in the Inter-Party Committee lasted throughout the war and helped to provide the Reich with an alternative basis of authority in late 1918, once the advocates of total war had failed and destroyed the old regime’s legitimacy. Scheidemann, the SPD leader, was right to see it as ‘the first step of a parliament that was taking independence’.27

  However, in the shorter term the initiative backfired very badly for parliamentary moderates. The main victim of their manoeuvre was Bethmann, a man who, while no dove, opposed the unlimited annexationist ambitions of the Reich’s military and conservative elites. His contortions to maintain his ‘politics of the diagonal’ between left-wing demands for domestic change and right-wingers’ desire for conquest had by this point made him the subject of hostility from all sides of the political spectrum. While the National Liberals, who shortly after left the Inter-Party Committee, favoured a total victory and disliked the Chancellor’s ambiguity, the Centre and their allies on the left considered him an obstacle to reform and peace. Bethmann reacted to the parliamentarians’ manoeuvres by urging reform on the Kaiser. He again demanded the immediate adoption of universal suffrage and, in a drastic break with the past, was prepared to invite Reichstag party representatives into his government. Nonetheless, he failed to stop the peace resolution. The clear evidence that he could no longer guide moderate and left-wing opinion in the country and Reichstag enabled his conservative and military enemies to give him the final push. Hindenburg and Ludendorff threatened the Kaiser with their resignation unless Bethmann were dismissed, and he went on 13 July. Subsequent chancellors were creatures of the OHL; little more, in the words of one left-wing deputy, than an ‘advertisement for the omnipotent military clique’ with no interest in either reform or a negotiated peace.28

  The peace resolution that was passed in the Reichstag on 19 July by 212 against 126 votes, with 17 abstentions, was also not all that its name implied or for which Socialists wished. Erzberger’s call for ‘a peace of reconciliation, which recognizes the power constellation that has come about through the war’ was as revealing as it was unrealistic; he hoped that somehow Germany’s enemies could be persuaded to accept her wartime gains, and he intended that the vote stiffen, not undermine, the people’s will to hold out. Within twenty-four hours of the vote he was advising the Reich’s new Chancellor, the former Prussian Food Controller Georg Michaelis, that the Longwy-Briey ore fields might be won through exchange and that Lithuania should become a duchy with Wilhelm II at its head. The SPD, which in April had accepted the Petrograd formula of a peace ‘without annexations or reparations’, and committed itself ‘to press the government for a clear rejection of any policy of conquest’, tried to present the resolution as a German equivalent to the programme of the Russian Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Yet as Haase was quick to point out in a critical speech, the resolution contained nothing about the right of national self-determination and twisted or diluted the Russian revolutionaries’ progressive demands. Only ‘territorial acquisitions achieved by force and violations of political, economic, or financial integrity’ were excluded, not the subjugated satellite states and informal empire imagined by Erzberger. The resolution’s tone was angry and nationalistic: it criticized the enemy for threatening ‘Germany and its allies with territorial conquests and violations’ and ended by defiantly asserting that ‘the German people are unconquerable’.29 Its total meaninglessness was assured by the new Chancellor, who accepted it ambiguously ‘as I interpret it’. This, however, was sufficient for all parties involved in the drafting of the resolution to vote in favour of 15,000 million marks in new war credits.30

  GOING FOR BROKE

  The German government had, from the outbreak of the First World War, sought to gain advantage. Bethmann Hollweg’s primary objective, as laid down in the programme of September 1914, ‘security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time’, remained the guiding aim of foreign policy, even in very dark days. Plans to secure economic hegemony or political domination had been a means to achieve this, as well as to hide or justify much more explicitly aggressive aspirations. The rise of the Third OHL brought a new inflexibility and even greater megalomania to the Reich’s war aims. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were interested in power, not rights. Their enemies’ blockade and methods of industrial combat had taught them the importance of securing an extensive resource base. Rule in Ober Ost had provided them with the experience of how to harness people and materials ruthlessly. The duo were focused not merely on winning the present conflict. Like Bethmann, their gaze extended into the future, although the world they inhabit
ed was much darker than his, defined by a perpetual, violent Social Darwinist struggle between states. The OHL’s prime purpose, as Ludendorff explained in September 1917, was to achieve ‘an economic and military position which allows us to face another war of defence without anxiety’.31

  Even in the dark days of December 1916, when Hindenburg and Ludendorff had used the dire strategic situation to justify the desperate gamble of unrestricted submarine warfare, their wish list of annexations had been formidable.32 As the OHL asserted the primacy of military aims over politics, and as the Russian revolution presented new strategic alternatives, its ambition became problematic. Bethmann was keen for a separate peace with Russia, but also opportunistic and deeply averse to being pinned down by any inflexible war-aims programme. He told Czernin in March 1917 that he envisaged large annexations from Russia in the event of total victory, but would reduce these substantially – probably to frontier adjustments in the Reich’s favour – to secure the end of hostilities in the east.33 For Hindenburg and Ludendorff, such vagueness and moderation were unacceptable. In April 1917 they not only pressed the Chancellor to lay out official aims and wrung from him a concession to prioritize military above political and economic considerations, but also prevailed upon the Kaiser to order Bethmann to draw up maximum and minimum war-aims programmes as preparation for possible peace with revolutionary Russia and negotiations with Austria-Hungary over how to divide the spoils of victory.34

  On 23 April 1917 a meeting between Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, and the Head of the Political Section of the Government General in Belgium was convened at Kreuznach, in the Rhineland, to discuss war aims. The OHL, confident at this time that the U-boat campaign would bring Britain to her knees ‘in at latest 2–3 months’, forced through its conception of a peace of extensive conquest.35 In the west, as the September 1914 Programme had demanded, the valuable French mining region of Longwy-Briey was to be won for the Reich. Elsewhere, however, the demands of 1914 had expanded. Belgium was to remain ‘in German military control until it is politically and economically ready for a defensive and offensive alliance with Germany’. Liège and the Flemish coast were to be either permanently occupied or held on a ninety-nine-year lease, a demand about which, it was stressed, that there could be no compromise. Belgium was to lose its south-east corner to the Reich, Luxembourg would become a German federal state, and the possibility of compensating France with a small part of Belgium or a worthless strip of German Alsace was also mooted. In the east, Germany was to acquire Courland and Lithuania, Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s own military colony. Buffer zones were to be carved out of the newly established Poland to protect key German territories, most notably heavily industrialized German Silesia. German oil interests in Romania were also to be secured. Austria-Hungary was to be handed parts of Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, as well as territory in Romania’s western Walachia. While Bethmann added a confidential minute refusing to be bound by these aims in any negotiations, they nonetheless thwarted his hopes of offering Russia an easy separate peace.36

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff were playing for high stakes. They wanted to dictate peace to a defeated Russia, not parley, and they adopted a strategy to destabilize the new Russian regime and precipitate total chaos. Civilian officials made the fateful decision to allow Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary firebrand then in exile in Switzerland, passage through the Reich to Petrograd in April 1917.37 The military concentrated on breaking Russian forces with a pioneering campaign of psychological warfare on the Eastern Front. Both sides had dropped leaflets over enemy lines earlier in hostilities, but no one had ever attempted anything like the Germans’ carefully planned and coordinated propaganda offensive. The Foreign Ministry chose the themes to be used: Germany wished for but did not need peace. The new Russian government was a puppet of England, prolonging the people’s suffering for the benefit of western imperialists. The German army and its Habsburg ally developed innovative new methods to disseminate this message. Russian-speaking intelligence officers were posted in the front line and made contact with units stationed opposite. At Easter, commanders permitted ceasefires and fraternization along the front in order to give the impression of German goodwill. Later, more subtle techniques were introduced. Among the most effective was the distribution of newspapers filled with apparently authoritative but carefully selected information intended to demoralize.38

  To Russian soldiers already disorientated by the upheaval in the rear, starved and desperate for information, and distrustful of their officers, the Central Powers’ propaganda only added to uncertainty and the hope of peace. Prussian units on the Eastern Front were enthusiastic about the impact of psychological warfare. The 12 Infantry Division, for example, reported in mid-April that ‘the disintegration of the Russian army through the revolution is becoming widespread’. Enemy troops were moving freely in the open, welcomed the propaganda flyers fired in their direction, and were happy to take part in live-and-let-live truces or even to fraternize.39 The Central Powers’ propaganda chimed with the message of Bolshevik agitation in the hinterland, and thereby helped not only to erode the Russian army’s combat motivation over the summer but also to pave the way for regime change. On 7 November, Lenin seized power in Petrograd, and when two weeks later he sent a wireless order to all units, over the heads of military commanders, instructing troops to elect representatives for armistice talks, the Germans intercepted and also transmitted it in order to ensure that it reached as many front-line units as possible. In the short term, the Central Powers’ strategy was spectacularly successful: on 3 December 1917 armistice talks opened with the now impotent opponent.40

  The Third OHL’s push for maximum war aims have with much justice been characterized as militarism run amok, yet behind it stood more logic than Ludendorff’s critics then or now have been ready to concede. Nobody thought the outcome of the war was settled in 1917. The Central Powers’ chance of total victory was greatly improved by Russia’s impending collapse, and although the longer term looked bleak thanks to the entry of the United States into hostilities, the new belligerent was without a large army and would be unable for some time to affect the decisive war on land.41 Ludendorff’s strenuous insistence after the war that no peace of understanding had been possible in 1917 was, at least for the west, probably correct, even if the OHL’s uncompromising stance contributed to the deadlock.42 The Americans before they joined hostilities, the Austrians, Socialists and the Pope all failed to broker peace during 1917 due to the distance between the belligerents’ war aims and the firmness with which they held to them. Even aside from German aims – and even Bethmann, a moderate by comparison with the other members of the Reich’s elite, was not willing entirely to surrender Belgium and wanted the annexation of Longwy-Briey – peace was scarcely possible when the French insisted inflexibly on regaining Alsace-Lorraine, a territory that for four decades had been integral to the Reich and whose population’s identity was by no means so unambiguously French as the Entente claimed.43

  Moreover, apparently moderate French wishes disguised aggressive intent, for French leaders coveted Alsace-Lorraine with the borders not of 1870, but of 1814 or even 1790, encompassing the unambiguously ethnically German but extremely valuable industrial and coal-mining Saar region, and they also planned a long-term military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine. These highly secret aspirations were comparable to Bethmann’s intention to grab Longwy-Briey. The Germans certainly knew about them, for, along with French consent to Russian annexation of the Reich’s eastern borderlands, they were leaked to the public in 1917.44 No less ominous were French calls to their allies to establish a self-sufficient economic bloc and the Entente’s reply to US mediation attempts in January 1917, which demanded ‘the liberation of Italians, of Slavs, of Roumanians and of Tscheco Slovaques from foreign domination’.45 Clearly, Germany’s enemies intended to return her to what her statesmen regarded as the pre-war ‘encirclem
ent’, weakened, economically isolated and either with no allies or at best an enfeebled and reduced Austria-Hungary. No Reich minister or even the parliamentarians who voted for the ‘Peace Resolution’ could find any of this acceptable. Even negotiating the return of Alsace-Lorraine would have been understood at home and abroad as an admission of defeat, with destabilizing consequences for the country’s government.46

  The Third OHL’s territorial aims were on a totally different scale from the French government’s demands, but as the deliberations at the 1919 Paris peace conference and the Versailles Treaty revealed, both shared something of the same zero-sum view of international relations: both sought security at their enemy’s expense.47 As Germany had so many bitter enemies, and as war had exposed her great economic vulnerability, her gains, so Ludendorff’s reasoning went, would have to be large to guarantee her safety. To understand his motives one has to look beyond tired stereotypes of Prussian militarism or the general’s personality; Ludendorff had, after all, been against large-scale annexations in early 1915 and the east was not a natural place for Germany to exercise its expansionist ambitions. The decisive recalculation had clearly come about in wartime, in response to the failure of the offensive bid for a quick victory in 1914 and the new economic conflict introduced by the British. Shocked German military leaders had been forced to re-evaluate the acquisition of raw materials as a military necessity. ‘The importance in war of coal, iron and food was known before the war,’ Ludendorff affirmed in his memoirs, ‘but how absolutely decisive they would actually become was only demonstrated to all the world as hostilities proceeded.’48

  Other wartime developments had also informed the expansion of German military aims. To protect the Reich’s precious industrialized border regions of Silesia, Lorraine, Westphalia and the Rhineland from the long-range artillery and aircraft that had developed so quickly during the war, protective barriers formed from enemy territory would be needed. At Kreuznach in the spring and again at a Crown Council in the autumn of 1917, Ludendorff demanded Belgium’s subjugation into economic and political dependence and the acquisition of Liège on the grounds that this would block an invasion route into the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial region.49 For the imperial navy, the retention of the Flanders coast was even more essential in light of the war experience, in order to counter future British blockades better and to facilitate access to the Atlantic, which in turn would enable contact to be maintained with the vast colonial territories it hoped Germany would also acquire.50