Despite these attempts to pacify the workforce, the summer of 1917 was very turbulent. Strikes broke out in the Ruhr industrial region and in the coal mines of Upper Silesia. In Cologne at the start of July, 30,000 metalworkers walked out, demanding a fifty-one-hour week and higher wages. The OHL became increasingly unnerved. In mid-August, Groener was dismissed. Ludendorff had looked on his conciliation of the unions with disfavour, and Groener had made many enemies in big business, which had the ear of the High Command, for trying to rein in profits.100 Ludendorff, along with the Prussian government and many home military commanders, interpreted the unrest not as an index of the rising distress within German society. Instead, they deluded themselves that it was the fruit of agitation by traitors and enemy agents. A circular sent by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in July 1917 set out this argument:
Various recent disturbances caused by the shortage of food follow much the same pattern. Simultaneous downing of tools in industrial complexes far removed from each other, sometimes on a particular signal, streams of demonstrators coming together at a clearly pre-arranged point, the putting forward almost everywhere of identical demands, in the case of threatened police intervention almost everywhere women, youths and children to the fore, obviously in the hope that in this way the police or military can be prevented from using the sharpest measures . . . The speed with which the crowd in most places rushes through the streets and the fact that plundering of grocery and other shops takes place also points to uniform intentions.
All these circumstances leave little doubt that we have faced demonstrations and riots painstakingly spread through arrangement passed from mouth to mouth. They were not simply spontaneous expressions of uproar about the worsening food crisis but in part are to be attributed to the secret agitation of unscrupulous rabble-rousers, possibly to be sought in the ranks of the supporters of radical Social Democracy, or possibly agents in the pay of our enemy or their henchmen.101
Intensely anxious officials were seized by fantasies similar to those at the start of the war. Edgy German commanders at home imagined a host of adversaries. Ludendorff, possibly thinking of the Reich’s sponsorship of Lenin, feared that enemy agents had enlisted radical Socialists and pacifists within Germany: ‘Especially since the entry of the United States into the war,’ he claimed, ‘an ambitious coordinated action has been observable.’102 Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists attracted particular suspicion. However, subversive agents could in the minds of officials take any form: as one home commander warned, ‘They carry out their highly treasonous activity in the garb of bourgeois citizens, political agitators, yes, even under the mask of the field grey soldier.’103 This mindset was dangerous, for it widened the gulf between leaders and people. Paranoid higher-ranking military and civilian officials came to regard their fellow citizens as potential agitators. Moreover, their interpretation of strikes and protests as products of subversion misguidedly encouraged them to dismiss real grievances and cast those who uttered them as willing or naive traitors to the Fatherland.
The OHL not only feared politically motivated disorder on the home front but was even more acutely concerned that similar agitation might undermine the army’s discipline and performance. An order issued on 25 July 1917 warned hysterically that political propaganda was entering the force ‘from the most diverse sides’. Independent Socialists were singled out as ‘conducting . . . subversive activity most damaging for the men’s discipline’. Commanders also feared dangerous ideas from the west. Conscious of the damage that its own propaganda was wreaking on the Russians on the Eastern Front, the OHL attempted in April to prevent any comparable Allied campaign in the west by announcing that enemy pilots shot down after dropping propaganda flyers would be court-martialled as acting against the laws of war.104 These anxieties were exacerbated by the knowledge that since the Somme, the army’s morale had become more brittle. Desertion had tripled over the rate of 1916, reaching around 20,000 men by the year’s end. From the summer, a catalogue of small mutinies, indiscipline and panics had hampered units fighting on the Western Front.105 There was some evidence of a leftist political edge to men’s discontent. Letter censors reported complaints that ‘the whole state is only a tool of capitalism and the profiteers’.106 One bitter ditty became ubiquitous across the front:
We do not fight for Fatherland
We do not fight for God
We’re fighting for the rich people
The poor are getting shot.107
It was even rumoured that men on leave and the hospitalized wounded were discussing ‘revolution’, albeit only once they had beaten the enemy.108 Their attitude was revealing: a readiness to defend hearth and home against the external foe still trumped class antagonism and limited the appeal of revolutionary Socialist propaganda for the western Field Army. Growing exhaustion and the strain of fighting a materially superior enemy, not political disaffection, were the causes of lowered morale and indiscipline.109
There was more evidence of political subversion in the navy. A mutiny on 2 August 1917, most seriously affecting the battleships Prinzregent Luitpold and Friedrich der Grosse, was treated by the Reichsmarine’s leaders as a revolutionary insurrection. In the aftermath, courts martial handed down ten death sentences, two of which were carried out, and terms of imprisonment totalling over 360 years. The two conspirators who were executed, Stoker Albin Köbis and Sailor Max Reichpietsch, had hoped to spark a strike demanding peace across the battle fleet. Reichpietsch, a USPD member, was a fantasist who deluded himself that he had been tasked by the party to build up a subversive movement within the navy. He had distributed and encouraged discussion of USPD newspapers and pamphlets among the men on the Friedrich der Grosse. He had also organized a list of signatures supporting the USPD’s efforts to promote a peace without annexations or indemnities at the international Socialist conference in Stockholm. Around 5,000 sailors had signed.
Nonetheless, the revolutionary potential of the fleet in the summer of 1917 should not be exaggerated. As one sailor noted at the time in his diary, while his comrades’ rebellious spirit owed something to ‘events in Russia . . . much has yet to be done to merit such a comparison’.110 Anger about service conditions rather than political alienation motivated insubordination in the fleet. Sailors on the battleships were more distant from their officers than both U-boat personnel and front-line soldiers. Their service seemed pointless, for the clash with the British at Jutland had changed nothing and the High Sea Fleet had not been out on an operation since October 1916. Above all, food was a flashpoint of inter-rank conflict far worse than any in the army. The rations of battleship crews were miserable, while their superiors still ate well. The navy had prevaricated for six months before following the army’s example and introducing food-checking commissions, and even then many captains had disregarded the order. The summer of 1917 had seen repeated strikes on several battleships, as sailors had tested the limits of authority and tried, mostly successfully, to assert their rights. The ‘mutiny’ of 2 August that finally unleashed the navy’s wrath was a limited affair not so different from these earlier strikes. Six hundred men from the Prinzregent Luitpold had left their ship, and planned to spend three hours in the tavern as a minor protest against the imprisonment of some of their comrades for skipping duty the day before when an excursion was cancelled. Nonetheless, despite the strikes’ modest aims, they were not without political impact. An attempt in the Reichstag by Chancellor Michaelis to censure the USPD for the strikes met strong opposition from a Reichstag left and centre majority, which saw the move as an assault on deputies’ immunity. In another illustration of parliament’s power, its hostility forced Michaelis to resign on 31 October 1917. The seventy-four-year-old Bavarian Centre Party politician Georg von Hertling was appointed to replace him. His long career in the Reichstag and in Bavaria’s government, and the decision to consult party leaders before his appointment, appeared to point towards another step on the way to a true German democracy. But his conserv
atism and age meant in practice that he was no counterweight to the power of the Third OHL.111
There were powerful forces in Germany that feared the Reichstag’s new assertiveness and the left’s appeal for a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The right’s response to the July peace resolution came in September 1917 with the foundation of a new movement, the German Fatherland Party. With the former State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Alfred von Tirpitz, as its figurehead and donations from heavy industry funding its activities, the new party set itself the task of unifying ‘all patriotic forces’ to resist democratization and proselytize for a ‘strong German peace’ with very extensive gains in the west and east, and beyond Europe. Tirpitz’s leadership was a huge draw for the right. By February 1918 it had attracted nearly 300,000 members and by the autumn, after the German army’s advances on the Western Front in the first half of the year, its membership had risen to 800,000. Around half were members of other nationalist organizations that were affiliated to the party, but the remainder were still more numerous than the combined membership of Germany’s Socialist parties. However, the Fatherland Party appealed only to a very specific section of society. Its strength lay above all in the Prussian east, the old Kingdom’s conservative heartlands and the ethnically mixed region whose German inhabitants had most to lose from a national defeat. In southern Germany, by contrast, the Fatherland Party was extremely weak. Higher officials, professionals, academics and estate owners were all present in the party in large numbers. Pastors and teachers played a key role in its decentralized organization. The party was thus a bastion of the respectable and wealthy middle class. Tradesmen and workers stayed well away.112 The organization was also unpopular with the troops. Many wondered why the government did not take steps to rein it in. While the Fatherland Party claimed that the army would not stand a moderate peace, men at the front shared the defensive conception of their home compatriots.113
The Third OHL was also spurred into action by the Reichstag’s peace resolution, as well as fears about leftist agitation and falling morale in the army’s ranks. Ludendorff, having experienced success with propaganda in Russia, now focused on influencing his own men’s hearts and minds. ‘Patriotic Instruction’, as his programme became known, was introduced two days before the resolution passed, on 17 July 1917. As he explained, it was intended to rejuvenate troops’ ‘combat effectiveness and with it confidence in victory’ and to ‘counter the agitators, skivers and weaklings at home and in the army’.114 The army commands at the front and the home military district commands were tasked with running the programme. Each combat division ultimately appointed a dedicated ‘Instruction Officer’ who guided officers at the front in disseminating the propaganda. The programme also embraced entertainment and welfare, for example new infrastructure such as field libraries and soldiers’ rest homes. It was a pioneering attempt both to raise morale and to indoctrinate troops; a product of the OHL’s insight, so different from its attempts to impose compulsion on despised civilians, that its citizen-soldiers could not merely be ordered but must be inspired to fight. The methods that the programme adopted were also innovative. Care was taken to identify soldiers’ anxieties and grievances and to assess their reactions to the propaganda. Postal censorship reports, discussions with company officers, regimental doctors and chaplains, and information from Vertrauensleute, troops tasked with reporting on their comrades’ moods, enabled Instruction Officers to adapt their material to their audience’s concerns. The feedback also allowed these officers to improve their communication. When lectures proved unpopular and ineffective, more imaginative techniques were adopted. Some Instruction Officers won an audience by squeezing in talks during company evenings with free beer or before cinema outings. It soon dawned on military propagandists that the entertainment itself could be used to strengthen soldiers’ combat motivation: plays were picked that would not only entertain but also educate. Films showing cities and landscapes in Germany were especially popular, and reminded troops why they should hold out.115
The programme was opposed by Socialists as disseminating a political message of total victory. The OHL attempted to persuade its men of the necessity of annexations. Under the slogan ‘More land!’ soldiers learned why a peace without annexation was impracticable. The blockade showed that, without more territory for food, Germany would remain vulnerable to British naval power.116 However, here, as in its other propaganda, the military took care to stress Entente aggression. Soldiers were warned about the enemy’s aims: ‘the Rhine should be French, the Oder Russian and the North Sea English’. In defeat, Germans would be enslaved and suppressed.117 The success of Patriotic Instruction in steeling the will of its troops to hold out – and despite limited resources, some reluctance among officers to take on the new propaganda duties, and apathy among soldiers, there is good evidence indicating that it did have an effect – was down to the army’s recognition of the fundamentally defensive combat motivation of its rank and file. Guidelines stressed that ‘everyone must hear time and again that in the case of an enemy victory not only the farther and nearer homeland but he himself and his relatives are lost’.118
Propaganda also did much to sustain civilian readiness to hold out in 1917. The activism and energy of 1914 and 1915, when local elites had led the public mobilization, had withered under the hardship, war weariness and food shortages. The state had stepped into the gap to provide motivation. The propaganda organization was, as in 1914, still splintered. Ludendorff’s appeal for a centralized agency to formulate press strategy and synchronize the fragmented ministerial publicity agencies fell on deaf ears in 1916.119 Nonetheless, the War Press Office under the OHL did provide some coordination through its monthly meetings with the Supreme War Office, the War Food Office and the Ministries of War, Public Works and Culture. It guided the press and supplied most of the material for the army’s Patriotic Instruction programme. It also engaged with crucial local community elites and opinion formers: its Deutsche Kriegswochenschau, a weekly newssheet with facts and figures useful for shaping the popular view of recent war activities, was sent to clergy, teachers, youth workers, railway and postal officials, as well as farmers’ and middle-class organizations. The initial issue of 80,000 soon expanded and at the most intense periods of propaganda ran to 175,000 copies. The new medium of film was also embraced. The Third OHL established the Photographic and Film Office in January 1917 to produce propaganda pictures. With a library of over 200,000 photographs, it supplied the War Press Office and other official bureaus with movies and illustrations for their campaigns.120
At the regional level – always important in the federalized Reich – another propaganda organization had been developed. Civil authorities had been spurred by the food crisis to intervene in public opinion, rather than simply rely on the military censor to suppress negative views. The Bavarians were the first to take the decisive step towards actively shaping public opinion in February 1916, but others soon followed, using clergy and schools to track and influence the people’s mood. The major change in 1917 was that due to the Third OHL’s regard for morale as the war’s decisive factor, the home military commands also became active in propaganda, working closely with local civil authorities. Principal themes included questions of food supply, military issues, citizenship and the economy. The propagandists did not confine themselves to direct appeals but, like the War Press Office, sought the cooperation of court organizations and key opinion-formers whose support would give their message greater weight. Middle-class organizations, unions and workers’ committees and, for women, the Church were all co-opted. Propaganda was skilfully packaged depending on its intended audience. Thus, the middle class, regarded by the Reich’s authorities as the backbone of the people but suffering more than any other section of society from price inflation, was bombarded with material on the consequences of defeat, the war economy and, particularly frightening for anyone with property or a business, the dangers of Bolshevism. In contrast, when
addressing workers, the language of the labour movement was adopted to persuade them of their interest in a German victory. The war against mercantile England was twisted into a crusade against Anglo-Saxon world capitalism.121
The campaign for the Seventh War Loan in the autumn of 1917 illustrates how effective German propaganda had become, as well as the themes it employed. The biannual war loans advertised in the spring and autumn of each year were the high points of the propagandists’ calendar. The Reichsbank’s Information Bureau led the campaign, but it was supported by the War Press Office, the civil authorities, army commands and home district commands. The campaign was no mere fund-raising exercise; while the war loan helped to cover the German government’s immense war expenditure, its symbolic value as a plebiscite on popular determination to continue the war was even more significant. Moreover, the impact of the loan campaigns on the national willingness to hold out was achieved not merely by persuasion. War loans gave each subscriber a material interest in victory, as it was inconceivable that the Reich’s government would be able to repay its immense debts unless it could force an indemnity on its enemies. The Sixth War Loan campaign had been the first to employ modern advertising techniques. It had a signature picture by the respected artist Fritz Erler, depicting a hardened front-line soldier in a steel helmet and with a gas mask slung around his neck, that carried the message ‘Help us triumph! Sign the War Loan’, which was reproduced on nearly 1.5 million posters and 11 million postcards. Two flyers, each with a run of 12 million copies, three short publicity films and a specially composed theme tune entitled ‘Help us triumph!’ all assisted in ensuring that no one in Germany could ignore the appeal.122 The campaign, launched when the people’s optimism about a rapid victory through the U-boats was still fresh, was a tremendous success. The loan mobilized small savers, attracting over seven million signatures, nearly twice the number of the Fifth War Loan, and raised 13,122 million marks.123
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