Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The Sixth War Loan was always going to be difficult to follow, but the circumstances in which the Seventh was advertised were especially discouraging for anyone considering investing in German victory. The U-boats had disappointed, Russia continued to fight, and the food supply was in crisis. Morale had plummeted to a new low.124 All the more impressive then that the campaign collected 5,530,285 signatures and raised 12,626 million marks; although somewhat less than its predecessor, these were still more subscribers and, in nominal terms, more money than for any of the other five previous war loans. The loan’s success in extremely adverse conditions owed much to the message that accompanied it. Hindenburg, the people’s hero and ‘saviour’, featured heavily. A pamphlet released by the Reichsbank illustrated to potential investors how in every way – land, industry, resources and people – Germany was superior to its arch-enemy, ‘England’.125 However, the campaign literature was above all stamped by a propaganda of fear. With defeat looming, the propagandists drew a nightmare vision of how peace might look. Germans were reminded of the official view that envious Britain had incited the war to crush competition from their commerce and industry. It wanted, they were told, ‘to annihilate us so we never recover!’126 ‘World history’ had ‘proven again and again that England takes everything from her vanquished and treats the poor, robbed people just as slaves.’127 Ragged Germans were shown being put to the plough or forced to labour in Entente colonies under brutal black guards. The suffering of Ireland under British rule was held up as a terrible warning of what the future would hold for a defeated Reich. The story of the Irish famine in the 1840s, closer to contemporaries than the First World War is to us, could be expected to resonate with malnourished, blockaded Germans. The British had turned Ireland, a ‘once so blooming land’, into a ‘hunger state’, and had ‘taken around half of its inhabitants through murder, hunger and forced deportation’.128

  Most emotively, the propaganda sought to reactivate the feelings of the national trauma of invasion in 1914. ‘German land should, as once in East Prussia, be laid waste and destroyed’ if the war effort slackened, the population was informed. The publicists called on the ‘robbery, murder, arson and rape’ that the north-easterly province had suffered to illustrate the consequences for the Reich if the enemy broke through.129 A short film was also shot that drew on this recent history in order to advertise the Seventh War Loan. The drama showed a wealthy and contented farmer’s family in East Prussia suddenly disturbed by the cry ‘the Russians are coming’. As the staging directions explained:

  Cossacks and Russians rush like animals into the village, burning and laying waste to everything in their path – the terrified inhabitants want to save themselves from the sea of flames – but mercilessly the Cossacks throw them back into the blazing fire, pull women and children onto the road and pitilessly knock down all who approach them to plead . . . They pay no attention to the whimpering women – the screams for help of following children echo unceasingly in the ears.

  If Germans did not wish to see these scenes repeated in 1917, there was only one course of action: ‘Yes, we must support our Fatherland with money!’130

  By the autumn of 1917, the German and Habsburg regimes were in a deep crisis of legitimacy. The half-hearted attempts at constitutional reform during the first part of the year had failed, sabotaged by their leaders’ reluctance, by entrenched interests in the Prussian Landtag and Hungarian parliament and by the tangle of conflicting ambitions nurtured by Austria’s nationalities. Peace, the peoples’ other demand, was also no closer to being realized. German leaders were set on an all-or-nothing gamble. The Third OHL’s rise and Bethmann’s dismissal had made their war aims even more expansive and inflexible. Austria-Hungary was dragged along in its ally’s wake. Emperor Karl lacked the courage to try for a separate peace, and the Entente powers, as their response to his approach showed, were anyway no more interested than their opponents in a negotiated settlement. Yet even if the idea of a compromise peace was a chimera in 1917, the failure of the Central Powers’ governments to respond adequately to popular desire for reform and relief jarred with the new Zeitgeist of Russian revolutionary fervour and Wilsonian idealism. The ideas from east and west of ‘self-determination of peoples’ and a ‘peace without victory’ were dangerously alluring. Against them, the Central Powers’ barren cry of ‘hold out!’ could only provoke the question ‘for what?’

  For Germany’s military leaders, there was no choice except to continue the war. In the generals’ zero-sum view of international politics expansive gains were essential; the conflict itself had taught them that not only favourable frontiers but above all food security were necessary to defend the Reich in perpetuity. Internally, the Reichstag’s growing power and the ever louder calls for greater democracy also encouraged expansionary aims. Germany’s conservative elites saw their salvation from reform in, and staked their whole legitimacy on, achieving that victory. In Austria-Hungary, where material conditions were worse, society angrier and the crisis of legitimacy more acute, the regime failed to find an exit from the war, and its fate remained bound to that of Germany. The Central Powers’ decision to continue the fight despite the doubts, disappointment and even disaffection of a growing proportion of their peoples placed them on a course of almost inevitable disaster. Yet, at the end of 1917, when Lenin and his Bolshevik followers seized control in Russia and shortly afterwards took the country out of the war, it suddenly appeared that this high-risk strategy might just succeed.

  12

  The Bread Peace

  BREST-LITOVSK

  The war efforts of the Central Powers were reinvigorated when, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks launched their coup d’état in Russia and a few weeks later sued for an armistice. For German leaders, it was a triumph. The Reich had gone to war in 1914 in large part through fear of Russian rearmament and aggression. The country’s earliest war-aims programme had stated that the behemoth to the east ‘must be thrust back as far possible . . . and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken’.1 The turmoil in Russia’s interior and the dissolution of her army after its last failed offensive in Galicia in the summer of 1917 now made this almost utopian objective appear achievable. For Austria-Hungary, the Bolsheviks’ peace request came as a lifeline. Emperor Karl and his Foreign Minister, Ottokar von Czernin, hoped that the cessation of hostilities in the east might lead to general peace. At the very least, they thought the resumption of trade might bring relief from the Empire’s catastrophic food shortages and permit their regime to survive. However, the peace they negotiated in practice accelerated their Empire’s demise. The Treaties of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine and Russia brought political disaffection and social disaster to Galicia and by opening a way for revolutionary propaganda and new discontents also undermined the Habsburg army.

  The armistice on the Eastern Front began on 15 December 1917 and one week later a peace conference between all four Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, and the Bolsheviks opened in the town of Brest-Litovsk (today in Belarus), at the German Eastern Field Army’s headquarters. For opinion at home and abroad, the Reich’s Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, and his Habsburg counterpart, Czernin, at first assented to Bolshevik proposals for peace without annexations or indemnities, but only with reservations, the most important of which was that the western Allies must participate in negotiations. Kühlmann in particular was playing a clever game. He planned to subvert the right of national self-determination and, as he later explained, through it ‘get for ourselves . . . whatever territorial concessions we absolutely needed’. The Germans had set up national councils in Poland, Courland, Lithuania and parts of Estonia. By strong-arming these councils to issue declarations seceding from Russia and either inviting German troops or proclaiming a wish for a close connection with the Reich, they were able with a veneer of legitimacy to prise these territories from Russia and draw them into Germany’s orbit.2

  The strategy
was too subtle for the OHL. Ludendorff and Hindenburg were outraged, fearing that by conditionally agreeing to Bolshevik proposals, Kühlmann had renounced the chance to dictate peace. The Bolsheviks too did not get it, thinking they had won a diplomatic victory until General Hoffmann, the OHL’s representative at the conference, explained to them that Russia was about to lose a lot of territory. What Kühlmann regarded as ‘absolutely needed’ filled a very long list. He himself wrote of ‘detaching huge areas from the present Russia and building up those districts into effective bulwarks on our frontier’, and the OHL was certainly not going to permit him to come away from the talks with anything less than their own objectives. In December 1917, Ludendorff wanted Lithuania, Courland, Riga and the nearby islands for the Reich ‘so that we can feed our people’. Poland was to be tied to the Central Powers. Russia was to evacuate Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Bessarabia, Armenia and the eastern tip of Galicia still under its control. Her economy would be opened to Reich influence, she would pay compensation for her prisoners held in Germany, and would deliver grain, oil and other materials at favourable prices.3

  The Germans forced through their demands. When, after an eleven-day intermission, the peace conference resumed on 9 January 1918, the western Allies had, as Kühlmann had foreseen, not replied, so he could argue that his conditional agreement in December to a peace with no annexations or indemnities was no longer binding. Leon Trotsky, who had come to lead the Bolshevik delegation, had no army capable of resisting the Germans. His only hope of staving off a humiliation was that revolution might break out in the Reich. The onset on 28 January of a huge peace strike in Berlin, organized by the new force in the labour movement, the revolutionary shop stewards under Richard Müller, and attracting 400,000 workers in the capital and tens of thousands more in Hamburg, Kiel and other industrial centres, stoked optimism. However, these strikes were quickly stamped out.4 There was also no chance that the Reich’s politicians would restrain its military; when an expansive treaty with Bolshevik Russia was eventually put before the Reichstag in March, the bourgeois parties that had supported the peace resolution eight months earlier all voted unhesitatingly for it, and even the SPD abstained.5

  Trotsky played into Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s hands by declaring ‘no war, no peace’ and storming out of the conference. The Third OHL wanted a firm finish to the war in the east, and had been itching to unleash the army again. Kühlmann had resisted, hoping rather wistfully that an agreement, however harsh, might avoid totally alienating Russia and permit future cooperation, but he was overruled by the Kaiser. German forces began rolling forward on 18 February, covering 240 kilometres in five days. On 3 March, Lenin and his colleagues in the Bolshevik Central Committee capitulated and signed a treaty even worse than the one they had earlier rejected. Ever since, its terms have been recounted with breathless horror. The Russian Empire lost around 2.5 million square kilometres of territory with 50 million inhabitants, 90 per cent of its coal mines, 54 per cent of its industry, and a third of its agriculture and railways.6 However, these losses need to be put in context. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, had it stood, would have left Russia somewhat larger than it is today. The Bolsheviks deserve little sympathy, for they had insisted on national self-determination in the hope of destabilizing the Central Powers but ironically had instead themselves become the first to lose from the ideal: the treaty detached minority peoples, not ethnic Russians.7

  The bulk of the wealth lost by the Russian Empire was in Poland and Ukraine, lands to which Russia’s rulers, regardless of ideological persuasion, had no moral claim and whose peoples, especially the Poles, had suffered more than a century of Tsarist religious and political persecution.8 The Germans were in no way idealistic or altruistic; pure self-interest and a desire for European hegemony shaped their policy at Brest-Litovsk. Nonetheless, for the populations of these territories, the power shift was an improvement on their previous plight. What was created was not a precursor to Hitler’s empire of 1941, but instead was similar to the Soviet reorganization of east-central Europe into satellite states in 1945. Unlike Tsarist Russia, Germany was at least prepared to allow these peoples to build some of their own institutions, and already during the war was finding these a struggle to control, especially in Poland and Lithuania. Moreover, however exploitative and intrusive a Germany that emerged victorious from the First World War may have been, for Ukraine, falling into its orbit could scarcely have been worse than the future that awaited. Ukrainians under the Bolsheviks in the interwar period would suffer conflict, brutal collectivization and 3.3 million deaths from man-made famine.9

  While the Germans had a good peace conference, the Austro-Hungarians were much less successful. Karl stressed to his Foreign Minister during negotiations that ‘the whole fate of the Monarchy and dynasty depends on peace being concluded as quickly as possible’.10 Czernin needed to secure food from the east for the starving Empire. He hoped to rein in German expansionism, fearing that it would prolong the war. He also wished to secure Poland for the Habsburgs, although this objective was less important than stopping hostilities. Czernin and his master’s desperation for peace constricted the Habsburg room for negotiation. ‘The peace with Russia must come about,’ the Foreign Minister admonished his deputy at the start of the conference. ‘Any eventuality is acceptable save the breaking off of the negotiations by the Central Powers.’ This stance was reinforced by subsequent events. The head of the Common Food Committee, General Ottokar Landwehr von Pragenau, warned at the start of January 1918 of the impending collapse of the food supply. What reserves were available in Hungary could not be transported to Austria because coal deliveries from German Silesia had dropped sharply. When on 14 January it was announced that the flour ration was to be halved, strikes broke out. They first flared just outside Vienna but then quickly spread across both halves of the Empire, encompassed 700,000 workers of all nationalities and lasted a full ten days. At the start of February, a mutiny broke out on ships at the naval base of Cattaro (Kotor, now in Montenegro). For three days, sailors had flown the red flag, demanded a peace without annexations and in the course of the mutiny killed an officer. To Habsburg leaders, it appeared the realm was on the brink of revolution.11

  The Germans, who had judged the Bolsheviks’ weakness correctly, were not going to budge from their expansive demands. Even Czernin’s bluff of a separate peace failed to push them into a hasty and more moderate settlement. Hoffmann was unfazed, replying that it would permit the welcome release of twenty-five German divisions from the Habsburg sector of the Eastern Front. However, Czernin had another option. On 16 December 1917 a delegation from the Ukrainian People’s Council, a nationalist government established after the March revolution smashed Tsarist authority, had arrived at Brest-Litovsk and asked to participate in the conference. For the Germans, this was good news as the group offered a publicity-friendly opportunity to detach Ukraine from Russia. For Austria-Hungary, the admission of the delegates to the talks was more double-edged. The Poles in the Warsaw Regency Council, established by the Central Powers in October 1917 to help govern the putative Polish state and provide legitimacy to its occupiers, feared their competing claims in the region would be disregarded and demanded representation. Habsburg Czech and South Slav representatives, testing the Central Powers’ commitment to national self-determination, also unsuccessfully demanded entry to the talks. However, although it was ideologically problematic, Czernin grasped the chance of parleying with Ukrainians while Germans and Russians were at loggerheads. Ukraine, the breadbasket of the east, appeared to hold the key to the Empire’s near fatal food supply problems.12

  There is no more telling a mark of how far the Habsburg Empire had fallen than Czernin’s readiness to appease the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian People’s Council were upstarts, ‘boys, scarcely more than twenty years old, people without experience, without property, without reputation, driven by adventure, perhaps megalomania’.13 They were members of the country’s tiny intelligentsia possessing n
o sway with the still mostly nationally indifferent peasantry in the countryside. It was not clear that the Council would be able to keep any promises it made or even whether it would be around long enough to try: the Bolsheviks had their own ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the Ukrainian Republic’ and in February their army briefly pushed into Kiev, assisted by the city’s workers, before being thrown out by the Germans.14 The Council’s representatives were thus breathtakingly arrogant in demanding from the Habsburg great power eastern Galicia and Bukovina, and also the Chełm region, which until 1912 had been a part of Congress Poland. Remarkably, Czernin listened. He parried the claim on Habsburg territory, but he made humiliating concessions. He signed Chełm over to the National Council, and he even permitted interference in the Empire’s own internal affairs, promising secretly that the Ruthenes’ pre-war demand for Galicia to be split into a western Polish and eastern Ukrainian Crownland would be realized. Both concessions, once they became public, would clearly alienate the Galician Poles, historically the most loyal of all the Empire’s Slavic peoples, and destroy any lingering possibility of tying Congress Poland to the Habsburg Crown. For this immense cost, Czernin won a secret undertaking from the Ukrainians to supply at least one million metric tons of grain by 1 August. The treaty was signed on 9 February.15