Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Habsburg functionaries did not merely defect after the revolutions, but were instrumental in some places in bringing about regime change. The city of Cracow best illustrates how officials who had been central to the success of the ‘double mobilization’ in 1914 and 1915 had turned by 1918. Their Polish nationalism, which had been entirely compatible with imperial loyalty at the outset, had through the war experience turned to a stance of irreconcilable opposition. The city council first manifested open disloyalty on 28 October, when it confiscated food transports intended for the Habsburg army. On 30 October municipal officials gathered at the city’s university and together decided that they owed their allegiance to the new Polish state forming to the north. On the following day, the revolution began. Polish troops of the garrison had been secretly alerted, and early in the morning they surprised and disarmed their German Moravian comrades. Arms were taken from the barracks’ magazines and handed over to students. The city’s police chief was in on the conspiracy and his men were already on the streets wearing Polish eagles and red-white cockades on their caps. At the city hall, the Polish Legionary Brigadier Bolesław Roja, whom the revolutionaries had appointed their military chief, negotiated the surrender of the city fortress with its disorientated Habsburg commander. Outside, soldiers unscrewed Habsburg eagles from the walls. The changeover was quick and orderly, ‘without any revolution and riots’, as the resident Aleksandra Czechówna remarked with astonishment.119 Notices were pasted around the city to inform its people of the changed circumstances. A Polish guard relieved the Austrian watch in the old city hall tower overlooking Cracow’s main marketplace.120

  The Habsburg state, defeated and drained of legitimacy, fell with very little resistance. Yet this did not mean that the replacement of the multinational Empire with nation states was seamless and straightforward. In this land with such intermixed ethnicities, where racial enmities had been inflamed by war and where Wilson’s organizing principle of national self-determination raised competition between peoples to a winner-takes-all struggle of national survival, such change inevitably brought bloodshed. Any place whose population was mixed and whose ownership was contested saw clashes or the suppression of the weaker group. The German-inhabited north and west of Bohemia briefly declared itself a part of German Austria but was overrun in early November by Czech troops. In Fiume, a 15,000-strong Italian mob gathered at the end of October to shout ‘Down with the Croatians!’ Some areas, such as the Romanian countryside around Czernowitz and parts of western Galicia, were sites of anti-Semitic outrages. One of the bloodiest inter-ethnic confrontations, the clashes and pogrom that took place in the former Galician capital of Lwów in early November, may stand both as an example and a conclusion illustrating the inter-ethnic animosities and new violence bequeathed to central Europe by the First World War.121

  Lwów had suffered greatly during the war. Russian occupation, food shortages and maladroit Habsburg diplomacy had all heightened tensions between its three major ethnic groups, Poles, Ruthenes and Jews. By the war’s end, the Poles who dominated the city council and accounted for just over half of its population were looking forward to joining the new independent Polish state. However, for Ukrainian nationalists the city was desirable as the capital of a new Ukrainian state that would stretch to the San River. They only made up a fifth of the population but could rely on two major advantages. First, the countryside around the city was overwhelmingly Ruthene. Second, thanks to Habsburg security policies, the majority of troops in Lwów that autumn were also Ruthenes. The coup launched with these soldiers on the night of 1 November 1918, which took the city centre and led to a yellow-blue flag being flown from the city hall, opened a period of bitter conflict. Polish residents resisted, soon helped by reinforcements from western Galicia. Polish fatalities amounted to 439 people; those of the Ukrainians are not known, but eventually, on 22 November, the Ukrainian troops were forced out of the city. As if this bloodletting was not sufficient, exultant Polish troops then turned on Lwów’s Jews, who had set up their own militia for protection but had remained scrupulously neutral. In a three-day pogrom, shops and houses were plundered, women were raped, seventy-three Jews were killed and hundreds more injured. This violence between ethnic groups and vicious anti-Semitism in Lwów boded very ill for the new national order of east-central Europe. The wiser among the residents recognized this. ‘You see those little holes?’ asked one showing an American visitor around the city in 1919. ‘We call them here “Wilson’s Points”. They have been made with machine guns; the big gaps have been made with hand grenades. We are now engaged in self-determination, and God knows what and when the end will be.’122

  Germany’s ‘revolution from above’ in the last month of war was not so abortive but no more successful than that of Austria-Hungary. In the hour of defeat, the Reich’s rulers decided that it would be best to spread the blame. The decree issued by the Kaiser on 30 September at the behest of the OHL suddenly announced a wish ‘that the German people would cooperate more actively than hitherto in the determination of the fate of the Fatherland’. Now, at a time when that fate was already sealed, ‘men who have the confidence of the people should have a broad share in the rights and duties of government’.123 Appointed to head the new administration was the fifty-one-year-old prince Max von Baden. Although a scion of southern German royalty, he had acquired a reputation as a liberal and it was believed that he could attract the confidence of a Reichstag majority. The government he formed was very different from any the Reich had ever seen. Among its ministers were Reichstag deputies from the Progressives, Centre and Social Democrat parties. These men could be expected to give the coming armistice credibility, for their parties had been behind the Reichstag peace resolution in July 1917.124

  The new administration immediately came under immense pressure from Ludendorff to open negotiations with the Allies to halt the fighting. The First Quartermaster General was intensely fearful that his army would collapse totally without an armistice and had naively hoped a new government would be in place and a note sent to Wilson by 1 October. To Max’s questioning about whether it was really necessary to appeal for an armistice so abruptly, leaving him in a very weak negotiating position with the Reich’s enemies, Ludendorff insisted on the ‘speediest possible despatch’ of a note and Hindenburg warned of a looming potential ‘catastrophe’. The army unnerved the party leaders too with a speech approved by Ludendorff and delivered to them on 2 October. Its explanation for why an armistice was necessary differed markedly from what the First Quartermaster General had told his officers at general headquarters a day earlier. Blame was heaped on Bulgaria’s military collapse, a misfortune for which conveniently nobody at the OHL could be held culpable. Where it was conceded that problems did exist on the Western Front, these were said to be of a purely material nature: the enemy had in the tank an invincible weapon and unmatchable reserves of manpower. Ludendorff clearly wished to preserve the army’s prestige, for the stress he had placed on the troops’ unreliability in the talk at general headquarters was not repeated. Indeed, the politicians were assured that ‘the old spirit of heroism had not disappeared’. Officers and men, it was claimed, ‘vied with one another’. Most revealing of military leaders’ desire to shirk all blame were the blatant contradictions within the speech. ‘The German Army,’ the party leaders were assured, ‘is still strong enough to hold out against the enemy for months’, and yet simultaneously they were also admonished that ‘no time should be lost. Every twenty-four hours can make the situation worse.’125

  Prince Max and most Reichstag politicians were prepared to continue the fight. By uniting Germans in national defence, they hoped to stiffen resistance to win better peace terms.126 Confronted by the panic of the military and warned by the Kaiser that he had ‘not been brought . . . to make difficulties for the Supreme Command’, Max relented and on the evening of 3 October dispatched via Switzerland a note requesting President Wilson to ‘take steps for the restoration of peace’ and or
ganize an immediate armistice.127 The calculation of appealing directly to the American President instead of to the bloodied and bitter French and British at first appeared correct. When Wilson’s reply of 8 October arrived, it was cautious but not hostile, seeking clarification on whether the German government was now representative of the people’s will and whether it accepted the Fourteen Points. However, his tone hardened in a response sent six days later to a second German note. In part, this was a consequence of pressure from the President’s disgruntled allies and American hardliners. It was also the result of a U-boat strike. With impeccably bad timing, UB123 sunk the British passenger ship Leinster on 11 October, with the loss of 450 lives, including 135 women and children and some Americans. Wilson’s second note shattered the illusions on which the German peace approach was founded. It emphasized that ‘satisfactory safeguards and guarantees’ would have to be conceded to preserve the Allied armies’ current military advantage, it fulminated against the continuation of ‘illegal and inhumane practices’ by German forces and, most ominously, it sought to exploit and widen the already stark divisions between the Reich’s people and its rulers. The ‘arbitrary power’ that Wilson still regarded as in control of Germany was condemned as an impediment to peace. The solution lay with the people: ‘It is within the choice of the German Nation to alter it.’128

  The clear evidence that Wilson would not permit Germany an easy armistice and was attempting to meddle with its internal politics inflamed resistance. Ironically, Ludendorff was one source of opposition. He had recovered from his panic at the end of September, and while he still hoped for an armistice, by mid-October he wanted just a temporary pause to permit his army to withdraw undisturbed and take up strong positions on the German frontier.129 At a meeting with the government on 17 October, he told Prince Max that Wilson’s conditions were ‘too hard’. If Germany’s enemies wanted to impose them, he declared defiantly, ‘we should tell [them] that they must fight’. In contrast to the OHL’s dire warnings earlier in the month, Ludendorff now estimated that the Germans would get better peace conditions if they fought into the following year. A military breakdown was ‘possible but nor probable’. The key was just to get through one more month: if ‘we get into winter,’ he claimed, ‘we shall be “out of the wood” ’.130 Quite what this new optimism was based upon is difficult to fathom. Ludendorff had started the meeting confident but he was certainly buoyed up during it when the new War Minister, General Heinrich Scheüch, offered him another 600,000 men. However, if he genuinely believed these were available, he was deluding himself. Only at the cost of stripping mining and the railways, and therefore crippling Germany’s industrial capability to wage war, could they be conscripted.131

  The situation at the front had not improved either. True, the Allies’ general offensive that had so scared the OHL at the end of September had not precipitated the feared rout and was slowing.132 However, the Hindenburg Line had been broken and, even worse, the armistice note that Ludendorff had insisted be sent had undermined what was left of his army’s combat motivation and, still more disastrously, its discipline. By mid-October, field post censors were reporting that soldiers demanded ‘peace at any price’.133 Some had surrendered claiming that an armistice had already been signed. Even worse, the number of stragglers and deserters in the rear areas had swelled after the armistice note, widely taken to be an admission of defeat, had been issued. Commanders understood the reasoning behind this indiscipline well. The men had decided, one army commander reported in the middle of the month, that ‘they would be stupid if they now still let themselves be shot dead’.134

  Ludendorff’s opposition sparked a power struggle between the OHL and the civilian government. A strange reversal of positions had taken place. Prince Max was now determined to pursue the approach to Wilson to the end. The first note of 3 October had raised popular expectations of peace that could not be disappointed without provoking a dangerous wave of anger and Ludendorff had been unable to justify why fighting on should secure a better peace. Deeply suspicious of the general, Max feared that his hubris and vanity would lead to a destructive invasion of the Reich.135 Overcoming military opposition by threatening to resign, he forced the Kaiser to support his desire to accede to Wilson’s demand to halt submarine warfare. However, tension peaked when the American President’s third note arrived on 23 October, in which he judged the reforms in German government as insufficiently far-reaching and warned that ‘the United States cannot deal with any but veritable representatives of the German people . . . If it must deal with the military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany . . . it must demand, not peace negotiations, but surrender.’136

  The army High Command responded to Wilson’s note by issuing an order to the troops stating that the American President had demanded a capitulation, an unacceptable demand for the armed forces. Contradicting the Chancellor’s policy, it warned that there was no choice but to embrace a ‘fight to the bloody end’. The following day, 25 October, Hindenburg and Ludendorff hurried to Berlin against Max’s express wishes. Their intention was to have the Kaiser dismiss him, break off negotiations with Wilson and return the country to a total war footing. Earlier in the conflict, their threats of resignation had succeeded in intimidating Wilhelm II into following their policy. However, now circumstances had changed. The OHL’s prestige was diminished. Hindenburg remained important as a figurehead but Ludendorff’s reputation had been greatly damaged by the military defeats. No less importantly, the Kaiser feared for his throne. Wilson’s notes had made clear his disdain for the Reich’s rulers, and the latest message appeared to offer Germans easier terms in exchange for revolution. As the imperial authorities were only too aware, so low was Wilhelm II’s stock that his people would willingly sacrifice him for a better peace. ‘In German newspapers, the removal of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the abdication of the current Kaiser is quite bluntly demanded,’ observed one official report from 22 October. Advocates of this course had ceased to be confined to the ranks of the Independent Socialists and now extended well into the middle classes.137

  Faced with this desperate situation, the Kaiser was prepared to support his Chancellor. Adopting Ludendorff’s methods, Max had threatened to resign should the First Quartermaster General not be removed from his post. Decisive in winning over the monarch was the hope, planted in his mind by the Chief of the Privy Cabinet, Clemens von Delbrück, that it was Ludendorff’s head rather than his own which Wilson really wanted.138 On the morning of 26 October, Ludendorff and Hindenburg were summoned to the Bellevue Palace in western Berlin for an imperial audience. The Kaiser’s demeanour was gruff. He reproached the two soldiers for their recent conduct, and declared that he had lost confidence in the General Staff. They had brought him ‘to a terrible situation’. He criticized how scarcely three weeks earlier the OHL had demanded an armistice, but now wished to fight on and reject Wilson’s offer, and he condemned its unauthorized order to the army to continue the fight. The interview ended with Ludendorff’s dismissal. Hindenburg, whose departure the government feared might further fatally demoralize the army, was ordered to remain.139

  A second and more fateful source of opposition to Max’s peace policy came from the navy. Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the Chief of the Admiralty, was particularly disgruntled about the move to terminate the war. He feared that Ludendorff would surrender the navy to get a land armistice and the turn towards peace stopped preparations for his own personal vanity project: a vast naval armaments drive, intended to produce 450 new U-boats, named the Scheer Programme.140 The Admiral’s discontent grew when, after Wilson’s second note, the government ordered an end to unrestricted submarine warfare. The fleet command took a weirdly detached view of Germany’s plight. ‘The Navy does not need an armistice’ asserted a strategy document of 16 October, as if the marine could go on fighting when the rest of the nation had stopped. Still, with the army having conceded inevitable defeat and the government determined not to break peace negotiat
ions, the fleet command searched for an appropriate response. The cessation of U-boat warfare permitted the battleships of the High Seas Fleet once again to become operational, and the Naval Command decided to send it out on a last, desperate operation against its arch-enemy, Britain’s Grand Fleet. ‘Even if it is not to be expected that this will bring a decisive turn in the course of events,’ observed a naval strategy document of 16 October, ‘nonetheless it is from a moral perspective a question of the Navy’s honour and existence that it does its utmost in the final battle.’141

  The Naval Command kept its intentions secret. Beyond a brief and obscure mention that the fleet now had operational freedom, neither the Kaiser nor Chancellor were consulted about the coming mission. Only Ludendorff was informed, and he was told to keep it quiet. The Naval Command did not aim to sabotage the government’s peace moves. Nor would a fleet action relieve any of the pressure on the German army. Rather, in a further example of the myopia that had pushed them to advocate unrestricted U-boat warfare, naval commanders were thinking only of their service’s prestige and interests. Officers’ honour demanded a show of force before national capitulation. They were also motivated by more pragmatic considerations. The peacetime justification for building a surface fleet, that it could deter Britain from entering hostilities against Germany, had been shown to be false in 1914. Worse, still, the expensive vessels had been of little use in wartime, proving too few to beat the stronger Royal Navy decisively and impotent against the British blockade.142 To save the service’s prestige and future funding, its commanders felt dramatic action was needed before the war’s end. Scheer’s Chief of Staff, Rear Admiral von Trotha, set to work in early October on a suitably desperate scheme. His Operation Plan No. 19 envisaged a night attack by the whole High Seas Fleet in the Hoofden, the water that lay between Britain and the Netherlands. Smaller vessels would first harass maritime traffic on the Flanders coast and in the mouth of the Thames. This would, it was hoped, provoke the British Grand Fleet to sally out. Newly laid minefields and submarines stationed along its path would erode the Grand Fleet’s strength, and give the Germans, who had only half its numbers, a chance of inflicting more damage. That few, if any German ships would return did not bother officers determined to choose death over dishonour. To the men, however, it was a ‘suicide sortie’.143