The Zimmermann Telegram

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  By November, when the prospect of involvement in Europe was getting blacker, the growing intimacy between Carranza and Japan was becoming plainer. The Japanese envoy in Mexico was lavishly entertaining government officials and being lavishly dined in return at the National Palace in an “ostentatious display of cordiality.” Also in November a Mexican Army officer, Major J. M. Carpio, sailed for Tokyo aboard the Empress of Asia on a mission to buy arms. His activities on arrival, reported daily by watching Americans, included conferences with many high naval officials and escorted visits to Japanese naval bases at Kure, Sasebo, and Yokosuka. Despite Japan’s agreement not to export arms to any except Allied nations, Major Carpio was able to purchase machine guns and rifles as well as all the equipment for an ammunition factory to be set up in Mexico. Nor did he find any obstacles put in the way of his engaging the services of several score Japanese ordnance experts to run the factory and a Japanese ship to deliver it. His activities set off so many wild rumors of Japanese infiltration that it really seemed as if the Yellow Peril had arrived in the flesh at last.

  Berlin fervently hoped so. At that very moment the militarists were forcing the decision to risk American belligerency for the sake of an all-out submarine campaign. German admirals and generals with confident arrogance were promising their government that America could be discounted in advance because her flank would be turned by Japan, which would certainly seize the chance to attack Lower California or the Panama Canal. The German government was anxious to be persuaded. But who, as 1916 drew to its somber close, knew what Japan might do? Wilson at the same time was ardently, desperately trying to wring from the belligerents some sign of willingness to negotiate a settlement before Germany should let loose the U-boats and force belligerency upon America herself. It was a grim race between Wilson and the Wilhelmstrasse. No one was cheering.

  Seven

  “Our Friend Zimmermann”

  IN NOVEMBER 1916, when Europe was war-numb and longing for peace, America thought it saw a sign of hope in the appointment of “a very jolly large sort of German” (so described by Ambassador Gerard) as the new Foreign Minister. Disgusted with the war, increasingly nervous lest they be dragged in, Americans were ready to seize on anything that seemed to offer a prospect of breaking apart the belligerents, who were reeling back and forth in their hopelessly deadlocked wrestle. They believed they saw in the promotion of Under-Secretary Arthur Zimmermann the signal of an upsurge of liberal forces that would free Germany from the grip of military autocracy, open the way to peace and the salvation of the world. They greeted him with a cry of welcome as if he were the sun that would begin the melting of the snows. Had they been less illusioned, they might have read in the appointment signs of even sterner weather ahead.

  Zimmermann appealed to Americans because he was what the “a man of the people,” the first ever to be appointed to high office in the German foreign service, hitherto reserved for Junkers. He was a big, ruddy, good-humored, square-headed bachelor of fifty years with blue eyes, reddish blond hair, and bushy mustache, the very epitome of the German middle class, although his middle-class origin he had contrived partially to remedy by an approved dueling scar on his cheek. He had not a von to his name, and his training and early career had been in the consular service, realm of the non-vons. Had he stayed there, wrote former Chancellor Prince von Bülow in those four malicious volumes of posthumous memoirs that on their appearance in 1930 caused such agony in the ministries of Europe, or had he become a provincial bureaucrat, he would have been liked and esteemed and greeted every morning by the local populace as he came to take his apéritif on the terrace of the town’s best hotel with a hearty “Good morning, good health, Your Honor!”

  The fate thus patronizingly laid out for him Zimmermann escaped through sheer industry. He was transferred to the Foreign Office in 1902 and reached the rank of Under-Secretary by 1911. A story circulated in Berlin by the Dutch Ambassador of that day claims that Zimmermann might have had the top job in 1913 instead of Gottlieb von Jagow, but that neither wanted the responsibility which, in those days of the Kaiser’s darting interferences, could be uncomfortable. Each deferred to the other, but Zimmermann won on the excuse that he was suffering from gallstones, and so “Herr von Jagow had to assume the responsibility although he had ten times as many gallstones.”

  Perhaps Zimmermann’s initial reluctance was due to his being an outsider, a self-made man in the aristocratic ranks of the Foreign Office. This very attribute predisposed every American, bred to the automatic assumption that to be self-made is simultaneously to be virtuous, in his favor. In Imperial Germany it merely had the effect, as so often happens to the self-made in a society of exaggerated class distinctions, of making Zimmermann more Hohenzollern than the Kaiser. Because he wanted to be “one of them” he was the more anxious to be orthodox, the more easily taken into camp by the ruling elite. They did not appoint Zimmermann because they felt any necessity of liberalizing the government by bringing in a “man of the people,” as the Americans imagined, but because they knew he was more amenable to the looming decision for full use of the U-boat than his predecessor, von Jagow, who was an insider by birth but, like Bernstorff, a believer in the necessity of a compromise peace. In America, Zimmermann’s replacement of von Jagow was taken to be a softening of policy; actually it was the reverse, a logical sequel to a more momentous shift in command that had taken place two months earlier.

  On August 29, 1916, the day after Rumania joined the ring of Germany’s enemies, the two grand dragons of the Eastern Front, General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, had been elevated to the command of the General Staff. Hindenburg, the seventy-year-old hero of Tannenberg, became nominal chief, with Ludendorff, brains of the combination, as his quartermaster-general and in reality the active commander. In effect this was dictatorship; theirs was now the final word, although their ascendancy was not then as apparent in the daily shifts and balances of events as it is now through the telescope of hindsight. Chronically through 1916 they grappled with the civil government; the generals grimly fixed on fighting through to a victory that would fulfill the Pan-German dreams of expansion and annexation, the civilians convinced that to save even the status quo ante Germany must make peace soon. But after August 29 the civil government was losing. Kaiser Wilhelm still presided hollowly at General Headquarters, consulted but ignored, a mere mirror of a king. The Ministers of State still functioned; parliamentary opposition in fact increased; Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg was still in authority. But the generals’ prestige made them irreplaceable, and they knew it. Though the Kaiser longed to be rid of the “ugly mug of the top sergeant” as he called Ludendorff, he did not dare to do without him. By a threat of resignation the generals could prevail.

  Zimmermann chose the generals. But he did not make his choice until he knew they were ready to force the issue. In March 1916 the war party’s demand for ruthless use of the U-boat had been defeated, whereupon fork-bearded old Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had resigned in despair. A lull had followed because the new grand admiral wished to wait until he had enough submarines on hand to give assurance of success. By fall he was ready. Again the fateful issue whether to risk American belligerency by releasing the U-boat or try for peace while there was still a chance of it came to a head. The military were prepared to take the risk; the Chancellor was not. Until now Zimmermann had supported the Chancellor because, as he told a secret session of the Reichstag early in the year, “Our situation is such that we cannot afford to have America as an enemy.” In his conscience he knew this was still true, but in his heart he yearned to stand with the heroes of Blood and Iron. Moreover, like everyone else, he now believed that the Chancellor was on his way out and he did not propose to sink with Bethmann.

  Bethmann was not the type of might-makes-right Prussian his most famous utterance has left him reputed to be. When he called Belgium’s neutrality “a scrap of paper” he was not so much cynically affirming the worthlessness of
treaties as expressing his despair that England would really go to war on this issue. No one had wanted a war, certainly not a two-front one, less than the tall, melancholy Chancellor who once, when the world was still at peace, had reminded Gerard of Abraham Lincoln. The resemblance was not very deep. True, Bethmann was tall and stooped and had sad eyes, like Lincoln, but in mind and spirit he was more like the premier of a later war, Neville Chamberlain. Well-meaning and serious but not forceful, inclined to trim when convictions were at stake, Bethmann, it was said, if he sat down across a treaty table with the English, would be lucky if he came away with Berlin.

  For two years Bethmann had been holding out against unrestricted use of the U-boat, insisting that it would “inevitably cause America to join our enemies,” pointing out that this would give the Allies enormous financial aid and lift in morale, plus use of all the German tonnage interned in American ports, and would influence other neutrals as well. The battle for the U-boat became a battle for Bethmann’s head. The military party knew well enough, had known since 1915, that Germany could not win the war on land; therefore the only chance for victory lay in Germany’s last weapon, the U-boat. But to be effective it must be used without restrictions, to the limit of its sinister capacity. Then, while the land war was kept going to drain the Allies’ strength, the U-boat would finish them off by strangulation under the sea.

  Pressure became intense. At an all-day conference Bethmann was described smoking one cigarette after another at a rate of five or six dozen a day. His hair had become white; his face was pale and lined; he looked to one observer “the personification of despair.”

  Everyone on the Right—military, Pan-Germans, conservatives—wanted Bethmann’s removal. One thing saved him: no one could think of anybody who could take his place, and the Kaiser clung to him for fear that if he let him go he might have to take back the suave and artful Prince von Bülow, who had so dreadfully wounded his feelings long ago. Meanwhile Bethmann clung to office, hoping that events would decide for him, in obedience to Bismarck’s advice: “We can only wait until we hear the footsteps of God in history and then leap forward and try to catch on to His coat-tails.”

  Implacable Ludendorff, determined to free the U-boat one way or another, could not wait for God, but he could shift the weight in the civil government toward his side. If he could not get rid of Bethmann yet, he could at least get rid of one other opponent of the U-boat, Foreign Minister von Jagow. Hardly a formidable target, von Jagow was a puny rodent of a man whose Charlie Chaplin mustache and un-Teutonic look of an anxious rabbit caused him to be regarded by everybody, including himself, as inadequate for his post. But he had been listening to Bernstorff, who, from America, was furnishing the strongest arguments against use of the U-boat and pleading for time to allow Wilson, if he was re-elected, to get peace terms from the Allies. The military, still resolved to risk everything on victory by U-boat, wanted to hear no more of Wilson. Von Jagow, the voice of Bernstorff, must go. The Under-Secretary, that able, honest, industrious, excellent fellow Zimmermann, must take his place. Bethmann, seeking always to maintain equilibrium and avoid a fracas, was prepared for the sacrifice, believing Zimmermann would work better with Ludendorff. “With Zimmermann,” sadly wrote von Jagow after the war, “the fanatical U-boat warriors thought they had a free hand. He was in his heart always pro-U-boat; that is, he always swam with the stream and with those who shouted the loudest. On that account he was considered ‘strong.’ ”

  In addition to his other virtues, Zimmermann was supposed to know all about America. Nearly twenty years before, he had returned from a consular post in China via San Francisco and New York, and ever since, as the result of his intimate knowledge of the American character gained while crossing the continent by train, he had fancied himself an expert on American affairs. Left by von Jagow to conduct the public affairs of the Foreign Office, he had carried on the personal contacts with Colonel House and Ambassador Gerard and had kept in close touch with Papen and Boy-Ed. He had also been receiving direct reports (bypassing Bernstorff) from the Consul-General in New York, who ridiculed Bernstorff’s belief in the sincerity of Wilson’s peace efforts and insisted Wilson was concerned only with getting favorable terms for the Allies. The Consul continually fed Zimmermann bloated estimates of the supposed success of German propaganda and of the fear of revolt by German-Americans that would keep the United States government from risking war. This became Zimmermann’s hobby.

  “In case of trouble,” he warned Gerard when an argument over American arms sales to the Allies became heated, “there are half a million trained Germans in America who will join the Irish and start a revolution.” A humorist himself, the Ambassador thought Zimmermann was joking but, on discovering he was serious, made his famous retort, “In that case there are half a million lamp-posts to hang them on.”

  Gerard liked the usually amiable Under-Secretary, admired his two-quart capacity for Moselle at lunch—but, he wrote the President, Zimmermann’s talk was “largely ridiculous.” Nevertheless Zimmermann, with the United States Census of 1910 on his desk showing a German-born population of 1,337,000 and an estimated 10 million of German descent, comforted himself in the belief that this formidable enclave would deter America from doing anything foolish. In 1916 when the American Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, came home by way of Berlin, Zimmermann treated him to his favorite discourse about how the German-Americans would “rise” in case of war.

  Until the spring of 1916 he had gone along with the prevailing Foreign Office view that releasing the U-boat would cause America to join the Allies and that Britain could not be beaten once America was in the war. Except for the fire-eating Consul in New York, everybody with any knowledge of the United States held this opinion. It was what Wilhelm von Stumm, chief of the Foreign Office’s American department, said, what the foreign news analysis bureau said, and of course what Bernstorff kept repeating day and night. But gradually, after the irritation of the Lusitania and the Sussex disputes, Zimmermann began to lose temper with the United States, almost to look forward to the event of war. He resorted more frequently to the German officials’ imponieren habit, as Gerard called it when they wanted to be most imposing, of sinking their voices two octaves and “glaring at one like an enraged bullfrog.” “I think Zimmermann hollered at the Colonel,” reported Gerard when Colonel House came on one of his missions to discuss a basis for peace negotiations. “He certainly tried to scare me.”

  During the Sussex affair in May, when Wilson stated flatly he would break relations unless Germany pledged not to renew attacks on merchant ships without warning, Zimmermann hollered again—off the record—to a German press conference, “Gentlemen, there is no use wasting words about Mr. Wilson’s shamelessness and impudence, but we have torn the mask from his face.” From then on he regarded Wilson as a hypocrite who “feels and thinks English” and veered to the war party’s view that, in any event, America was not a military power worth reckoning with. Now he listened with more sympathy to the pleas of the Navy, chained to its kennel in raging futility. Now he found more persuasive the Army’s argument that America could neither train nor transport enough troops in time to affect the outcome and that before they could arrive in Europe in any number the U-boat, if let loose, would have beaten the British into surrender.

  Listening to the drumbeat of military expediency, Zimmermann fell in step. Bethmann and von Jagow were still opposed; the Kaiser, bored by Bethmann but a little afraid of his generals, hesitated. Repeatedly the issue was thrashed out at high-level conferences. Admirals unrolled charts and graphs proving how many tons the U-boats could sink in a given time until they should have the British, as one of them put it, “gasping in the reeds like a fish.” The struggle raged. In the Reichstag the Liberals and Social Democrats shouted, “The people don’t want submarine warfare but bread and PEACE!” They exchanged pessimisms in the lobbies and told one another that another winter campaign was out of the question; peace had to come in the fall. Bu
t no one paid any attention to parliament or the people because, no matter how hungry they were, they remained obedient. “Here in Germany,” said a deputy, “we don’t have revolutions till things have got so bad that the revolution can be announced on official placards posted up on all street corners by the police.”

  By November the U-boats were being held back by barely a fingernail. Under the pounding of the military, the opposition had little grip left. Zimmermann had already gone over. On November 12, ten days before his elevation to von Jagow’s place, he sent that telegram to Eckhardt in Mexico, hinting at an alliance in exchange for U-boat bases. Indeed it may have been some promises of his about a deal with Mexico and Japan that would keep America out of Europe altogether which brought about his promotion. On November 22 his appointment as Foreign Minister was announced.

  Innocent of the real meaning behind the appointment, Americans greeted the new Foreign Secretary with a warmth born of a pathetic eagerness to find a friend in Germany. “Our Friend Zimmermann” was the title of a glowing appreciation in the New York Evening Post. “Liberalization of Germany!” proclaimed the Literary Digest. “One of the most auspicious omens for the future of German-American relations that have occurred since the outbreak of war,” the Post added.

  “All Americans like him,” said the author of the article, and in fact this was hardly an exaggeration. “I have had a conference with Zimmermann and he was exceedingly cordial and delightful,” wrote Colonel House to the President early in 1915. “I have always liked him and I am glad we have resumed our friendly relations.” Publicly he referred to him as “one of the biggest men in the Empire.” Ambassador Gerard had been equally well disposed. “I get on very well with Zimmermann,” he said and later spoke of him as “a fine type of man … my warm personal friend, just and friendly toward America, one of the ablest men in Germany today.”