On the other hand, even the most sanguine members of the German leadership knew that there was a risk of Russian involvement; if they had not, then the assurance of support offered on 5 July would have been meaningless. But the evidence suggests that this risk was perceived as minimal at the time when the blank cheque was made out. It gradually grew, however, as the public shock over Sarajevo wore off, the Austrians dragged their feet before acting, and the impression thereby gained ground that an elaborate démarche had been jointly prepared by Berlin and Vienna with the aim of thrusting Russia out of the Balkans. For Wilhelm, the first reality shock came on 27–28 July when telegrams from Lichnowsky warned of a hardening in the British position. The Kaiser, who regarded London as the key to continental Great Power diplomacy, responded with a desperate effort to prevent the conflict before it began by seizing on the Serbian reply as the basis for mediation between Belgrade and Vienna. In order to bring this about he was willing, as we have seen, to renege comprehensively on the assurance of 5 July, or more precisely, to put a new construction upon it: German support now signified sympathetic mediation, not military assistance against a third party. All this was very much in keeping with Wilhelm’s earlier attitude to the alliance relationship, in which personal respect for the elderly emperor and care not to jeopardize Austrian confidence in Berlin were held in check by a reluctance to allow Germany to be sucked into a Balkan entanglement involving one or more hostile Great Powers. But Wilhelm’s initiative remained a dead letter because it was overridden by the chancellor, a further reminder that Wilhelm could influence, but did not control, the course of German policy.
8. War, Exile, Death (1914–41)
Supreme warlord
The Prusso-German monarch was – in theory at least – a military commander. From the beginning of his reign, Wilhelm saw this aspect of his responsibilities as a crucial dimension of his sovereignty. In a Cabinet Order issued just a few weeks after the accession, he announced the creation of a new military establishment to be known as the ‘Headquarters of His Majesty the Kaiser and King’. By contrast with the traditional Prussian military entourage, whose members attended the monarch as representatives of their respective branches of the service, the generals and adjutants of the headquarters were personally selected by the Kaiser, with the assistance of the chief of the Military Cabinet.1 Throughout the pre-war era, Wilhelm took a keen interest in armaments issues and in the drafting of military and naval legislation and even aspired to play a leading part in the annual army manoeuvres. The responsibility of the monarch for the structure and deployment of the armed forces was underscored by the increasingly widespread use from around 1900 of the term ‘supreme warlord’ (Oberster Kriegsherr) to denote the person of the Kaiser.2
The monarch’s determination to preserve and extend the extra-parliamentary royal Kommandogewalt had important consequences for the political and constitutional history of the Reich (see chapter 4). It also affected the structural evolution of the higher military and naval commands. Above all, it militated against the emergence of a central body capable of coordinating the activities of the respective services and reconciling their priorities. During the reign of Wilhelm I, responsibility for personnel, training, armaments and deployment was gradually parcelled out to a range of competing agencies: the General Staff, the Ministry of War, the Military Cabinet and so on. Wilhelm II made no attempt to reverse this state of affairs, indeed he further atomized the command structure by stepping up the number of military and naval command posts that reported directly to the emperor.3 This was part of a conscious strategy to create an environment that would permit the untrammelled exercise of the monarchical command function. ‘After deciding to exercise personally the supreme command over My navy, just as over My army,’ Wilhelm declared in a Cabinet Order of 14 March 1899, ‘I do not consider it practical that there should stand between myself and the various leaders a central institution of command, which would merely have the purpose of conveying my orders.’4
In reality, however, Wilhelm’s capacity to exercise a command function was narrowly circumscribed. His participation in army manoeuvres proved highly disruptive, partly because Wilhelm was a poor tactician and partly because the chief of the General Staff (CGS) Count Alfred von Schlieffen took the view that if the Kaiser participated then he must not be permitted to lose in battle simulations: ‘as Kaiser he cannot be beaten by one of his generals’.5
Schlieffen’s successor as CGS, Helmuth von Moltke, made Wilhelm’s exclusion from further involvement a condition of his taking office in 1906.
Wilhelm also lacked an overview of strategic planning. He was apprised of the broad drift of General Staff strategy for the eventuality of war – he was aware, for example, of the outlines of the Schlieffen Plan – but he was not informed of the details of military planning in the immediate pre-war years, possibly because the secrecy-obsessed General Staff regarded him as a potential security leak.6 Moreover, neither the Military and Naval Cabinets, nor the imperial headquarters possessed the resources to support the monarch in a genuine command function. Wilhelm was thus unable to perform the kind of coordinating role that would have compensated for Germany’s relative lack of unitary command institutions comparable with the Conseil Supérieure de la Guerre in France and the Committee of Imperial Defence in Great Britain. Even in the last years before the outbreak of war, virtually no concrete preparations were made for coordinated military–naval operations, and there was no attempt to dovetail the strategies cooked up by the military planners with the options pursued by German diplomacy. Germany remained, in this sense, ‘strategically leaderless’.7
In the field of military command, as in so many other aspects of the emperor’s role, there was a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. The Reich constitution stipulated (Art. 63) that the Kaiser assumed supreme command over all land forces upon the outbreak of war and Wilhelm is reported to have declared that he would be ‘his own CGS in time of war’.8 If he did indeed make this claim, the outbreak of war in August 1914 cured him of such delusions; he lost no time in formally transferring to the CGS the right to issue operational orders in his name. The General Staff chief thereby became ‘the man who is actually in control of the supreme army command’.9 Early in August Wilhelm promised that he would abstain from interfering in the running of operations and, to the surprise of the military leadership, he stuck to this promise throughout the war. The generals for their part, at least in the early years of the war, saw to it that he was shielded from much of the bad news from the front, possibly because they were aware of the fragility of his morale. The outbreak of war appears to have cast him into a state of nervous exhaustion that lasted – with brief interruptions – as long as the war itself. Wilhelm could be moved to bloodthirsty exultation by rumours of success, but was also easily cast down and prone to bouts of defeatism. His moods soared and plunged in response to the rapidly changing news from the front. On 6 September 1916, for example, it was reported that the Kaiser ‘looked very bad’ because he had just received an alarming report on the condition of the First Guards Regiment on the Somme. But he apparently spent the very next day in a ‘very elated’ mood, following reports of the fall of the Romanian fortress of Tutrakan.10
The Kaiser thus increasingly became a peripheral figure, a ‘prisoner of his generals’ as an Austro-Hungarian minister later recalled.11 He stayed at the Grosses Hauptquartier throughout the war years, but complained of not being informed or consulted by the decision-makers.12 Visitors to the imperial headquarters were often struck by the mood of unreality they encountered there as the emperor sat dining on the silver service of Friedrich the Great while treating his guests to vivid third-hand tales of German feats in battle: ‘piles of corpses six feet high […] a sergeant killed twenty-seven Frenchmen with forty-five bullets’, and so on.13 ‘If people in Germany think I lead the army,’ he remarked in November 1914, ‘then they are very mistaken. I drink tea and cut wood and go walking, and then I hear from time to ti
me that this and that has been done, just as the gentlemen wish…’14 ‘I try not to get into their hair,’ he told the Prussian minister of war, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, in the summer of 1915. ‘But Falkenhayn has to maintain the outward appearance that it is I who am giving the orders.’15 The cabinet chiefs whose task it was to attend the Kaiser during the war years complained (privately) of the claustrophobia and tedium of evenings spent listening to imperial monologues, humouring his latest enthusiasms (philological reconstruction of the Hittite language was in vogue during the summer of 1916), taking part in conversations that never seemed to gain any real momentum, or playing cards to pass the time.16
Historians have rightly stressed the role of the war in displacing the emperor from the centre of affairs. As Lamar Cecil has put it: ‘the once-vaunted persönliches Regiment, with its mighty throne and ruler, became in wartime a backseat occupied by a neglected, ill-informed and increasingly inconsequential figurehead’.17 It would be a mistake, however, to push this argument too far. Wilhelm was, of necessity, excluded from the sphere of operational command of the land forces – in this area the ambition of the universalizing monarch had to yield before the custodians of expert knowledge. But he did exercise a more direct, if largely restraining, influence on the wartime operations of the German navy.18 And the emperor remained nonetheless, by virtue of his position at the nerve centre of the Reich constitution, a figure of crucial importance. Above all, he retained the power to appoint and dismiss ‘his’ officers and officials.
This was a matter of little practical import for the great mass of military personnel decisions, but the appointment to chief of the General Staff, the highest office of wartime operational command, was another matter. Wilhelm had traditionally seen this post as an issue for his own personal decision and did not necessarily feel bound by considerations of seniority or by the recommendations of the Military Cabinet. He had been closely involved in the appointment of Helmuth von Moltke in 1906, a decision that surprised many informed observers because Moltke, though of senior rank, had never served as chief of staff at army corps level.19 But clashes over policy during the July crisis (see chapter 7) had strained relations between the two men and by mid-September 1914, when the first reports reached the imperial headquarters of serious setbacks for the German forces at the front, Wilhelm’s confidence in Moltke had waned. The staff chief had always been emotionally volatile and the combination of bad news and the withdrawal of the sovereign’s confidence plunged him into a nervous breakdown.20 The appointment of a successor cast into sharp relief the important residual powers of the sovereign. Flouting the preferences of many senior military figures, Wilhelm chose General Erich von Falkenhayn, for whom he had long shown a special personal regard. Falkenhayn was a highly controversial appointment and he was to become increasingly unpopular as the German forces on the western front failed to break the Allied lines in the winter of 1914.
This state of affairs underscored Wilhelm’s continuing centrality within the power structure. In the first place, the very fact that Falkenhayn’s continuing tenure in office was contingent upon Wilhelm’s personal support accentuated the element of dependency in the relationship. In this sense, as Falkenhayn’s biographer Holger Afflerbach has pointed out, the chief of the General Staff remained a ‘court favourite’. He was also an uncommonly gifted communicator – an important attribute in Wilhelm’s eyes – whose oral reports stood out for their brilliance and lucidity. The Kaiser’s tenacity in retaining this embattled commander had more to do with a reluctance to let go of a familiar and trusted subordinate than with an ambition to regain operative control; Wilhelm virtually never sought to alter Falkenhayn’s dispositions.21
By the end of 1914 there was growing pressure from within the military to dismiss Falkenhayn. The root of the anti-Falkenhayn agitation – aside from professional jealousies and rivalry – lay in the polarization of views on how the war should be conducted. Falkenhayn believed that the key to ultimate success lay in the west, and that it was here, where Germany faced the combined forces of France and Great Britain, that she must commit the bulk of her resources. In a long memorandum of December 1915, he explained that if the German army were to select and focus on a target that the French would feel compelled to defend until the last, it would be possible, by dint of sheer attrition, to ‘bleed white’ the French army. The fruit of this strategy was the colossal assault launched by the German army in February 1916 against the fortifications around the fortress of Verdun. By contrast, Hindenburg and Ludendorff saw the key to a German victory in the complete destruction of the Russian forces in the east. They felt themselves vindicated by the relatively successful record of the German armies on the Russian front and complained that they were being starved of resources in order to sustain a westward policy that had not yet delivered a decisive breakthrough. In the summer of 1915 there was an open dispute over these questions between the eastern commanders and the CGS.22
As the campaign to force the general out of office gained momentum, Wilhelm became increasingly aware that his own authority, as well as Falkenhayn’s, was at stake. The threat to Wilhelm’s independence was made clear when the dominant figure in the anti-Falkenhayn agitation, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, threatened to resign unless Falkenhayn were dismissed. Hindenburg and his close associate Erich Ludendorff, a nominal subordinate but the more gifted strategist and organizer of the two, were the dominant commanders and strategic planners of the eastern front, and were widely credited with the spectacular victory over the Russian armies at Tannenberg, East Prussia, in August 1914. Hindenburg’s ultimatum set a new precedent in the history of the Prussian military – never before had an officer attempted to trade his continuation in service for the pursuit of a particular policy. Wilhelm was furious at this manipulative behaviour and considered bringing Hindenburg before a court martial. He refused the resignation and failed to discipline the unruly field marshal, presumably because he feared alienating such a prestigious and popular commander.23
A deadlock of this kind could not be resolved without imperial arbitration. The situation was made more difficult for Wilhelm by the fact that the men of OberOst and their allies within the command structure were supported by no less a figure than Reichskanzler Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Indeed, it was Bethmann who had coordinated the early phases of the anti-Falkenhayn agitation. Bethmann rejected Falkenhayn’s view that the key to success lay in the combination of a massive assault on the western front with diplomatic overtures to Russia (the responsibility for conducting which would lie with the chancellor). He supported the Hindenburg–Ludendorff view that Germany would be able to secure a favourable outcome only if the strategic focal point of the struggle were shifted from west to east. The anti-Falkenhayn camp even succeeded in recruiting members of the royal family, among them the Kaiser’s youngest son, Joachim, then serving in Hindenburg’s headquarters, and the empress herself, who agreed at Hindenburg’s prompting to write to her husband in support of Falkenhayn’s dismissal.24 In a telegram to Auguste Viktoria, Wilhelm expressed his indignation at the fact that ‘the conspirators have not stopped short of my own House, but rather, in total disregard for its peace have made so bold as to send you into the field against me.’25 In the dispute of July–August 1915, Wilhelm took a mediating position. Falkenhayn was ordered to move new troops from the western front to the eastern command, but he was retained in office over the protests of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and Hindenburg was ordered to operate within the limitations of Falkenhayn’s strategic concept. Hindenburg’s authority was cut back by the creation of a new civilian administration within the area of Russian Poland that had previously been under the control of OberOst. But this was merely a temporary respite for the embattled CGS. The gigantic offensive launched against the Verdun fortress system in February of the following year dragged on into the summer at a huge cost in German lives and without achieving a breakthrough. On 30 July 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff successfully pressured Wilhelm int
o approving a concentration of control on the eastern front that substantially undercut the authority of Falkenhayn’s supreme army command.26 The death-knell for Falkenhayn came with Romania’s unexpected entry into the war on the Allied side on 28 August 1916. The emergence of a new and apparently formidable enemy in the east shifted the fulcrum of the war effort towards the eastern front and cast serious doubt on the appropriateness of Falkenhayn’s westward-oriented strategy. On 30 August 1916, one day after Romania’s entry into the war, Wilhelm bowed to the inevitable and appointed Hindenburg chief of the General Staff, with Ludendorff as his quartermaster-general.27
10. Wilhelm II greets Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. The Kaiser never trusted this over-mighty subject, who was as dominant in their political relations as he appears on this wartime postcard. It is no coincidence that this image depicts the Field Marshal towering over his interlocutor. Hindenburg skilfully built up his image during the war years and photographs that understated his importance rarely made it into print.
Falkenhayn had warned Wilhelm that the appointment of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to the supreme command would effectively nullify his sovereignty as emperor.28 When Lyncker, as chief of the Military Cabinet, with responsibility for personnel decisions, proposed that the command structure should be concentrated and placed in the hands of Hindenburg, Wilhelm protested that this would mean ‘abdication for him […] Hindenburg would effectively replace him as a tribune of the people.’29 It is certainly true that the two generals quickly ate into what little remained of Wilhelm’s role as military commander-in-chief. A new minister of war, Hermann von Stein, was selected for his pliancy and political loyalty to the supreme command. The deputy commanding generals, officers with extensive domestic administrative powers who had hitherto reported directly to the emperor, were placed under the authority of the minister of war. Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to conclude that Wilhelm could no longer play a significant role in the executive structure as a whole. The promotion of the eastern generals had closed the gap in the military command structure by imposing unity of control from above, but there remained important divergences between the civilian and military leadership which required the emperor’s adjudication. The most important of these during the middle war years concerned the deployment of submarines against enemy shipping.
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