Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Map 4 The western front, December 1914

  The results of the fighting in 1914 vindicated the expectations of no one. To the Germans, the situation offered little grounds for optimism – least of all to Moltke, who suffered a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of the Marne and had to be replaced. German armies had, to be sure, won a spectacular victory in the east, in which the Russians had lost more men than the French had lost at the decisive Battle of Sedan in 1870. Yet, despite their frightful losses, huge Russian armies remained in the field, their spirits buoyed shortly thereafter by significant gains in Galicia against Austrian forces, whose strategic value to the Germans already appeared dubious. To the west, the failure of the German grand design could not be disguised. Despite the brilliant strokes of the first hour, which had brought large expanses of Belgian and French territory under German control, enemy armies remained in the field, in positions that could henceforth be attacked only frontally.

  The campaigns of 1914 suggested that the Schlieffen Plan had been geared to the wrong century, that the model of 1870 had lost its validity to the demographic and technological transformations of the intervening era. The failure of the Schlieffen Plan was due in no small part to the difficulties of moving vast bodies of foot soldiers, while combat in both theaters revealed that the machines of war – artillery and machine guns – had become the dominant elements of the modern battlefield, where they posed prohibitive disadvantages to forces on the attack. The costs of learning these lessons were staggering. The Germans lost more than 500,000 casualties in action on the western front and perhaps one-third as many in the east. To the human costs were added the enormous expenditures in weapons, munitions, and supplies needed to support the soldiers in combat. The campaigns of 1914 exhausted nearly all the available German stocks of war material. It was of little comfort that Germany’s antagonists had endured still higher costs and losses, for these countries commanded resources that were vastly superior.

  Schlieffen’s plan was in ruins, and the debate over the blame began almost immediately. Moltke was long assigned the principal responsibility, because of the adjustments that he made to the plan’s original conception and for his deviations during the battle itself – particularly for weakening the attacking flank at the crucial moment.26 The weight of evidence has since turned in the direction of Schlieffen himself, however, the man who devised a plan that – for all its brilliance – lay beyond the capacities of the armies of his day to execute.

  Regardless of the culpability, the year 1914 ended in Schlieffen’s nightmare. Imperial Germany faced a long war that the country’s military leaders had gambled desperately to avoid. Germany now faced a new kind of warfare, for which there were no plans whatsoever. The new dynamics of combat defied a rapid decision at arms, and they suggested a ghastly possibility. The fighting front threatened to become a peripheral arena, where armies were locked in strategic paralysis, occupied in destroying the prodigious human and material resources that belligerent societies had mobilized for military use. In this scenario, the war was to be won elsewhere than on the field of battle.

  1 On these deliberations, see now Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York, 2013), which deals less convincingly with developments “in Berlin” than “elsewhere.”

  2 Fischer, Germany’s Aims; John A. Moses, The Politics of Illusion: The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (New York, 1975).

  3 Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., Austria–Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1991); Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz, 1993).

  4 Quoted in Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1993), 433.

  5 Quoted in Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979), 39.

  6 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston, 1943), 161.

  7 Wolfgang Kruse, “Die Kriegsbegeisterung im Deutschen Reich zu Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges: Entstehungszusammenhänge, Grenzen und ideologische Strukturen,” in Marcel van der Linden and Gottfried Mergner (eds.), Kriegsbegeisterung und mentale Kriegsvorbereitung: Interdisziplinäre Studien (Berlin, 1991), 73–87; Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000). See also Roger Chickering, “‘War enthusiasm?’ Public opinion and the outbreak of war in 1914,” in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds.), An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York, 2007), 200–12.

  8 Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Boston, 1950), 25.

  9 Quoted in Leed, No Man’s Land, 42.

  10 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, 1989).

  11 Michael Stöcker, “Augusterlebnis 1914” in Darmstadt: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Darmstadt, 1994), 9.

  12 Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration: Eine Neuinterpretation des sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/15 (Essen, 1993).

  13 Steffen Bruendel, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volksstaat: Die “Ideen von 1914” und die Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2003), traces this story.

  14 Sven Oliver Müller, Die Nation als Waffe und Vorstellung: Nationalismus in Deutschland und Großbritannien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 2002).

  15 David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 1996); David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ, 1996).

  16 Stig Förster, “The armed forces and military planning,” in Chickering, Imperial Germany, 454–88; Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1968); Herbert Rosinski, The German Army (New York, 1966), 76–130.

  17 Eric Dorn Brose, The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870–1918 (New York, 2001).

  18 Antulio Echevarria, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (Lawrence, KS, 2000); Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning (Oxford, 1991); Jehuda Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and Their Impact on the German Conduct of Two World Wars (Westport, CT, 1986).

  19 Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (New York, 1958). The weaknesses of this book are now evident, but Ritter’s conclusions have in the main been confirmed in recent controversies over the Schlieffen Plan. See, in this regard, Gerhard Groß, “There was a Schlieffen Plan: Neue Quellen,” in Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans, and Gerhard Groß (eds.), Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente (Paderborn, 2006), 117–60.

  20 Quoted in Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan, 148.

  21 Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001).

  22 Lancelot L. Farrar, Jr., The Short-War Illusion: German Policy, Strategy and Domestic Affairs, August–December 1914 (Santa Barbara, CA, 1974).

  23 This point is a matter of controversy, however. See Stig Förster, “Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges 1871–1914: Metakritik eines Mythos,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 54 (1995), 61–95.

  24 Dennis Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Hamden, CT, 1991).

  25 Holger H. Herwig, The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World (New York, 2009); Robert Asprey, The First Battle of the Marne (Westport, CT, 1979).

  26 This view informs the official German history of the war and most of the accounts composed between the two world wars: Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918 (14 vols., Berlin, 1925–44). Professor Ritter’s The Schlieffen Plan offers the most powerful retort. On these debates, see Markus Pöhlmann, Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die amtliche deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung 1914–1956 (Paderborn, 2002).

  2 The war continues

  The mil
itary failure to resolve the war in 1914 surprised soldiers in Germany and everywhere else. It also surprised civilian leaders in all the belligerent countries, who now confronted unanticipated and unprecedented challenges. They had to redirect the productive energies of society towards the massive demands of industrial warfare. The first year and a half of the war established the framework of mobilization in all these lands. Public institutions invaded economies and societies, as vast material and moral resources were channeled to military ends.

  The transition to new modes of organization for war took place everywhere by improvisation during the first months of the conflict, but some of the belligerent powers were better able than others to adjust. Imperial Germany, which in 1914 was reputed to be the most efficiently organized society on earth, faced major impediments to meeting the challenges. Deficiencies in the organization of mobilization contributed to the mounting burdens of war on the home front. They also fed the political controversies that attended the prolongation of the war.

  Bureaucratic foundations

  Institutions were a fundamental problem. Germany’s reputation for bureaucratic efficiency was deceptive, for the country’s basic administrative structures were fragmented among federal, state, and local institutions. Administrative particularism had its champions, but it posed grave obstacles to the execution of common policies in a national emergency.

  The institutions of military administration, which were conceived with national emergency in mind, only compounded the difficulties.1 These institutions were as much geared to the wrong century as was Schlieffen’s plan. They were designed to mobilize forces rapidly in the event of war (or revolution) and to provide basic services and security at home during a limited period of crisis, as they had in 1870–1. Their legal foundation was the Prussian Law of Siege, which had first been promulgated in 1851 and then taken over into the imperial constitution in 1871. Upon declaration of national emergency, this law specified that executive power passed into the hands of the corps commander in each of the country’s twenty-four military districts. Because these commanders accompanied their corps into battle, however, their executive powers devolved to their seconds-in-command, the so-called deputy commanding generals. These soldiers then enjoyed almost unlimited powers over a broad range of public affairs in their respective districts, including censorship, transportation, and the preservation of public order in the civilian sector, as well as ensuring the recruitment, training, supply, and deployment of additional troops for combat.

  Several features of this system made it ill suited to the demands of the war that broke out in 1914. In the first place, the military districts were superimposed onto the civilian bureaucratic structure with little heed to the jurisdictions of these other public agencies. Boundaries did not coincide. Fifteen of the military districts severed the geographical bounds of state or regional governments, while others encompassed parts of two or more different states. The district of the eleventh army corps sprawled over the boundaries of eight small Thuringian states in central Germany. Civilian officials at all levels were legally subordinate to the deputy commanding generals, but the soldiers could not govern without the willing cooperation of the civilians. The proliferation of jurisdictions complicated the already daunting difficulties of bureaucratic coordination, particularly as the lengthening war brought ever broader facets of civilian life into the purview of military administration.

  A second feature of German military administration was more perverse. Each deputy commanding general was responsible only to his commander-in-chief, the German emperor. This arrangement need not have been an impediment had the commander-in-chief been a stabilizing force, capable of lending coherent direction to the policies of his military subordinates. Instead, the commander-in-chief was William II, whose erratic thinking and impulsive behavior were legendary.2 These traits had already eroded his effective power before the war. As the conflict continued, he became an increasingly peripheral figure, closeted among his warriors at military headquarters near the front – as remote from the deputy commanding generals as he was from policy discussions in Berlin. Because he was determined to guard his powers of command, however, his inclinations could never be ignored, and he was a factor in repeated intrigues at the centers of power.3 In these circumstances, the deputy commanding generals remained autonomous for much of the war; they were like rulers of independent satrapies, and they could – to the extent they wished – resist attempts from above, from civilian or military agencies, to impose common policies or institutional constraints on them.

  The most serious consequence of this bureaucratic maze was to impede the execution of legislation designed in Berlin to coordinate economic mobilization throughout the country. Fashioning the central legislative procedures themselves was, by contrast, swift and smooth. On August 4, 1914, the same day as it authorized funding for the war, the Reichstag, in a demonstration of national unity, passed a special enabling act, which became known immediately as the Burgfrieden – an allusion to the peace that was supposed to reign in a medieval fortress when it was attacked. For the duration of the war, the Reichstag, the most democratic body in the country and hitherto the focus of partisan conflict in Germany, delegated its legislative powers to the Bundesrat. This body was now empowered to issue emergency legislation, which was binding on all levels of civil government. Although the Reichstag was entitled to review the laws so decreed, it vetoed none of the more than 800 orders that emerged out of the upper house during the war. Instead, it became a peripheral arena during the first half of the conflict; and its principal charge was to convene at six-month intervals in order to authorize the continued funding of the war.

  Most of the Bundesrat’s decrees related to questions of mobilizing the economy for military purposes. The administrative agency that was most directly concerned with these questions was the Ministry of War in Berlin. Although this was technically a Prussian institution – the counterpart of similar agencies in the states of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg – its responsibilities for supplying the army had made it effectively a national institution before the war broke out. During the war its competence and powers grew rapidly, as many of the agencies created by the Bundesrat to oversee the mobilization of production found a bureaucratic home here. This arrangement appeared logical, but it had an astonishing defect. The minister of war, who was a political figure insofar as he represented the army’s affairs in the Reichstag, remained for this very reason outside the chain of military command. He did not have the power to discipline the deputy commanding generals. Nor did the Bundesrat. Each new agency that was rooted in the War Ministry accordingly multiplied the bureaucratic friction between the officials who formulated policies and those who, in a myriad of jurisdictions, were supposed to carry them out.

  Imperial Germany had already been a bureaucratic wonderland before the war. Existing institutions remained in place during the war on all levels, where they provided the basis of most day-to-day administration. But the bureaucratic network now became a nightmare, first with the superimposition of autonomous military institutions and then with the proliferation of new civilian and military offices to oversee the reorganization of the economy. The result was disorder so imposing that it initially disguised a number of important truths. Governmental power remained in the hands of the men who had traditionally exercised it in Imperial Germany. Their position was now more exposed and vulnerable than before, however, for they faced a situation that offered neither precedents nor reliable rules of procedure. The intrusion of public power into private life was massive; but, in no small part as a consequence of bureaucratic chaos, it was also unplanned, unsystematic, and in significant ways unfair. These features were bound to nurture popular discontents, which attached easily onto the officials who embodied public authority in all its burgeoning clutter. This proposition reigned even in the areas where mobilization was most effective.

  Mobilizing industrial resources

  During the Battle of the Marne, G
erman armies expended more munitions daily than they had during the entire Franco-Prussian War. Stockpiles were exhausted by the conclusion of the same battle, so waging war during the remainder of the year was possible only on the strength of current German industrial production. The expenditure of munitions was merely the most direct and dramatic sign of the vast demands that combat in the new mode was placing on the economies that supplied it.

  Several preliminary questions suggest the dimensions of the problem. What, in the first place, was the “war economy”? The march of German armies westward into Belgium and France, and later eastward into Russian Poland, was like the export of a population as large as a small state’s. Several million men, whose principal occupation was fighting, had to be supported abroad. To a degree, they could “live off the land,” although obstruction from the inhabitants of occupied territories and the destruction wrought in front-line areas limited sources of supply in these places. Much of the burden of equipping, clothing, healing, feeding, and transporting these men to and from the front fell accordingly onto the home economy. In principle, every phase of production that was involved, however remotely, in supporting the German armies abroad – and their replacements at home – represented a facet of the “war economy.” The description was comprehensive. It included not only the immediate manufacture of arms and munitions but also the goods and services necessary for the employment of arms and munitions – such things as wooden boxes for cartridges, hemp for sandbags, rubber for tires, and nails for myriad uses. Even the watchmakers of the Black Forest discovered that one of their special wares, the small mechanisms in cuckoo clocks, was essential to the manufacture of time fuses. With the inclusion of other sectors whose support for the soldiers was less immediate though hardly less essential, the list became almost endless. It included firms that produced or processed food, textiles and leather goods, reading materials, medicines, transport vehicles (including horses), as well as those that provided all these firms with the materials, equipment, and services that they required.