Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  These decisions were not easily reached. Submarine warfare had become another element in the struggles that raged in the German capital over strategic and political priorities. The suspension of the blockade represented a temporary victory for Bethmann and the diplomats in the Foreign Office, who feared drawing both the Netherlands and the United States into the war on the Allied side. While the decision provoked bitter opposition from Tirpitz and the rest of the navy’s leadership, it also lent new life to the idea of a naval Armageddon with the British surface fleet.

  The debate over these questions continued for more than a year. The decision to renew the submarine blockade in the spring of 1916 represented a facet of Falkenhayn’s grand strategic concept for that year, but it was so freighted with compromise that it provoked the general’s disgust and Tirpitz’s resignation. Despite procedures that were carefully defined to avoid attacks without warning on passenger ships and other unarmed vessels, the submarine offensive nonetheless brought another crisis in relations with the United States the moment several American passengers died on a torpedoed French steamer in the English Channel. When the chancellor thereupon concluded that the diplomatic risks were still too grave, the government again lifted the submarine blockade, tipping the balance in the German naval leadership to those who longed for the great surface battle.

  They got their way. At the end of May 1916 the main elements of the German and British surface fleets, some 250 warships on both sides, met in the North Sea for the only time in the war, in the so-called Battle of Jutland (or the Skagerrak). It was the largest direct clash among surface vessels in modern history.71 Few sea battles have been the subject of as much controversy or retrospective analysis, for the stakes were as enormous as the opportunities that were squandered in miscommunication on both sides. The “Trafalgar of the First World War” it was not. After several hours of brawling the two fleets disengaged, intact. Judged on the numbers alone, the results of the encounter registered a victory for the German High Seas Fleet, whose ships and gunners consistently outperformed their counterparts in the larger British Grand Fleet. The British lost six capital ships to the Germans’ two, and they sustained more than twice the Germans’ casualties. The announcement of these statistics unleashed popular celebrations throughout Germany, but the numbers were irrelevant to the battle’s strategic outcome. In this respect, the Germans suffered an unambiguous defeat, for the strategic balance in the North Sea, which had kept the German navy paralyzed, remained unaltered. The German navy returned to port, while the British returned to the business of the blockade. The prisoners had attacked their jailer, noted a journalist on the morrow of the battle, but in the end they were safely back in jail.72

  So the balance tipped again in the summer of 1916 back to the advocates of unrestricted submarine warfare.73 This time, however, the change accompanied a dramatic shift in the political climate in Berlin. It was no surprise that Hindenburg and Ludendorff favored resuming the blockade of the British Isles, nor that they were willing to risk war with the United States, for they were convinced that without American supplies the British could not long continue to fight. Nor was it surprising that the industrial leaders and their nationalist allies favored the same course. More surprising was the broad resonance that resumption of the submarine offensive found among the other parties, including factions of the Social Democrats. Amid the same frustrations and illusions that gave birth to the Hindenburg Program in the fall of 1916, the submarine underwent a metamorphosis in the popular imagination. It became a panacea, the wonder weapon whose all-out employment promised to resolve the war and bring the British to their knees.

  The chancellor remained more skeptical, but he was under mounting pressure to bow to popular sentiment. The showdown came at the end of the year, once the end of the Romanian campaign freed the Supreme Command to address the larger picture. A memorandum from Henning von Holtzendorff, the Naval Chief of Staff, brought enticing prospects to Hindenburg’s attention in December. Admiral von Holtzendorff reasoned that submarine warfare could, if ruthlessly directed against commerce with Great Britain in the English Channel and the North Atlantic, sink 600,000 tons of shipping per month and frighten off most of the remaining neutral traffic. Five months of this punishment would, he predicted, reduce total tonnage to Britain by 39 percent and force the starved enemy from the war. He dismissed as irrelevant the objection that this strategy would draw the United States into the war against Germany. The submarine, he explained, would block the transport of American soldiers to Europe; and, by the time they did arrive in Europe in significant numbers, the war would in all events be over. The memorandum revealed that Hindenburg and Ludendorff were not alone in the land of fantasy, for Holtzendorff proposed to accomplish this breathtaking feat with about 100 submarines, of which forty could be put to sea at a given time. Hindenburg and Ludendorff nonetheless embraced the admiral’s calculations during their bitter assault on Bethmann’s opposition, which they concluded in victory in early January 1917. The emperor endorsed the position of the generals; and on February 1, 1917, the Germans officially resumed unrestricted submarine warfare.

  Popular celebration at the announcement of the renewed offensive could not long hide the folly of the whole idea. Not only did submarine warfare bring war with the United States within two months, but the assumptions on which it was predicated were preposterous. While destroyed tonnage corresponded to German projections in the spring months, the figures plummeted once the Royal Navy, whose own traditions had resisted the new realities of commercial warfare, organized merchant traffic into convoys. These were escorted in increasing numbers by ships of the United States Navy. German submarines sank only two-thirds of their monthly quota for the rest of the year, whereupon Allied shipping, which now included the American merchant fleet (and some fifty German ships that had been interned in the United States), grew significantly. By 1918 British and American shipyards were producing twice the tonnage that the Germans were sinking. The situation in Great Britain had been briefly scary in the middle of 1917; but the British food supply was never in jeopardy. Limited rationing was imposed only in early 1918; and it did not include bread. The British proved no less agile than the Germans in adjusting to shortages. Nor was a single American troop transport sunk. The German submarine offensive was a failure.

  Not for the first time in this war had the German leadership taken a leap in the dark. This one ensured the country’s eventual defeat, for it invited the world’s leading industrial power, whose productive capacities the German leaders had gravely misjudged, into the ranks of Germany’s enemies. These now numbered most of the world. The indices that mattered had less to do with the numbers of American troops who arrived fresh for combat on the western front in 1918 than with the industrial bases of combat (see Table 2).

  Table 2 Raw material production, 1918

  * * *

  Production in 1918 (millions of tonnes)

  CoalIronSteel

  Great Britain 231 9 10

  France 26 1 2

  United States 615 40 45

  Allied total 872 50 57

  German total 161 12 12

  * * *

  Source: Klein et al., Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg, III, 313.

  The German figures were themselves impressive, but they paled in the context of the Supreme Command’s great gamble in 1917, which defied the dimensions and degree of their enemies’ industrial superiority. The German figures reflected in all events an extraordinary campaign to exploit limited economic resources, a collective exertion that brought comprehensive disruption and took a frightful toll on the lives of practically every German who endured it.

  1 Roger Chickering, “Total war: use and abuse of a concept,” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster (eds.), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), 13–28.

  2 Robert T. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development of Attri
tion, 1870–1916 (Cambridge, 2005).

  3 Quoted by Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, 361.

  4 Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (New York, 1962).

  5 Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (eds.), Die Deutschen an der Somme 1914–1918: Krieg, Besatzung, Verbrannte Erde (Essen, 2006); Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: The British and the Somme, 1916 (London, 2006).

  6 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XI, 41.

  7 Wolfram Pyta’s Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich, 2007) has largely superseded the older literature, but, for an introduction in English, see William Astore and Dennis Showalter, Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Dulles, VA, 2005); John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London, 1967). Cf. Walter Görlitz, Hindenburg: Ein Lebensbild (Bonn, 1953); Rudolf Olden, Hindenburg: Oder der Geist der preussischen Armee (Hildesheim, 1982).

  8 The best treatment of Ludendorff during the war is now Manfred Nebelin’s Ludendorff: Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 2010). See also Wolfgang Venohr, Ludendorff: Legende und Wirklichkeit (Berlin, 1993); Roger Parkinson, Tormented Warrior: Ludendorff and the Supreme Command (New York, 1978); D. J. Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Genius of World War I (Boston, 1966).

  9 Cited in Afflerbach, Kaiser Wilhelm II als Oberster Kriegsherr, 32, 34. On the tandem, see Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the First World War (New York, 1991); Trevor Dupuy, The Military Lives of Hindenburg and Ludendorff of Imperial Germany (New York, 1970).

  10 Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009), esp. 14–42; Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg: Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (Cologne, 2007); Pyta, Hindenburg, 91–154.

  11 The book in question was his Der totale Krieg (Munich, 1935). See Roger Chickering, “Sore loser: Ludendorff’s total war,” in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, 2003), 151–78; Hans Speier, “Ludendorff: the German concept of total war,” in Edward Mead Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (New York, 1966), 306–21; Michael Geyer, “German strategy in the age of machine warfare, 1914–1945,” in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 537–54; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “‘Absoluter’ und ‘totaler’ Krieg: Von Clausewitz zu Ludendorff,” Politische Vierteljahrschrift 10 (1969), 220–48.

  12 Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (New York, 1976). Nebelin, Ludendorff, has embraced this argument.

  13 Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966); Robert B. Armeson, Total Warfare and Compulsory Labor: A Study of the Military–Industrial Complex in Germany during the First World War (The Hague, 1964).

  14 Quoted in Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor, 74–5.

  15 Dorothea Groener-Geyer, General Groener: Soldat und Staatsmann (Frankfurt am Main, 1954).

  16 Hermann Schäfer, Regionale Wirtschaftspolitik in der Kriegswirtschaft: Staat, Industrie und Verbände während des Ersten Weltkrieges in Baden (Stuttgart, 1983).

  17 Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor, 150.

  18 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001).

  19 Alexander Watson, “‘Unheard of brutality’: Russian atrocities against civilians in East Prussia, 1914–15,” Journal of Modern History (forthcoming). See also Alfred Eisfeld, Guido Hausmann, and Dietmar Neutatz (eds.), Besetzt, interniert, deportiert: Der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche, jüdische, polnische und ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung im östlichen Europa (Essen, 2013); Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia (Cambridge, 2009), 44–61; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 121–65; Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999). On the broader implications, see Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007).

  20 See “Krieg als Besatzungsherrschaft: Die Welt der Besatzer und Besetzten,” part V of Bruno Thoß and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.), Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich (Paderborn, 2002), 521–634; Benoît Majerus, “Von Falkenhausen zu Falkenhausen: Die deutsche Verwaltung Belgiens in den zwei Weltkriegen,” in Günther Kronenbitter, Markus Pöhlmann, and Dierk Walter (eds.), Besatzung: Funktion und Gestalt militärischer Fremdherrschaft von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 2006), 131–45; cf. Richard Cobb, French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations. 1914–1918/1940–1944 (London, 1983).

  21 Philippe Nivet, La France occupée 1914–1918 (Paris, 2011); Annette Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre: Humanitaire et culture de guerre, populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris, 1998); Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918 (London, 1999).

  22 Larissa Wegner, “Besatzung,” in Marcus Pöhlmann, Harald Potempa, and Thomas Vogel (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914–1918: Der deutsche Aufmarsch in ein kriegerisches Jahrhundert (Munich, 2013), 159–83.

  23 Annette Becker, Les cicatrices rouges 14–18: France et la Belgique occupées (Paris, 2010).

  24 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale (Berne, 2004); Serge Jaumain, Michaël Amara, Benoît Majerus, and Antoon Vrints (eds.), Une “guerre totale”? La Belgique dans la Première Guerre mondiale (Brussels, 2005); Larry Zuckerman, The Rape of Belgium: The Untold Story of World War I (New York, 2004); Frank Wende, Die belgische Frage in der deutschen Politik des Ersten Weltkrieges (Hamburg, 1969).

  25 Brigitte Hattke, Hugo Stinnes und die drei deutsch–belgischen Gesellschaften von 1916 (Stuttgart, 1990).

  26 Benoît Majerus, “Controlling urban society during World War I: cooperation between Belgian authorities and the forces of military occupation,” in Marcus Funck and Roger Chickering (eds.), Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars (Leiden, 2004), 65–79.

  27 Reinhold Zilch, Okkupation und Währung im Ersten Weltkrieg: Die deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Belgien und Russisch-Polen 1914–1918 (Goldbach, 1994).

  28 Jens Thiel, “Menschenbassin Belgien”: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen, 2007); Armeson, Total Warfare and Compulsory Labor.

  29 New York Times, January 22, 1915.

  30 Sophie de Schaepdrijver and Emmanuel Debruyne, “Sursum Corda: the underground press in occupied Belgium, 1914–1918,” First World War Studies 4 (2013), 23–38.

  31 De Schaepdrijver, La Belgique, 137–69, 251–85.

  32 Vejus Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000); Aba Strazhas, Deutsche Ostpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg: Der Fall Ober Ost 1914–1917 (Wiesbaden, 1993).

  33 Christian Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg: Deutsche Arbeitskräftepolitik im besetzten Polen und Litauen 1914–1918 (Paderborn, 2011).

  34 Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: “Ethnische Säuberungen” im modernen Europa (Göttingen, 2011), 80–3.

  35 Imanuel Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck, 1960).

  36 Liulevicius, War Land, 247–77; cf. Shelly Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011), 86–9.

  37 Werner Conze, Polnische Nation und deutsche Politik im ersten Weltkrieg (Graz, 1958); cf. Werner Basler, Deutsche Annexionspolitik in Polen und im Baltikum 1914–1918 (East Berlin, 1962); Martin Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (Munich, 1963).

  38 Jesse Kaufman, “Warsaw Universi
ty under German occupation: state building and nation Bildung in Poland during the Great War,” First World War Studies 4 (2013), 65–79.

  39 Andreas R. Hofmann, “Reweaving the urban fabric: multiethnicity and occupation in Łódź, 1914–1918,” in Funck and Chickering, Endangered Cities, 81–94.

  40 Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, 332.

  41 Lisa Mayerhofer, Zwischen Freund und Feind: Deutsche Besatzung in Rumänien 1916–1918 (Munich, 2010).

  42 David Hamlin, “‘Dummes Geld’: money, grains and the occupation of Romania in World War I,” Central European History 42 (2009), 451–71; Mayerhofer, Zwischen Freund und Feind, 121–38.

  43 Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955).

  44 Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York, 2010), esp. 40–75.