The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Elsewhere in Germany the strikes in April were not politicised, or at least not overtly so. In Berlin on the 16th 200,000 workers, half of them women, staged a one-day demonstration to demand food. The newspaper of the Social Democrats, Vorwärts, denied the motivations were political. But the denial in itself carried a message. The Social Democrats had voted for war credits in 1914, and had embraced the idea that support for the state in its time of trial would be the path to political reform after the war was over. But for a party still constitutionally committed to revolution a policy of reform carried penalties. Although the largest single grouping in the Reichstag, its individual membership had fallen from over a million in 1914 to a quarter of a million in 1917. A minority rejected the Burgfrieden, the domestic truce between parties of August 1914, and in April 1917 broke away from the majority Socialists to create an Independent Socialist Party. The new grouping shaped the demands of the Leipzig strikers, which in themselves suggest that the Independent Socialists were not a major threat. They looked back to the original programme of the German Socialists, adopted at Erfurt in 1890, not forward, and they were still ready to support a defensive war. However, they did possess an inner core, the Spartacists, headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1916, in Switzerland, Luxemburg, under the nom de guerre of Junius, had published a refutation of the notion that the war was defensive for Germany. Its purposes were imperialist and capitalist: ‘The cannon fodder inflated with patriotism and carried off in August and September 1914 now rots in Belgium, in the Vosges, in the Masurian swamps, creating fertile plains of death on which profits can grow’6 She declared that social democracy had failed the working class, and that only international class action could bring peace. Inspired by the events in Russia, she and Liebknecht believed that a mass strike could be the trigger for revolution.

  For Bethmann Hollweg, therefore, the message was clear: political reform would keep the majority Socialists tied to the state, would validate their position in the eyes of the working class they aspired to represent, and would divide social and economic grievances from the idea of revolution. Wilhelm Groener, appointed to head the war office, or Kriegsamt, within the Prussian Ministry of War, was committed to a parallel and complementary set of ideas. He was the principal architect of the Auxiliary Service Law, a deal between army, industry and labour on the management of German manpower in the war. For the first time in Germany, the trade unions were given an acknowledged role in the arbitration of disputes. Between 1916 and 1918 trade-union membership, which had been savaged by the consequences of conscription, recovered: that of the metal-workers’ union in upper Silesia increased 154 per cent in 1917 alone.7 But for many German socialists the Auxiliary Service Law was not an important step towards workers’ rights but another compromise which weakened them. Workers were restricted in their ability to move between jobs, while industrialists’ profits were not controlled. Groener wished the army to be the neutral representative of the state, the embodiment in some senses of Walther Rathenau’s corporatist dream, an amalgam of the best of capitalism and collectivism. But many of his military colleagues preferred to align the army more closely with the interests of the industrialists. The war aims programme, which aspired to secure for Germany the iron ore and coalfields of Belgium and of Longwy-Briey in France, was one manifestation of this alliance. Another, in October 1917, was the dismissal of Groener, who tried to control both wages and profits, as labour and industry exploited the Hindenburg programme for their respective advantage.

  The peace resolution and the emergence of a centre-left coalition may have weakened the right in parliamentary terms but it had not silenced its effectiveness outside the Reichstag. Here it had powerful allies in Hindenburg and Ludendorff. They, not the centre-left or Bethmann Hollweg, were the beneficiaries of the political crisis the peace resolution generated.

  On 6 July 1917 Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the Catholic Centre Party, delivered a speech during the debate on the war credits for the coming year, in which he declared that ‘all our calculations as regards the submarine war are false’, that the idea of defensive war should be resuscitated, and that ‘we must do everything possible to find a way which favours the conclusion of a peace this year’.8 Erzberger thus began the process that concluded with the Reichstag peace resolution. However, his victim was not the Pan-German League and its annexationist war aims, which he specifically mentioned, but the chancellor. Bethmann Hollweg was tired, committed to a policy of unrestricted submarine war in which he did not believe but which Erzberger among others had once advocated. ‘My position does not matter’, he said when he rose to reply on 9 July. ‘I myself am convinced of my own limitations . . . I am considered weak because I seek to end the war. A leading statesman can receive support neither from the Left nor the Right in Germany.’9

  But that was precisely the function of the chancellor in the Kaiser’s eyes. Bethmann Hollweg resigned the following day, not because the army wanted him to go but because he could not manage the Reichstag. His policy of what he had called the ‘diagonal’ was no longer sustainable. In the minds of the centre and left the chancellor was now bracketed with the Pan-German League, and in the minds of the right and the army he was a reformer and liberal, insufficiently committed to the idea of a ’German peace‘. The army’s opportunity arose from its ability to strike out on a new diagonal of its own. Colonel Max Bauer, the army’s most adroit intriguer, dined with Erzberger and Gustav Stresemann, leader of the National Liberals, and suggested that the chancellor had failed in his democratic duty by denying the Reichstag committee the opportunity to discuss the issues with the supreme command itself. The notion that Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the people’s representatives was not as absurd as first appearances might suggest. Rathenau told Ludendorff that he was ’exercising an unconscious dictatorship and that, if he were to appeal to his real power-base, he would have the support not only of parliament, but the whole of public opinion.‘10 The rising talents in the war, such as Ludendorff and Groener, were not Junkers but bourgeois, and, although they had a traditional Prussian in Hindenburg at their head, even his authority rested on demagogic populism derived from the victory at Tannenberg.

  On 12 July Bauer arranged a meeting between Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son, and selected representatives of the principal Reichstag parties. Bethmann Hollweg’s fate was sealed and he resigned the next day. When the Reichstag formally adopted the peace resolution on 19 July, it did so not with the Kaiser’s or the Reichstag’s nominee installed as chancellor, but with the army‘s, Georg Michaelis. Political heavyweights were surprised and cynical: ’We have lost a statesman and have secured a functionary in his place‘, said a Social Democrat, Conrad Haussmann.11 But Michaelis was a man for his times, a bureaucrat who was popular because he had run the wheat administration effectively. ’In my opinion, this is the only organization which has completely fulfilled its responsibilities without mismanagement‘, wrote Richard Stumpf, a seaman. ’He is Germany’s first bourgeois chancellor.‘12 Michaelis’s response to the peace resolution was to accept it as ’he understood it‘.

  The army’s presence in the chamber as Michaelis spoke was unmistakable, but the ‘silent dictatorship’ was exactly that - silent. The army did not itself govern. Moreover, it was the navy which revealed the limits on military power in German politics. In August 1917 mutinies broke out on the capital ships moored at Wilhelmshaven. The grievances were in part professional. Relations between officers and men were poor, the ships had not put to sea since Jutland, and the crews were bored; those on U-boats, now fully engaged in the fighting, remained quiet. But the sailors also expressed themselves in terms similar to the workers with whom they consorted in their off-duty hours, complaining of war-weariness and poor food. The mutineers had made contact with the Independent Socialists, and Admiral Scheer - like Pétain and Cadorna - was quick to detect an external conspiracy. Two of the mutineers were executed after a summary court martial. Michaelis seized the oppo
rtunity to castigate the Independent Socialists in the Reichstag, hoping thereby to drive a wedge between them and the centre-left coalition. He had miscalculated. The Reichstag rallied to the Independent Socialists, and Michaelis fell. His successor was appointed without the army being consulted. Georg von Hertling, a Bavarian Catholic, was no democrat, but he was a member of the Centre Party and was clear on his constitutional responsibilities. He selected a Social Democrat, Friedrich von Payer, as his vice-chancellor and a liberal, Richard Kühlmann, as his foreign secretary. In January 1918 he reminded Hindenburg that the general staff’s role was advisory.13

  Hertling’s difficulty was that he was claiming a responsibility which he did not have the tools to exercise. Germany was fighting what Ludendorff in later life called a ‘total war’, but with the administrative structures of a small nineteenth-century state. It had no equivalent of Britain’s Ministry of Munitions; the Prussian Ministry of War did duty as a Reich economics ministry; it never collected its various propaganda agencies into a ministry of information. Therefore the general staff expanded to fill the gaps, and took over functions for which its structures and attitudes - geared to the conduct of war at operational level - were not fitted. By January 1918 2.3 million men had been released from military service for war production. But no checks were imposed to ensure that they were being efficiently used. Daimler, the manufacturer of automobiles and aero engines, employed 1.8 workers per machine in 1914, but 2.4 in 1918. At the beginning of 1917 the firm demanded a 50 per cent price increase after a year in which it had paid out a 35 per cent dividend and written off the entire book value of its plant.14 No body existed to take an overview, to balance competing priorities, or to link the military conduct of the war to its economic and social imperatives.

  The principal casualty of the army’s arrogation of power was not the Reichstag but the Kaiser. Increasingly redundant, he went for walks in the woods, played skat, bickered with the Empress, and complained about his own irrelevance. ‘Great indignation with the Kaiser who spends hours supervising the building of a fountain at Homburg, for which a war contractor has raised the money’, wrote Georg von Müller in his diary on 7 August 1916. While his soldiers slogged it out at Verdun and on the Somme, ‘He went for an excursion to Saalburg and Friedrichshof this afternoon and refused to read a report from Hindenburg on the situation on the Eastern Front because “he had no time”’.15

  In the people’s eyes, Hindenburg, not the Kaiser, became the supreme warlord. The principal political vehicle for this idea was the Fatherland Party, formally launched on 2 September 1917, the anniversary of Prussia’s defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. The purpose of its founders, Wolfgang Kapp (an advocate of extreme war aims) and Tirpitz (now out of office), was to rekindle the ‘spirit of 1914’ by appealing for national unity in order to achieve a German victory. In reality, its supporters were conservative - schoolteachers, clergy and the professional middle class conspicuous among them. Right-wing nationalism, with its anti-capitalist overtones and its rejection of constitutional reform, was elided with calls for conquest. Its policies were in reality more divisive than unifying, but it could still claim 1.25 million members by 1918.

  The army supported the Fatherland Party through its own press agency and through the censorship of the party’s political opponents. Formally speaking, soldiers could not be members, but Ludendorff was very conscious that mechanisms like mail and leave meant they could not be insulated from the effects of war-weariness at home. He tightened postal censorship, and at the end of July set up an organisation for patriotic instruction, to remind the army what it was fighting for. French intelligence reported mutinies on the western front between May and August 1917, a phenomenon which may explain why Ludendorff did not exploit the disturbances in the French army. By September and October morale was very low, particularly on the Ypres sector, with cases of desertion reaching a peak not surpassed until the following August. ‘There must be an end,’ Hans Spiess wrote to his mother from the front on 16 August 1917, ‘even the 30 Years [War] came to an end’. Dispirited soldiers could depress those at home. ‘When you go on leave, leave the muck and melancholy in the trenches’, a leaflet of December 1917 enjoined; ‘bring them a pinch of fresh air from the front and the humour of the front line’.16

  A German field post office on the Western Front, March 1918. Mail was both vital to the maintenance of morale and the principal conduit linking front and rear None the less, the German army did not tighten censorship of its post until 1917.

  In September 1916 the Prussian war minister ordered all letters to be written exclusively in German. The easy scapegoats in the event of defeat or disobedience were the non-German nationalities. As early as November 1914 there were reports of Poles in the German army surrendering to the French with cries of ‘Catholics! Poles! Friends!’17 In 1915 Danish soldiers were denied leave and had to serve for a year before being given civic rights. But the army’s suspicions focused particularly on those from Alsace-Lorraine. A third of all orders concerning desertion were directed at them, a policy which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.18 Dominik Richert was in a unit ordered to go from the eastern front to the western at the beginning of 1917. All Alsatians (like Richert himself) and Lorrainers were told that they were to stay behind and be incorporated in other regiments. As they left their barracks on the morning of 2 January, calls of ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘Vive l’Alsace!‘ rippled up and down the column.19

  GERMANY’S ALLIES UNDER STRAIN

  The nationality issue was even more emotive in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1914 Czechs were blamed for the initial defeats in Serbia, earning a reputation which their brave conduct on the Italian front could not subsequently slough off. In Romanian units of the Honved, the Hungarian territorial army, ‘A gulf of deadly hatred appeared between the officers and men’, Octavian Tsluanu wrote. ‘The Hungarian officers, mad to think that Roumania had not declared herself for them, vented their rage on our peasants. They knocked them about abominably, and boasted each night of their schemes of punishment.’20 But the most significant tensions were those between Magyars and Austrians. Conrad von Hötzendorff blamed the inadequacy of the army’s budget on Budapest before the war broke out. He was therefore particularly irked when Hungary resisted the authority of the War Surveillance Office in 1914. With parliamentary government in Austria suspended, the focus of open debate and press criticism shifted to Budapest. István Tisza, the Magyar prime minister, had good cause to be anxious: as the Russians fought to break through the Carpathians, Hungary was likely to be the first casualty of the army’s incompetence. In 1916 Romania’s declaration of war widened the gulf yet further, with Hungary blaming the Austro-Germans for Romania’s decision and rightly fearful that chunks of Hungarian territory would be Bucharest’s reward from the Entente.

  Food was the most emotive aspect of the problem. Austria-Hungary was predominantly agricultural without being agriculturally self-sufficient. The direct effects of the blockade were not great, but the war shut off the empire’s two principal sources of supplementary food, Russia and Romania (which although still neutral in 1914 imposed an embargo). By 1917 Austria’s own output of wheat had fallen to 47 per cent of its 1913 total, of rye to 43 per cent and of oats to 29 per cent. Hungary’s production also fell, in large part for the same reasons - the loss of labour, fertilisers and horses - although not to the same extent; it was also hit by the conquest of Galicia. It therefore had less to market. In 1912 Hungary had supplied 85 per cent of Austria’s wheat and cattle, but in 1914 Hungary closed its frontier with Austria and ceased to regard its food as a common resource, preferring to sell its surplus to Germany and to the army. By 1917 Austrian imports of cereals and flour from Hungary were 2.5 per cent of their 1913 total.21

  Lack of animal fodder led to meat shortages, and by 1917 the most obvious manifestations of the food problem were two or three meatless days a week in big cities. The shortages were not as severe as in Germany, and in some respects Hun
gary was taking the blame for Austrian maladministration. Throughout the war Austria-Hungary maintained the fiction that its currency, the crown, was not losing its value, despite an increase in circulation of 1,400 per cent. Excessive liquidity meant that money was translated into goods as quickly as possible, so forcing up prices. They doubled every year, and yet wages remained constant until 1917, and had only risen by a maximum of 100 per cent by the war’s end. Thus the problem was less the production of food than the ability to buy it. Hyperinflation encouraged producers to opt out of the cash economy, either hoarding or bartering. Those in the cities, and consequently furthest from the sources of production, were worst hit. The problems of the railways compounded urban food shortages. Suffering from poor maintenance and overstrain, the trains could not deliver to the cities. Austria’s stock of cows fell only 18.4 per cent between 1910 and 1918, yet milk deliveries to Vienna declined 69 per cent.22 Finally, food supply was never brought under a single head. Austria-Hungary aped Rathenau’s war raw-materials agencies, calling them ‘centrals’, but they established them for services as well as goods. The slaughter of an ox involved five centrals, those for leather, meat, bone, fat and procurement. In February 1917 a common food agency was established under General Ottokar Landwehr von Pragenau, but he lacked full executive powers, especially in Hungary.