Kaiser Wilhelm II

by Christopher Clark

  Wilhelm’s next intervention in the crisis came on 5 July, with the arrival in Berlin of a letter from Emperor Franz Joseph, setting out his and the Austrian government’s view of the assassination and its implications for the future of the dual monarchy. The letter and an accompanying memorandum were presented to Wilhelm in the Neues Palais at Potsdam by the Austrian ambassador Szögyényi. According to Szögyényi’s report, Wilhelm read quickly through both documents and then remarked that he had ‘expected a serious action on our part against Serbia’, but that he must also consider that such a course might well bring about ‘a serious European complication’. He would therefore be unable to give a ‘definitive answer before conferring with [the] Reich Chancellor’. He then retired for lunch. Szögyényi wrote:

  After the meal, when I once again stressed the seriousness of the situation in the most emphatic way, His Majesty empowered me to convey to our Supreme Sovereign [Franz Joseph] that we can count, in this case too, upon the full support of Germany. As he had said, he must first hear the opinion of the Reich Chancellor, but he did not doubt in the slightest that Herr von Bethmann Hollweg would completely agree with his view. This was particularly true as regards an action on our part against Serbia. According to his (Kaiser Wilhelm’s) view, however, this action should not be delayed. Russia’s attitude would be hostile in any event, but he had been prepared for this for years, and if it should come to a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia, we could be confident that Germany would stand by our side with the customary loyalty of allies. Russia, incidentally, as things stood today, was not by any means prepared for war and would certainly think long and hard over whether to issue the call to arms. […] But if we had truly recognized the necessity of a military action against Serbia, then he (the Kaiser) would regret it if we failed to exploit the present moment, which is so advantageous to us.65

  After Szögyényi had left, Wilhelm called a meeting of all the most senior political and military advisers who could be summoned at short notice, and read out the contents of the Austrian messages. He then asked Falkenhayn, now the minister of war, whether the army was ‘ready for all eventualities’. Falkenhayn replied in the affirmative.

  The message conveyed in this document has since been memorialized in the historiography of 1914 as Germany’s ‘blank cheque’ to Vienna; inasmuch as this otherwise slightly misleading metaphor connotes a promise of support for the alliance partner, it is a fair description of the Kaiser’s intentions. Wilhelm believed that the Austrians were justified in taking action against Serbia, and deserved to be able to do so without fear of Russian intimidation. More problematic is the thesis that Wilhelm overinterpreted the Austrian messages, made commitments that surpassed Austrian intentions, and thereby brought war a decisive step closer.66 While it is true that Franz Joseph’s note did not refer explicitly to ‘war’ against Serbia, it left the reader in absolutely no doubt that Vienna was contemplating the most radical possible action. The Austrian emperor insisted, for example, that ‘a conciliation of the conflict’ was no longer possible, and that the problem would be resolved only when Serbia ‘is eliminated [ausgeschaltet] as a political power-factor in the Balkans’.67 In any case, Count Alexander Hoyos, the senior official entrusted with bringing the imperial note to Berlin, was himself in favour of military action and one of his tasks was to brief the Germans on the pro-war views of the Austrian Foreign Ministry.68 His conversation with Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office in Berlin – in the course of which Hoyos spoke of an eventual ‘partition’ of Serbia – left no doubt as to the severity of Austrian intentions.69

  How did the men assembled at the Potsdam Council of 5 July assess the risk that a Russian attack on Austria would bring Germany into a war on two or, more probably three, fronts? Some historians have argued that Wilhelm and his military advisers saw the crisis brewing over Sarajevo as an opportunity to seek conflict with the other Great Powers on terms favourable to Germany. Over the preceding years the military had repeatedly made a case for preventive war, and it was reasonable, in the light of the continuing escalation of Entente military preparedness, to assume that the balance of military striking power would soon tilt away from Germany and Austria–Hungary. Should this happen, it made sense to assume that Germany would never again be in a position to close the widening armaments gap with the Entente coalition.70

  It is highly probable that such arguments played a background role in the deliberations of the German leadership, in the sense that they relativized the perceived risk involved in a potential conflict between Germany and two or more Great Powers.71 On the other hand, it is also clear that Wilhelm neither believed a Russian intervention to be at all likely nor wished to provoke one.72 On 2 July Salza Lichtenau, the Saxon envoy in Berlin, reported that, although certain senior military figures were arguing that it would be desirable to ‘let war come about now’ while Russia remained unprepared, he felt it unlikely that the Kaiser would accept this view. A report filed on the following day by the Saxon military plenipotentiary noted that, by contrast with those who ‘looked with favour’ on the possibility of a war sooner rather than later, ‘the Kaiser is said to have pronounced in favour of maintaining peace’.73 Wilhelm’s aide-de-camp General Hans von Plessen, who was present at the meeting of 5 July, noted in his diary that ‘the opinion prevailed among us […] that the Russians – though friends of Serbia – will not join in after all’.74 Thus, when Falkenhayn asked Wilhelm whether he wished that ‘any kind of preparations should be made’ for the eventuality of a Great Power conflict, Wilhelm replied in the negative. The reluctance of the Germans to make military preparations, which remained a feature of German handling of the crisis into late July, may in part have reflected the army’s confidence in the existing state of readiness, but it also testified, as David Stevenson has shown, to the German leaders’ ‘preference for confining the conflict to the Balkans, even if they jeopardized their readiness should confinement fail’.75

  During the early weeks of July, Wilhelm appears to have remained confident that the conflict could be localized. On the morning of 6 July he told the acting secretary of state for the navy, Admiral von Capelle, that ‘he did not believe there would be further military complications’, since ‘the Tsar would not in this case place himself on the side of the regicides. Besides, Russia and France were not prepared for war.’ He briefed other senior military figures along the same lines.76 This was not simply whistling in the dark: Wilhelm had long been of the opinion that although Russian military preparedness was on the increase, it would be some time before the Russians would be in a position to risk a strike. Thus, late in October 1913, in the aftermath of the Albania crisis, he told Szögyényi that ‘for the moment Russia gave him no cause for anxiety; for the next six years one need fear nothing from that quarter’.77

  This outlook reflected the tenor of German General Staff and other reports, which offered sobering predictions of the growth in Russian numbers, firepower and speed of mobilization by 1917 or later, but were virtually unanimous in ruling out a threat from Russia in the short term. Reports passed to Wilhelm and his military staff from independent sources in March 1913 and January 1914 confirmed that Tsar Nicholas had formally excluded any Russian involvement in a military conflict during the following five to six years. This remained the view both of Wilhelm and of the military elite in the first weeks of July 1914.78 When the possibility of an anti-Serbian action was first mooted, Ambassador Tschirschky in Vienna was more concerned about the possibility of Italian and Romanian intervention than about the response from St Petersburg.79 Since Wilhelm feared no ‘serious complications’, and was keen to get on with his planned Scandinavian cruise, it was easy for Bethmann to persuade him not to delay his departure from Berlin. He left Germany on 6 July, accompanied by the North Sea Fleet, which planned to carry out exercises along the coast of Norway. He was later to blame Bethmann for having kept him out of Berlin during the crucial phases of the crisis.80

  After some pleasant days
at the annual Kiel regatta, at which there was much jovial fraternizing between the Kaiser and officers of the Royal Navy, Wilhelm sailed on to the Norwegian coastal town of Balholm, where he remained anchored until 25 July. It was from here, on 14 July, that he sent a first personal reply to Franz Joseph’s message of 2 July. The letter, which may have drawn on a draft note provided by the Foreign Office, reiterated the earlier assurance of support and denounced the ‘crazed fanatics’ whose ‘Pan-Slavist agitation’ threatened the ‘state structure’ of the dual monarchy, but it made no reference to the waging of war. Wilhelm stated that, although he must ‘refrain from taking a view’ on the question of current relations between Vienna and Belgrade, he viewed it as a ‘moral duty of all civilized states’ to ‘counter’ anti-monarchist ‘propaganda of the deed’ with ‘all the available instruments of power [mit allen Machtmitteln]’. But the rest of the letter referred exclusively to diplomatic initiatives in the Balkan region to prevent the emergence of an anti-Austrian ‘Balkan League under Russian patronage’. The letter closed with best wishes for the emperor’s swift recovery from his bereavement.81

  Wilhelm’s comments on the state papers that reached him on the yacht reveal that, like many of the leading political and military figures in Berlin, he was impatient to hear of a decision from Vienna.82 His chief concern seems to have been that allowing too much time to elapse would squander the benefits of worldwide indignation at the Sarajevo murder, or that the Austrians might lose their resolve altogether. The Austrians certainly dragged their feet over a decision, at first because of disagreements within the leadership and later because of concern that the delivery of an ultimatum should not occur until after a scheduled visit to St Petersburg by the president and prime minister of France on 20–23 July. In the meanwhile, according to the Saxon envoy in Berlin, the German government remained determined not to ‘discourage’ the Austrians, but also abstained from openly inciting them to a particular course of action.83 Wilhelm was pleased to hear, on around 15 July, that an ‘energetic decision’ was imminent in Vienna. His only regret was that there would be a further delay before Austrian demands were delivered to Belgrade.84

  On 19 July, however, Wilhelm was shocked into a state of ‘high anxiety’ by a telegram to the Hohenzollern from the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Gottlieb von Jagow. The telegram contained nothing essentially new, but its warning that an ultimatum was now planned for 23 July and that measures were to be taken to make sure that the Kaiser could be reached ‘in case unforeseen circumstances should make important decisions (mobilization) necessary’ brought home to Wilhelm the potential scope of the crisis that now loomed.85 He immediately issued an order that the High Seas Fleet should cancel a planned visit to Scandinavia, and instead remain together in a state of readiness for immediate departure. His anxiety was understandable, given that the British navy happened at this time to be in the midst of a trial mobilization and was thus at a high level of battle-readiness. But Bethmann and Jagow rightly took the view that this would merely arouse suspicion and exacerbate the crisis by discouraging a British demobilization; on 22 July they overruled Wilhelm and his naval staff and ordered that the visit to Norway proceed as planned. Diplomatic priorities still outweighed strategic considerations.86

  Despite the rising tension, Wilhelm remained confident that a more general crisis could be avoided. Presented with a copy of the text of the Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade, he commented: ‘Well, what do you know, that is a firm note after all’ – Wilhelm had clearly shared the view widely held within his entourage that the Austrians would ultimately shrink from confronting Serbia. When Admiral Müller suggested that the ultimatum meant that a war was imminent, Wilhelm energetically contradicted him. The Serbs, he insisted, would never risk a war against Austria. Müller interpreted this as a sign that the Kaiser was completely unprepared for military complications and would cave in as soon as he realized that war was a real possibility.87

  Wilhelm returned to Potsdam on the afternoon of 27 July. It was very early on the morning of the following day that he first read the text of the Serbian reply to the ultimatum served by Vienna two days before. Of the ten demands set out by the Austrians, the Serbian government accepted two without reservation and three with partial reservations, evaded a further four with obfuscating or misleading replies and rejected one outright. The rejected point (no. 6) required that organs ‘delegated’ by Vienna would participate in the Serbian investigation into the ‘plot of 28 June’. The Serbs rejected this on the grounds that it would be ‘a violation of the Constitution and of the law of criminal procedure’.88 Wilhelm’s response was unexpected, to say the least. He inscribed on his own copy of the Serbian reply the words: ‘An excellent result for a forty-eight-hour [ultimatum]. This is more than we could have expected! A great moral victory for Vienna; but this does away with any need for war [aber damit fällt jeder Kriegsgrund fort].’ He was surprised to hear that the Austrians had already issued an order for partial mobilization: ‘I would never have ordered a mobilization on that basis.’89

  At ten o’clock on the same morning (28 July) he dashed off a letter to Jagow in which he argued that since Serbia had tendered a ‘capitulation of the most humiliating kind’, ‘any reason for war has now been eliminated’. He went on to propose that the Austrians consider temporarily occupying the evacuated city of Belgrade as a means of ensuring Serbian compliance. More importantly, Wilhelm ordered Jagow to inform the Austrians that this was his wish, that ‘every cause for war [had] vanished’, and that Wilhelm himself was prepared to ‘mediate for peace with Austria’. ‘This I will do in my own way and as sparingly of Austria’s nationalistic feeling and of the honour of her arms as possible.’90 He also let Moltke know in writing that he took the view that if Serbia abided by her undertakings to Austria– Hungary, the grounds for war would no longer exist. During the day, according to the minister of war, Erich von Falkenhayn, he made ‘confused speeches which give the clear impression that he no longer wants war and is determined to [avoid it], even if it means leaving Austria–Hungary in the lurch’.91

  Historians have seen this sudden bout of circumspection as evidence of a failure of nerve. As Luigi Albertini memorably put it: ‘Wilhelm was full of bluster when danger was a long way off but piped down when he saw a real threat of war approaching.’92 There is something in this: we have seen that Wilhelm’s readiness to commit himself to the defence of Austrian interests had always been inversely proportional to his assessment of the risk of conflict. And on 28 July the risks appeared very grave. The latest telegrams from Lichnowsky in London reported Sir Edward Grey as saying that Serbia had ‘given satisfaction’ to a degree ‘he would never have believed possible’ and warning that a major conflagration was in prospect if Austria did not moderate her position.93 Hypersensitive as he was to the British viewpoint, Wilhelm must have taken these warnings seriously. In some respects, however, Wilhelm’s note of 28 July was less out of line with his previous interventions than the idea of a ‘failure of nerve’ might suggest: his comments during the crisis suggest that, unlike those figures in Vienna and Berlin who saw the ultimatum as a mere pretext for military action, he regarded it as an authentic diplomatic instrument with a crucial role to play in resolving the crisis and that he had always remained wedded to the notion of a political resolution of the Balkan problem.

  Perhaps the most striking thing about the letter to Jagow of 28 July is that it was not acted upon. Had Wilhelm enjoyed the plenitude of power that is sometimes attributed to him, this intervention might well have changed the course of the crisis and possibly of world history. But he was out of touch with developments in Vienna, where the leadership was now impatient to hit Serbia. And more importantly, having been away at sea for the better part of three weeks, he was also out of touch with developments in Berlin. His instructions to Jagow had no influence on Berlin’s representations to Vienna. Bethmann did not inform the Austrians of Wilhelm’s views in time to prevent them from issuing the
ir declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July. His urgent telegram to Tschirschky, despatched only a quarter of an hour after Wilhelm’s letter to Jagow, incorporated some of Wilhelm’s proposals, but omitted the crucial insistence that there could now be no reason for war. Instead Bethmann stuck to the earlier line, since abandoned by Wilhelm, that the Germans must ‘avoid very carefully giving rise to the impression that we wish to hold Austria back’.94 Why Bethmann did this remains difficult to establish. The view that he had already begun to harness his diplomacy to a policy of preventive war cannot be supported from the documents. It is more probable that he was simply already committed to an alternative strategy that focused on working with Vienna to persuade Russia not to overreact to Austrian action. On the evening of 28 July Bethmann urged the Kaiser to send a telegram to Nicholas II assuring him that the German government was doing its level best to bring about a satisfactory understanding between Vienna and St Petersburg; only twenty-four hours before, Wilhelm had rejected such a move as premature.95 In other words, Bethmann’s strategy had progressed one step further down the path of incremental risk: he was thinking in terms of localizing the conflict, not of preventing it, and he was determined to protect his policy against interventions from above.

  The arrival in St Petersburg of news that the Austrians had declared war on Serbia brought a crucial turning point in the crisis. The Russian General Staff had already inaugurated the ‘Period Preparatory to War’ three days earlier, on the evening of 25 July – an interim measure that permitted the preliminary concentration of military resources in the frontier zones – and the news of Austria’s declaration on 28 July prompted a hardening of the Russian line. According to General Dobrorolsky, head of the Russian General Staff mobilization division, Foreign Minister Sazonov, whose policy had hitherto focused on avoiding a conflict, now accepted that a general war was inevitable and that a Russian mobilization must be put in train as quickly as possible. On 29 July a partial mobilization was ordered, but this was scaled up to a general mobilization on the following day, when a warning arrived from Berlin that further military preparations would force the Germans to mobilize.96