Kaiser Wilhelm II

by Christopher Clark

  The decision for unrestricted submarine warfare (USW)

  For the German political and military leadership, the use of submarines was the most contentious issue of the war. The naval command argued that the submarine could play a decisive role within the German war strategy by establishing a counter-blockade against Britain and thereby forcing her out of the war. Achieving this would entail deploying submarines against merchant vessels of the enemy belligerents and warning neutral merchant craft away from the ‘war zone’. But the deployment of submarines in this fashion was fraught with risks. International law did not provide for the use of submarines against mercantile craft. The law was drawn up for enemy surface warships that were supposed to follow the rule of ‘visit and search’. But if neutral craft (including those of neutral states) continued to traverse the war zone, were they fair game? Even if they were declared exempt from attack, accidents were inevitable, since submarine captains often found it difficult to distinguish between neutral and enemy vessels. There was also the problem of defining and distinguishing legitimate targets. Did an exemption granted to passenger vessels still apply if these were carrying contraband military supplies? Did Britain’s ‘illegal’ blockade against Germany’s northern ports justify reprisals against British shipping? And what was the status of those craft that sailed under a belligerent flag but also carried passengers of neutral nationality?

  By the beginning of 1915 the question of how U-boats should be deployed had sown deep divisions within the decision-making elite. On the one hand there were those, like Bethmann, the cabinet chiefs Müller and Valentini, and Treutler, the foreign affairs liaison official at imperial headquarters, who argued that the risks of a comprehensive U-boat campaign outweighed the prospective gains. The crux of their argument was that if indiscriminate U-boat attacks were to bring America into the war on the side of Germany’s enemies, Germany’s prospects of victory or even an advantageous peace would evaporate. Opposed to this group were the naval and military hawks around state secretary Tirpitz and the naval chief of staff Bachmann, who saw maximum submarine deployment as the only means of retaliating against the British ‘hunger blockade’.30

  Wilhelm was ambivalent on the matter of submarine deployments. He initially favoured the moderate view, largely because he feared the consequences of alienating the United States, but also because, as he later put it, ‘the idea of innocent passengers drowning at sea appalled him’.31 In February 1915, however, after learning that the Americans were supplying the Allies with submarines and other military equipment, he agreed under pressure from Tirpitz that Allied merchant vessels within a designated war zone could be torpedoed without warning. Launched on 4 February, the new policy yielded disastrous results in early May when the Lusitania, a large passenger liner with contraband cargo in its hold, was torpedoed and sunk. Among the 1,198 passengers drowned were more than one hundred American citizens. Unnerved by the international uproar that followed and desperate to prevent an American entry into the war, Bethmann and Müller pressed for the re-imposition of restrictions. After a meeting of the Crown Council on 31 May 1915, Bethmann prevailed over the submarine enthusiasts, and on the following day, Wilhelm issued an order to all submarine captains that neutral shipping was henceforth to be spared and that, in cases of doubt, ‘it is better to let an enemy merchantman pass than to sink a neutral’. A further order issued on 6 June 1915 forbade all attacks on large passenger ships of whatever nationality.32

  Tirpitz and Bachmann were furious and responded with a joint telegram setting out their objections to the new policy, but Wilhelm stuck to his ground and added that he expected the order to remain absolutely secret – a precaution intended to prevent the demagogical naval secretary from agitating publicly against the government’s restrictions. In an ominous rerun of Hindenburg’s insubordination of January, Tirpitz and Bachmann now submitted their resignations. Wilhelm refused to grant them, exclaiming to an adviser: ‘No! The gentlemen have to obey and to remain. A regular military conspiracy! Brought about by Tirpitz.’33 After the sinking of a further passenger ship, the Arabic, mistaken for a freighter by Lieutenant Schneider of U-24 on 19 August 1915, Bethmann persuaded Wilhelm to introduce further limitations on deployment, thereby rendering the submarine weapon ‘virtually impotent’.34 Tirpitz was predictably outraged and once more submitted his resignation. Wilhelm was reluctant – as earlier in the case of Hindenburg – to dismiss an official who enjoyed such widespread public support, but he did dismiss Tirpitz’s irritating sidekick, Bachmann. In a letter to the naval secretary that drew on the arguments of the political advisers grouped around the chancellor, Wilhelm explained that preventing America from entering the war as an ‘active enemy’ was of supreme importance, since ‘she could provide unlimited money for our foes’.

  As Chief Warlord I had absolutely to prevent this […] First the war must be won, and that end necessitates absolute protection against a new enemy; how that is to be achieved […] is My business. What I do with My navy is My business only.35

  Throughout 1916, despite increasingly widespread parliamentary and press agitation for unrestricted submarine warfare (USW), Wilhelm and the Bethmann group kept the submarine lobby at bay. On 15 March Bethmann persuaded Wilhelm to strip the naval secretary of some of his ministerial responsibilites. Tirpitz’s resignation – the third since the outbreak of war – was now accepted by the Kaiser. After a brief experimental period of slightly loosened restrictions produced yet another controversial sinking (the cross-channel steamer Sussex, mistaken for a mine-layer on 24 March), Wilhelm issued a new order stating that no vessels whatsoever (excluding warships of the belligerent powers) were to be sunk without prior warning, which led the naval commanders to suspend submarine operations entirely in the Atlantic and English Channel. The Kaiser thus – at least for the moment – fulfilled the decision-making potential of his office in holding the fort against the advocates of USW. His position was motivated in part by geo-strategic concerns – especially as regarded the incalculable consequences of a US entry into the war – but strong moral reservations were also in play. He took the view ‘that to torpedo huge passenger ships full of women and children was a barbarous brutality without parallel, with which we will bring upon us the hatred and the poisonous rage of the entire world’.36

  Wilhelm thus played a crucial role in supporting the politically moderate elements within the decision-making elite against the demands of the hawks. Why, then, did he endorse a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917? Public opinion was certainly a key factor. During the second half of 1916 there was increasingly vocal and widespread support for submarine warfare, especially after the Battle of Jutland at the end of May failed to lift the British blockade. Support for USW now came not only from the annexationist milieu that had dominated the submarine agitation of 1915, but also from across the spectrum of the Reichstag parties. It appealed to a German public whose hostility was increasingly focused upon Great Britain as the keystone of the enemy coalition.37 The submarine became, as Roger Chickering has put it: ‘a panacea, the wonder weapon whose all-out employment promised to resolve the war and bring the British to their knees’.38 The prevailing climate of opinion was not, of course, in itself sufficient to convert Wilhelm to a policy of USW, though its impact on him can scarcely be doubted. But it weakened the position of the chancellor and thereby helped to tilt the balance within the executive towards the submarine enthusiasts. During the summer and autumn of 1916, support for USW seeped like a powerful solvent through the chancellor’s parliamentary base. The Conservatives and the National Liberals broke away to form a ‘U-boat bloc’; by October 1916, even the formerly loyal Centre Party was openly opposing the chancellor’s policy on submarine deployment and demanding that the power of decision be placed in the hands of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, whose support for USW was widely known. These developments undermined the chancellor’s confidence and personal standing in the tough debates within the executive upon which everythin
g depended.

  A further important factor in Wilhelm’s decision to accept USW was the failure of Bethmann’s peace sounding to the nations fighting Germany in December 1916. The peace note of 12 December was the product of a fierce struggle over wording between the chancellor and the supreme command. The result was a characteristically ambivalent communiqué that opened with an announcement that Germany was willing to talk about peace, but closed with a warning that she would fight onward to victory if discussions did not take place. Wilhelm gave his full support to Bethmann’s initiative, not merely for reasons of ‘expediency’ as Lamar Cecil has suggested,39 but also because he was genuinely weary of the war (he is reported to have burst into tears at the mention of the word ‘peace’ during a meeting with a Reichstag delegation)40 and because the making of peace also accorded with his sacralized conception of the sovereign’s office: peacemaking, he told Bethmann, was a ‘moral act that was appropriate for a monarch who has a soul, and feels himself responsible to God, who has a feeling for his people and the enemy’s’.41 In the event, the peace initiative of 12 December was a failure. Five days later Admiral Müller observed that Wilhelm’s buoyancy at the news of German victories against Romania had given way to gloom, ‘chiefly because foreign statesmen have looked down their noses at our peace feelers’.42 When the Allies’ negative reply to the peace note was published, Wilhelm grew angry, declaring that Germany must fight on to the end, annex Belgium, subdue France and so on.

  In the fatalistic, self-righteous mood of late December 1916, Wilhelm, whose commitment to the Bethmann view had in any case always been ambivalent and conditional, was disposed to embrace the promise and risks of unrestricted submarine warfare. The submarine enthusiasts, for their part, had raised their act since 1915; the stock of submarines had been enlarged and improved and the enthusiasts could now produce barrages of tables and statistics demonstrating that five months of ruthless submarine warfare against Great Britain’s commerce in the Channel and the Atlantic (submarine warfare had never been suspended in the North Sea) would suffice to drive her out of the war. The risk of an American entry into the war was irrelevant, they contended, since German submarines would already have decimated Allied transatlantic traffic before substantial numbers of US troops were ready for embarkation and would in any case have little difficulty in stopping troop shipments from the United States to Europe. Wilhelm quickly adopted these arguments as his own. At a meeting of 9 January 1917, organized by the military command to discuss the issue in the eastern front headquarters at Pless, it was apparent that the Kaiser had already resolved to support the generals. Bethmann had come armed with arguments against a new submarine campaign, but found himself isolated and eventually acquiesced in the majority view. Wilhelm showed signs of impatience as Bethmann enumerated his objections, and then signed an order to the effect that unrestricted submarine warfare was to commence from 1 February. When this decision was formally announced by the German government, it resulted in the almost immediate severance of diplomatic relations with the United States and in April in the latter’s declaration of war on Germany.

  At the meeting in Pless, Wilhelm had presided over a decision of world-historical moment. It was founded, as historians have pointed out, on an egregious miscalculation of the risks and benefits involved. Although German submarines reached, and for a time even exceeded, the projected target of sinking 600,000 tons a month, the advantage to Germany was shortlived. The British food supply and distribution system proved more elastic than expected, the capacity of the American shipyards to replace lost tonnage was much greater than the German strategists had appreciated, and the anti-submarine measures developed by the Allies proved more effective than the Germans could have predicted. The loss rate among German submarines soared, and soon far exceeded that among Allied convoys.43

  Of course, it could be argued that Germany had no other choice, because in the long run the odds in a continental war of attrition were stacked against Germany. But was this true? It is open to doubt, to say the least. In January 1917 Germany had just succeeded in crushing Romania and victory in Russia was not far off, though the Germans could not know that. The morale of the French army was close to collapse and Britain was fast running out of money, indeed it was much closer to financial collapse than the Germans knew. During the autumn of 1916 American exasperation at the British blockade against Germany was rising and Anglo-American relations were at their nadir. Without American participation and the comprehensive aid that came with it, Britain may well have had to sue for peace in the summer or autumn of 1917, at around the time that the Italian front was beginning to collapse under Austro-German pressure.

  In other words: if Germany had not embarked on unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping and the United States had stayed out of the war, a German defeat at Allied hands seems highly unlikely. Germany’s best chance – seen in retrospect – lay in ‘simply waiting for the paralysis of [Allied] shipping, finances and military collapse on several fronts’.44 Wilhelm himself appears temporarily to have glimpsed this possibility. During a visit to Vienna late in November 1916, he predicted ‘revolution in Moscow and St Petersburg’, ‘complete munitions failure in Russia’, ‘famine in England’ and a French army worn down ‘to the last man’.45 Wilhelm’s interlocutors greeted this outburst with weary scepticism, but as a vision of a ‘virtual future’, it was less implausible than they thought.

  The fall of Bethmann

  During the autumn and winter of 1916–17, two developments conspired to erode further Wilhelm’s position within the executive. There was, firstly, a drastic extension of the power wielded by the military over the civilian arm of government. In a series of clashes with the generals, Bethmann was forced to give way on important questions pertaining to the future status of Russian Poland and to accept the high-handed dismissal of various ministers and senior aides ( Jagow, Helfferich, Hammann). By the beginning of 1917, notwithstanding Bethmann’s role in helping to bring down Falkenhayn and hoist Hindenburg into the supreme command and his ultimate compliance over the submarine question, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had decided that the chancellor himself would have to go.

  11. Wilhelm II followed closely the course of the German war effort, but he was unable to play any role in the day-to-day management of operations. There were, however, decisions of strategic importance, such as the dismissal of senior commanders or the transition to unconditional submarine warfare, that could not be resolved without him. He is seen here awarding medals to officers near Cambrai in 1917. Standing to the right of him (with goggles) is Moritz von Lyncker, whose diaries and letters shed much light on the wartime phase of the Kaiser’s reign.

  At the same time as these developments were unfolding within the executive, an increasingly volatile domestic political situation threatened to overwhelm the government from below. The outbreak of war had been followed by a brief period of ‘national unity’, in which the Reichstag factions agreed to exercise self-restraint on issues that divided the population. But by the summer of 1915, this ‘truce’ (Burgfrieden) had come under pressure from both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, a radical faction within the Social Democratic Party broke party discipline to denounce the war and vote in the Reichstag against further war credits. During 1915 there were increasingly frequent calls from the SPD for social and political rewards for the working class that was sustaining the fighting in the trenches. Key themes in left-wing political agitation were the rejection of a ‘war of conquest’ and the call for franchise reform. On the right, there emerged an influential ultra-nationalist network with powerful patrons in the army, navy and government, which demanded extensive German annexations as the sine qua non of peace and opposed domestic political reform.

  During 1916, as we saw, the right had succeeded briefly in rallying a substantial body of parliamentary support around the campaign for the submarine. But by the early spring of 1917, the political initiative had passed to the left. Severe food shortages
and news of the February revolution in Russia generated a highly volatile mood in the German industrial cities and the centre-left was beginning to coalesce around the call for domestic political reform, and specifically for the abolition of Prussia’s antiquated and discriminatory three-class franchise. In order to restore calm, Bethmann urged Wilhelm to issue an ‘Easter message’ promising that franchise reform would follow the cessation of hostilities. Wilhelm had – albeit reluctantly – accepted the need for democratization since early 1915 and was willing to comply.46 But his vaguely worded promise merely raised the political temperature. The following weeks saw the first major strikes since the beginning of the war, and renewed efforts by the Reichstag to assert political control over the German war effort. Many deputies now insisted upon franchise reforms without further delay, and much of the early summer was spent discussing a ‘Peace Resolution’ moved by the prominent Centre deputy Matthias Erzberger, which called for a negotiated peace without forced annexations.