Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  These discussions were rooted as well in issues raised by the occupation of Russian Poland during the First World War, however. In the sector of Polish lands that they occupied, the Germans installed a governor-general in 1915.37 Like his counterparts in Belgium, Hans von Beseler was a general who ruled with the aid of a civilian bureaucracy. Like his counterparts in Belgium, he also believed that tutelage in German discipline would benefit the Poles (and the Polish Jews), and that a genuine condominium of interest united the occupiers and occupied, particularly given their common antipathy to Russia. Beseler sought to demonstrate these convictions with a number of measures that were calculated to appeal to the occupied population. Early in the occupation he reopened Polish schools in the German sector and permitted the establishment of a Polish university in Warsaw.38 He also loosened the censorship, presided over the restructuring of urban government, and introduced municipal elections with a weighted system that resembled the Prussian suffrage. Eventually, he believed, German occupation should foster a satellite Polish state, autonomous in its domestic policy but dependent on Germany in military and foreign affairs. However benign these intentions, the basic circumstances of the occupation defeated them. The vast disparities in the power relations – the tight and pervasive limits that the Germans imposed on Polish political activity – led quickly to frustration and conflict, which culminated in a student strike at the university in 1917. The harsh material burdens of occupation made the situation worse. Among the occupation authorities was a familiar roster of German industrial committees, which oversaw the mobilization of the Polish economy in the interests of the German war effort. Poland’s industrial resources, particularly the large textile plants of Łódź and Warsaw, fell under German management, as did electrical utilities and coal mines. Stripped of its machinery, however, and deprived of raw materials by German policy or the Allied blockade, industrial activity collapsed, leaving the urban workforce unemployed.39 In these conditions, over a half million Poles were enticed or forced into employment in Germany (of whom 300,000 were seasonal farmworkers who were confined in Germany when the war broke out).40 Agriculture, the principal sector of the Polish economy, was likewise pressed into the effort. Polish farmers were compelled to divert their crops at low, administered prices into the German food supply. Fodder crops, such as potatoes, clover, oats, and sugar beets, relieved critical shortages in Germany, as did Polish livestock, wood, cotton, wool, and flax. The shortages grew correspondingly in Poland.

  Amid all these pressures, the political situation in Poland was much more complicated than in Belgium. In 1914 the empires of Russia, Austria–Hungary, and Germany had all ruled over large Polish minorities for decades. The redefinition of Poland’s status during the war thus carried far-reaching implications for Germany’s relations not only with its enemy but also with its principal ally. The military victories of 1915 brought virtually all Polish lands under the control of Germany and Austria, which occupied lands to the south of the German sector. The “Polish question” thus became central to their relations with one another, to say nothing of its bearing on a negotiated peace with Russia. While the German and Austrian armies controlled the land, opinions remained deeply divided in Berlin and Vienna over Poland’s future. The most diplomatic option (and the most propitious for the alliance) seemed to be the so-called “Austro-Polish solution,” which would cede sovereignty over Russian Poland to Austria in return for economic concessions to Germany.

  The terms of diplomacy shifted, like much else, in the summer of 1916, however. Ludendorff, whom the first two years of the war had taught contempt for the Austrians, was interested only in the immediate military implications of the Polish question. He was attracted by the proposals to concoct a sovereign Polish state out of the German and Austrian occupied territories (minus the Grenzstreifen). He calculated that it would appeal to Polish nationalists and win large contingents of Polish soldiers to the armies of the Central Powers. Accordingly, he dismissed both the protests of the Austrians and the objections of Bethmann, who clung to the hope of a separate peace in the east. In November 1916 the Germans proclaimed the birth of a Polish kingdom, to be governed – with German assistance – by a parliament and a council of leading Polish politicians. Although the idea raised more issues than it resolved, the Germans’ intentions were transparent. By this point in the war, though, German domination had become little more palatable to Poles than to Belgians. Calls for Polish volunteers produced disappointing results. The Polish military contribution to the Central Powers never much exceeded the 20,000 members of the so-called Polish Legion, which had been fighting as a contingent alongside the Austrians. By 1917 and the entry of the United States into the war, the great majority of Poles had concluded that an Allied victory represented the best hope for genuine independence.

  Germans and Austrians also occupied Romania jointly after they conquered most of this country in the fall of 1916. The Germans dominated the occupation administration, however. Their policy was devoted first and foremost to the mobilization of Romanian resources, above all grain and oil, for the relief of the German home front.41 Because they could ill spare the military manpower for yet another occupation, they sought to exploit the lingering sympathies that they enjoyed among Romanian elites, whose fears of Russia remained strong. Collaboration with the occupier was hence not the stigma here that it was in France or Belgium. At both the national and local levels, many Romanian officials remained in place. The effectiveness of the German efforts to raise resources was due in the main to this fact, as well as to financial arrangements that allowed them to buy Romanian goods at no effective cost with a currency that they themselves printed.42 In the last year of the war, however, the mounting German demands on Romanian resources encouraged passive resistance, as they exhausted the Romanian harvest and left Romanian finances in ruins.

  It is difficult to gauge the economic impact in Germany of resources from Romania and the other occupied countries. That they helped alleviate shortages of crucial materials is beyond question, but so is the fact that depriving restive local populaces of these resources tied down large German forces. Beyond question was also the Germans’ determination to retain some form of control over most of these areas after the war. This attitude was so pronounced in the discussions of war aims that one can almost speak of a consensus, at least to the right of the Social Democrats. The modalities of control were the object of debates that burst into the open in the fall of 1916, when, in hopes of encouraging morale with visions of triumph, Ludendorff removed the ban on public discussion of Germany’s war aims. The debates suggested that plans for large-scale population resettlement were less common than visions of a postwar German Mitteleuropa – a colossal customs union, whose core was to be the empires of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs, and whose satellites were to span the continent, from Belgium to Estonia to Turkey, all of which were to be joined in political or economic dependence on the German core. The leading public advocate of this project was the head of the Progressive party, Friedrich Naumann, who was more eloquent and benign in his thinking than many of the others in this broad coalition of sentiment, which reached from Ludendorff and the Pan-Germans into the ranks of the Social Democrats.43 Mitteleuropa promised to eliminate, once and for all, the problem of German access to foreign markets and resources. The project seemed to offer the material foundations on which Germany could henceforth compete more effectively for power on a worldwide scale.

  Global war

  Compared to the great conflict that followed a generation later, this was a largely European war. Much the greatest share of fighting took place in European theaters. European soldiers accounted for the greatest proportion of battle deaths and injuries; European civilians as a group bore the most sustained burdens on the home front. Even so, the Great War of 1914–18 had a major global dimension, which became decisive during the last two years of the conflict. Troops, supplies, and laborers from around the world found employment in Europe, thanks primarily t
o the colonial empires of the belligerent states in Asia and Africa.44 Although Germany had counted as a second-rank colonial power before the war, its scattered territorial holdings now provided both the scene and the pretext for military action in Africa and the Pacific. Meanwhile, Germany’s alliance with Ottoman Turkey lured Germans deep into the Middle East and Caucasus, as well as into the complex, often savage, ethnic politics of these regions.

  The Great War opened a new chapter in the history of European colonialism: a sudden redistribution of the spoils in which subimperial colonialism, the seizure of colonies by states that had themselves recently been European colonies, was a featured part. The spoils in question were Germany’s colonies, none of which were prepared for a war among the European colonizers.45 Most of these colonies were sparsely inhabited and defended by little more than small constabularies and the prospect of a German warship in the harbor. The support that German colonies had provided to these warships, however, be it in the form of coaling stations or as nodes in a global communications network, defined the principal goal of Germany’s naval rivals. The British and their Japanese allies thus moved immediately upon the outbreak of war to seize the German territories.46 In the Pacific, troops from the British dominion in New Zealand quickly took control of the German colony in Samoa, while, after brief fighting, Australian forces occupied the main settlements throughout German New Guinea.47 To the north, the Japanese besieged the German naval station in Tsingtao on the Chinese coast and occupied German holdings in the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Island chains. The fall of Tsingtao to the Japanese in November 1914 marked the end of these operations, as well as the end of the German Pacific empire. The practical effect was to deprive the German navy of the infrastructure for operations in the Pacific.

  The military action in Africa resulted likewise in the termination of German colonial rule.48 Here the story was more protracted and complicated, however, for most of the German African colonies were larger, the German military resistance was better organized, and concerted action among Allied forces proved difficult to achieve. The fate of Togo, Germany’s small “model colony,” which had been the only profitable holding in the entire German empire (and, more pertinently, the site of a pivotal German wireless station), was much like that of the islands in the Pacific. The colony’s defense lay in the hands of several hundred policemen, most of them Togolese, who in the first days of the war faced a joint invasion from the British Gold Coast colony in the west and French Dahomey in the east. In the face of these forces, the German governor first proposed neutrality, then capitulated three weeks into the war.

  Although it was singularly quick, operations in Togo resembled military action elsewhere in Africa, insofar as they were conducted on both sides largely by African fighters in the pay of Europeans. In this respect, the anomaly lay in Germany’s largest and principal settlement colony, South-West Africa, where both the invasion of the colony and the resistance to it were conducted primarily by white troops.49 The invaders came from the recently created Union of South Africa, whose army was drawn from British and Boer volunteers and a conscription system that was restricted to white Europeans. The absence of black soldiers among the German forces was due to the tense race relations in the German colony after German troops had, with genocidal fury (and intentions), crushed uprisings by the native Herero and Nama tribes ten years earlier. Because they feared to draw on the indigenous population, the Germans could mobilize only around 5,000 men to defend the colony against an invasion force that numbered more than eight times as many. The character of the campaign was governed by the Germans’ determination to demonstrate their claims to the territory by keeping a credible fighting force in the field as long as possible. This goal recommended avoiding pitched battles. The result was a gradual retreat along the central railway line northwards, punctuated by skirmishes with Boer cavalry units, until the Germans agreed to terms in July 1915.

  As the conquest of South-West Africa ended, combat continued in the two remaining German colonies in Africa. To the north, in the Cameroons, the Germans’ objectives were the same as in South-West Africa: to survive militarily and hold as much territory as possible as long as possible, in hopes of retaining the colony after the European war.50 The core of the German forces comprised the so-called Schutztruppe, a professional body of some 200 white officers and 1,600 askaris, black mercenaries who had enlisted for terms of three years. The incorporation of police reserves and armed white settlers raised the strength to about 8,000. Against them stood nearly twice as many troops, drawn principally from French Equatorial Africa to the east, British Nigeria to the west, and Belgian troops from the Congo. Basing their operations on strong defenses in the northern plateau of the colony, the Germans exploited the support they enjoyed among the indigenous peoples to raise supplies, additional troops, and auxiliary workers. In this fashion they waged a skilled “small war” of raids and ambushes against opponents who found it difficult in any case to coordinate their actions. Only in February 1916, after their munitions supplies had been exhausted, did the German forces surrender.

  The most remarkable African action of the Great War took place in German East Africa. Here the defenders exploited to the point of virtuosity the advantages that vast, unmapped or poorly mapped spaces, difficult terrain, an inhospitable climate, and the absence of communications offered to badly outnumbered forces. This story is indelibly linked to the Prussian officer Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who arrived as a lieutenant colonel in East Africa early in 1914 to assume command of this colony’s Schutztruppe.51 In its size and composition, the force resembled its counterpart in the Cameroons.52 It drew on the support that the Germans enjoyed among the tribes in the north and west of the colony – outside the areas that had hosted the Maji-Maji rebellion a decade earlier, which the Germans had subdued as ferociously as the simultaneous Herero–Nama uprisings. Lettow-Vorbeck had seen action in the latter campaign, but he had also learned to value the military advantages of cooperation with indigenous peoples. Exploiting these advantages enabled him to expand his forces by the spring of 1916 to more than 17,000 men, together with the thousands of porters who were essential to operations in climes where the tsetse fly was a lethal threat to animals. Arrayed against the German forces in 1916 was an army of some 70,000 men. It resembled a microcosm of the British Empire, with soldiers from Britain itself, British East Africa, India, Rhodesia, the Gold Coast, South Africa (after the collapse of German resistance in South-West Africa), and (after the fall of the Cameroons) Nigeria. First the Indians, then the South Africans, constituted the largest contingents; and in 1916 the South African Jan Smuts became the commander of the force, with orders to destroy the German resistance.

  Lettow-Vorbeck’s great achievement was to frustrate this design for the entirety of the war. He evaded a crippling defeat as he led his forces and his pursuers from one end to the other of the colony – which was larger in area than France, Germany, and Spain combined – then around Portuguese East Africa and into Northern Rhodesia. This feat was due to his mastery of the tactics of the small war, the high discipline, morale, and mobility of his troops, the success of German ships in running supplies through the British blockade of the coast, the skill of his military doctors, and – certainly not least – to questionable decisions by Smuts, who could not rely on mounted troops as he had in South-West Africa. By the time Lettow-Vorbeck surrendered – in Rhodesia – the war in Europe had been over for two weeks, and some 160,000 troops had been committed at one time or another to defeating him.

  It has subsequently become common to lionize him as a pioneer in the tactics and strategy of guerilla warfare. This “obscure Prussian officer,” wrote one admirer in 1974, “could have conducted post-graduate courses in irregular warfare tactics for Che Guevara, General Giap and other celebrated but far less skilled guerilla fighters.”53 Judgments such as these mistake effects for intentions, however, and overlook basic features in the career of a Prussian soldier who had trained in the
traditions of Schlieffen. A war of popular liberation was the last thing on his mind; and the fate of native peoples interested him only insofar as it bore on operations. The object of his African campaign was strategic, to draw as many British forces as possible from the European front; and, to this end, he hoped to defeat them in open battle. That he resorted instead to irregular tactics was due not to his inclinations but to the refusal or inability of his opponents (particularly Smuts) to draw him into open battle – and to the fact that, as he quickly realized, he lacked the forces to risk in such an action. In this respect, he faced the same limitations as the German army in Europe. Emphasizing the forward-looking aspects of Lettow-Vorbeck’s approach obscures another important dimension of the war in east Africa. In many respects, it more resembled European warfare of the seventeenth century, so the comparisons are less apt with Che Guevara and General Giap than with the Count of Tilly and Gustavus Adolphus. Lettow-Vorbeck’s troops represented more or less cohesive bodies of foot soldiers, who took with them not only food and munitions but also their households and family members. Near the end of the campaign, a German column extended thirty kilometers as it marched.54 Especially after they left friendly territory, these formations exacted a fearsome toll in crops, livestock, and human labor from the lands they traversed, to say nothing of the casualties that otherwise attended this kind of warfare. Including porters, who died in droves of disease, losses in the campaign numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The result was an African humanitarian calamity to rival the Maji-Maji or Herero–Nama uprisings.55 This truth must temper any claim that military operations in Africa were but a sideshow to the European theaters. In fact, despite his own calculations, Lettow-Vorbeck’s adventures occupied few British or imperial troops who would otherwise have seen action in western Europe.56 In Germany itself, the significance of these operations was more moral than military. They represented a persistent, immensely satisfying act of defiance against Britain. In particular, the loyalty of Lettow-Vorbeck’s African troops seemed to refute the claim, piously announced by the British and French to justify their own seizure of the German colonies, that Germans were unsuited to steward primitive peoples towards civilized behavior and that German rule in Africa, like German actions in Belgium and northern France in 1914, indicated the depths of German barbarism.