The German Empire of 1871 did not stand in the line of continuity emanating from the medieval empire, as the name might suggest, but in that of the state of Brandenburg-Prussia, which the Bavarian historian Karl Alexander von Müller described in August 1914 as an ‘heroic-aristocratic warrior state in which everything – taxation, officialdom, economy, society – revolved around the army, was determined by the needs of the army’.4
In eighteenth-century Germany this military state was ‘an alien phenomenon, incomprehensible to contemporaries’. In the Reform Era it had enhanced its efficiency, at the same time strengthening the position of its ruling caste, the landowning aristocracy. It had defeated the Revolution of 1848, and in the army and constitutional conflict of 1862–6 it had once again repulsed parliamentary government and democracy as well as the subordination of the army to parliamentary control. Indeed, it was the condition of Bismarck’s appointment that he maintain undiminished the preponderance of the crown and the army within the state, thus preserving this continuity – though the Olympian dimensions of his personality all but obscured this for two decades. Even the introduction of manhood suffrage for the parliament of the North German Confederation proceeded from an anti-democratic calculation on Bismarck’s part. In the Prusso-German Empire, which Bismarck created in three short wars which he ‘willed and made’,5 federal elements only thinly disguised the dominance of Prussia, just as the liberal constitutional elements merely served the purpose of masking the dominance of the crown and the aristocracy (holding the leading positions in the army, the high bureaucracy and the diplomatic service) in an age of liberal ascendancy. Thus a pre-industrial elite retained political power as well as control over the chief instrument of power, the army. The latter, via universal conscription and the institution of the ‘officer of the reserve’,6 exerted so decisive an influence on the whole society as to permeate all spheres of life with a military spirit of hierarchy and subordination such as the rest of Germany had never before known. School, university and church, above all the Protestant state churches based on Lutheran tradition, with their close association of throne and altar, sanctioned this order: they were in 1848, and again in 1918, anti-revolutionary: the core of the morality which they coined was obedience.7 Through this habit of subservience, the industrialists’ adoption of the ‘master in the house’ mentality of the estate-holders was greatly facilitated.8
In terms of its social ideas and its distribution of political power so monarchic and feudal in structure, this in 1870 still predominantly agrarian German Empire developed in two waves (1850–73 and 1896–1914), and on a scale and tempo bearing comparison only with the development of North America, into a modern industrial state. The new industrial bourgeoisie had established itself as the economically dominant force no later than the onset of the boom period beginning in 1896, but it had been quite unable to acquire for itself a commensurate share in political power. One of the most significant results of Bismarck’s conservative policy was his success in reconciling these two social elites by means of his post-1878 economic and social policies, indeed promoting the assimilation of the new industrial big bourgeoisie by the agrarian-feudal forces. This alliance of ‘steel and rye’, of the manor and the blast furnace,9 in the fight against Caprivi’s reform policy was renewed in Miquel’s ‘consensus policy’ (Sammlungspolitik) of 1897–8, cemented through the 1902 Bülow tariff, and in 1913, through the manipulative recruitment of petty-bourgeois groups from the ‘old Mittelstand’, was once again consolidated in the ‘cartel of the productive estates’. It persisted as the hard core of reaction within German society and continued to play a decisive role, despite manifold divergences, in 1933. The policy of naval building inaugurated in 1898, although heavy industry (coal, iron and steel) was its chief beneficiary, was yet accepted, albeit with great reluctance, by the agrarians, represented by the Conservatives, because their acquiescence in navalism bought them higher grain tariffs which, in conjunction with direct subsidies, secured their survival as an economic and a social class.
Within industry, whose organizations co-operated closely with the civil service, the heavy industry lobby (the older CDI) consistently outstripped the influence of the BDI (the manufacturing lobby),10 while the chemical and electrical industries, representing the most advanced of modern technology, were concerned primarily with foreign markets. While finishing industry was more strongly organized in small and medium-sized enterprises, raw-materials industries had already achieved, at a fairly early stage, a high degree of syndication and cartelization (the coal syndicate in 1893, the steel producers’ association in 1894). The attempt to strengthen the liberal elements in commerce, banking and industry through the creation of the Hanseatic League in 1909, as an ‘anti-feudal consensus policy’, proved a failure.11 ‘Latent reform movements’ (G. Schmidt) of an ‘opening to the left’ were not realized;12 and for the government it was quite impossible to oppose the Conservatives with a centre-left coalition. On the contrary, as late as May 1914 Matthias Erzberger, a leading representative of the Centre Party, could still describe ‘the decimation of the gigantic power of Social Democracy’ as the greatest task of the Reich’s domestic policy, requiring co-operation of the ‘right (i.e. the Conservatives), the Centre and the National Liberals’.13
Even after the lifting of the anti-Socialist Law the state continued to hound Social Democracy via the civil service and the judiciary.14 After the turn of the century, however, Social Democracy managed to strengthen its position enormously, at the same time clipping the wings of its social revolutionary faction. Through reformism, the growth of the trade unions and the survival of petty-bourgeois artisan traditions, the party (hitherto a subculture or counter-culture) gradually became assimilated to the existing social order. It was this process of deradicalization which accounted for its decision of 4 August 1914 to vote in favour of war credits. In this embourgeoisement of the party the Hanseatic League saw the possibility of acquiring an ally against the great landowners and heavy industry, which in fact proved unattainable. For the great landowners and heavy industry, together with their lower middle-class and Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie) supporters, this transformation of Social Democracy and its rise to the position of strongest party in the German Reichstag in January 1912 served as an alarm signal and an occasion to go beyond their anti-democratic animus and to demand that the Reichstag be neutered and the trade unions suppressed, for it seemed to them that their economic and social position could be guaranteed only in an authoritarian corporate state: here the nexus with Papen’s ideas of 1932, even with the year 1933, becomes palpable. To them it seemed that external aggrandizement and possibly even victorious war abroad might be the appropriate means for combating the Social Democratic, no less than the liberal-democratic challenge – as had proved expedient in 1866.
In the meantime, the conservative royalism and liberal patriotism of the 1860s had been changed into a new German nationalism marked by völkisch-racist, populist and pseudo-democratic features. This new nationalism no longer merely toadied to the powers that be but also attacked the government whenever the authorities seemed to act with insufficient dash either at home or abroad. Examples of this include the petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism of the seventies and eighties; the Farmers’ League, with its strongly anti-Semitic and, in part, anti-aristocratic peasant groups; the colonialist movement; and the radical wing of the Navy League, with its many agitators of petty-bourgeois origin. This transformation revealed itself most dramatically in the Pan-German League and its affiliations when, between 1911 and 1914, the animus against the ‘weak’ government intensified to the point of open criticism of the ‘weak’ Emperor Wilhelm II and began to depict itself as a radical ‘revolution of the right’, anticipating and preforming elements that were to become manifest in 1933.
Externally, the Reich was caught in a tightening vice between, on the one hand, initial consolidation of its 1871 position by means of Bismarck’s alliance policy and, on the other, pressure from sections of the bourgeoisie for expansion of its colonial empire and penetration of the Near East. The Reich remained burdened with the enmity of France, which it was unable to divert overseas. The attempt to repair its damaged relationship with Russia (strained since 1878) was also unsuccessful, not least because the Conservatives (bound to tsardom by political tradition), through their agrarian interests, aggravated that estrangement at the economic level. This led to the Franco-Russian rapprochement (the 1892 military convention). Nevertheless, in 1897–8 the Imperial government under Wilhelm II, with its vehemently anti-British new men, Bülow and Tirpitz (both demonstrably influenced by the historian Treitschke15), decided in favour of naval construction and hence of ‘world policy’ in the sense of overseas expansion. Of necessity, such a policy threw down the gauntlet to Britain, the third possible Great-Power opponent of global stature. In the Reichstag, this policy drew support from the vast majority of the bourgeois parties, including the Centre. Whether it was primarily the powerful economic interests of heavy industry; or (as has recently been maintained, perhaps in exaggeration of the domestic political motives) a ‘social imperialism’16 which, using the navy as its symbol (as Bismarck had used the army), sought to unify all the bourgeois forces against the Social Democratic peril; or whether it was the ideas of the neo-mercantilists and neo-Rankeans, of the professors recruited for naval propaganda work; or whether it was the influence exerted on the Kaiser and Tirpitz by Mahan’s teachings about sea power and world standing – for the Great Power in question, namely Britain, these motives were completely immaterial: it was the fact of naval building which counted. What mattered was that the German Empire had embarked on a course aiming at nothing less than ‘parity’ with the British world empire, if not more. Thus, at any rate, the then Lord Lieutenant of the province of Brandenburg, von Bethmann Hollweg, described the Kaiser’s intentions in 1903:
In the eyes of the agrarians it remained the ‘ghastly’ fleet, which they had accepted only in return for the concession of high agricultural tariffs,18 though these were never high enough in their estimation. The fleet was to be completed by 1918 or 1920 and to be used as a lever or military instrument. When one recalls that Germany at this time was the strongest land power in Europe, it becomes clear that extensive maritime world-power ambitions of this sort must necessarily transform the balance of power and call into question the European states system. In reality, Britain began to respond to this challenge, through her armaments and her ententes, as early as 1901–2.19
Contemplating the self-restraint of the Bismarckian and Caprivi eras with a mixture of pity and contempt, and partly animated by concern that Britain might go over to protectionism and close off her markets, a younger generation of Germans unleashed on all parts of the globe a hectic flurry of activity known as ‘world policy’, seeking to gain spheres of influence in China, for example, in South America, in Turkey especially, and, above all, additional colonies in Africa and the Pacific. What this amounted to in the consciousness of the nation, among the so-called liberal imperialists in particular, was a redivision of the globe that would more accurately reflect prevailing power relations, i.e. acknowledge the rise of the German Empire, than did the status quo. In practice, this could be attained only by means of war. Even a Cassandra warning against war (Hans Plehn in his study, German World Policy without War) drew attention to this nexus when he noted as the consequence of German public opinion’s bitterness over the German retreat in the crisis of 1911: ‘In the year since the last Moroccan crisis it has become virtually the unanimous feeling of the German nation that the freedom necessary to the implementation of our world policy can be won only through a great European war.’20
The gains of all such efforts were disappointingly modest. Yet there is a clear continuity here. For the same objectives which were being pursued and, intermittently, even negotiated with Britain (at the turn of the century and in the years 1912–14) cropped up again as early as August 1914 as one of the Imperial Colonial Office’s peace terms (a German Central Africa), augmented in 1916 by the Imperial Navy Office and the Naval Staff with demands for naval stations in Dakar, on the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands, as well as Malta and Cyprus, which were required to secure the German sea-lanes to South America, Africa and the Pacific.21 The same aims surfaced again in official documents and maps during the Second World War. In them, the Tirpitz tradition lived on.
After the formation of the Triple Entente such aims had become quite dubious, for the German naval programme had, in the meantime, led to a naval arms race with Britain (this assumed the form and the challenge of attempting to keep pace with British naval construction) and at the same time fundamentally altered the international political position of the Reich through Britain’s ententes with Japan (1902), France (1904) and Russia (1907). This was seen as a great diminution in Germany’s power and perceived subjectively as ‘encirclement’. Underlying the latter concept was the sense of being cut off from future development of the nation’s power potential. The financial strains of the naval programme also had the effect of destabilizing rather than stabilizing the domestic political system, for the inevitable financial reform (1909) once again spared the Conservatives while burdening the business classes and the masses.22 After 1905 the Reich attempted, in a number of major crises, to break out of its ‘encirclement’, invariably doing so with an eye to the probable domestic ramifications. Its final endeavour led to the First World War. During these crises the Kaiser repeatedly revealed his own weakness. When he again ‘caved in’ on 28 July 1914 he was pushed aside. In all this, and at the crux of military deliberations from 1908 onwards, there was the anticipated and accepted two-front war with France and Russia. Only the active hostility of the third world power, Britain, remained in doubt.
In the first Moroccan crisis of 1904–5, which was generally regarded in retrospect as the most opportune moment to ‘strike’ because Russia was then preoccupied in East Asia, France stepped back from the brink. Within the Reich, among its political and military leaders, the Social Democratic threat appeared to reach a climax, while at this juncture neither the army (then undergoing a reconversion in armament) nor the navy seemed ready for a great war. Fear of a recrudescence of the revolutionary events of the year 1848 remained dormant but ever-present during the crises of the seventies (the anti-Socialist Law), the eighties (the miners’ strike) and the nineties (the Hamburg dock workers’ strike), reaching a new peak with the great 1905 Ruhr miners’ strike which was taken all the more seriously because the Russian revolution and its bloody clashes were expected to have repercussions within Germany. After Wilhelm II had proclaimed excitedly in the Prussian council of ministers’ meeting of 24 January 1904, ‘I am due revenge for [18]48 – revenge!’,23 by late 1905 it had become clear to the Kaiser that:
That the forces in the German government pressing for utilization of the favourable external situation were unable to assert themselves was due, in part, to the assumed domestic political threat but also, and more importantly, to the technical condition of the German army, which in the realm of field artillery weaponry was then vastly inferior to the French army, its main opponent. In this sense, the German army was, in fact, virtually unfit for active service. What we have here is a classic instance of a political decision being influenced by deficiencies in military technology. This was still more true of the navy, which in 1905 remained incomplete and could therefore not be exposed to a preventive British strike à la Copenhagen in 1807.
In the Bosnian annexation crisis, in which the Dual Alliance was converted, for the first time, from a defensive association into an acquisitive alliance and the entire German Balkan and Near Eastern policy was at risk, Russia backed down because of her weakened condition following the Japanese war and the 1905 revolution, to say nothing of Britain’s manifest lack of interest in her predicament. Even at this point, however, when the monarchical system and its ‘power prestige’ had been severely shaken by the Daily Telegraph affair, the German ‘war party’ already perceived war as the means of scoring a great external success that would impose with a single blow a lasting roll-back on both the liberal-democratic and the Social Democratic movements – in short, of repeating the experiment of 1866. Thus, at any rate, the situation was understood and described by an experienced observer of the German scene, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, Count Nicolai Osten-Sacken:
If the German government were sure of the British neutrality which it coveted, then war would begin at once, wrote Osten-Sacken. Bitterness in conservative and military circles over criticism of Wilhelm II by the Reichstag and parts of the press at the time of the Daily Telegraph affair was certainly mixed with mistrust of the person of the Kaiser in the event of a military crisis. ‘Moltke does not fear the French and the Russians so much as the Kaiser’ (because of his weak nerves), so the Chief of the Military Cabinet, General von Lyncker, reported to the Lord Chamberlain, von Zedlitzsch-Trützschler. Russia’s retreat before the German semi-ultimatum of April 1909 (in respect of the Bosnian annexation question) prevented this problem from coming to a head until July 1914.
In the second Moroccan crisis of 1911 the German government yielded to British intervention on behalf of France (Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech), the more so as its own allies proved uninterested in the matter. However, in the wake of the government’s use of the Pan-Germans for agitational purposes, the excitement and bitterness of nationalist opinion over what was seen to be the humiliating outcome of the crisis were profound and enduring. Now the target of pejorative criticism at home and abroad was not only the government of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg but the person of the emperor as well -Guillaume le timide. Apart from the foreign policy and economic factor (Morocco, Central Africa) comprehending a trial of strength with France, indeed with the Entente, what was also at stake in this crisis was an implicit domestic political calculation on the part of the Wilhelmine ‘power bloc’. Thus on 26 August 1911 the heavy-industry Post saw a war as guaranteeing ‘beside the clarification of our precarious political situation’ an all-important ‘sanitization of many political and social conditions’, while the Armeeblatt wrote in lapidary style, ‘For relations within Germany a grand passage of arms would be not at all a bad thing, even if it means tears and pain for individual families.’26 When, a little later, in January 1912, Social Democracy emerged as the strongest party in the Reichstag, making the coup d’état demanded by the Pan-German Conservatives appear no longer feasible, the anticipated curative internal effects of a war became the focus of still more fervent hopes.
When the surprising collapse of the Reich’s Turkish friend in the first Balkan war (October 1912) unleashed a fresh crisis, Britain warned the Berlin government that it would not stand idly by on this occasion, as it had in 1870, should France be overrun by Germany, because it would then confront a hegemonial power in command of the Continent. But this was the very goal which was expressly and repeatedly endorsed not only by the Kaiser -he pictured himself at the head of the ‘United States of Europe’ – but was seen as self-evident by the military and the widest circles of German bourgeois opinion, many actually regarding it as an existing reality. War was indeed averted by another Russian retreat (as in 1909), but Britain’s unmistakable warning did not produce a change in Germany’s strategic planning or in her general political style: it led only to an intensified armaments build-up – now exclusively military in character – while the deadline for the allegedly inevitable clash was postponed by one and a half years out of concern for the navy. This was the outcome of the so-called ‘war council’ of 8 December 1912,27 to which the Kaiser, excited by the British warning, called his army and navy chiefs. In the Prusso-German Empire, given the position of the military leaders in immediate contact with the monarch, their assessment of the necessity and likelihood of war against two, possibly even three Great Powers carried such weight that the civilian chancellor was in no position to oppose them with political objections, whatever his personal inclination to do so.
There followed what was by 1913 the largest army increase since the creation of the Reich,28 the Prussian War Minister, and hence the political system, having hitherto kept the army numerically relatively small – out of concern for the maintenance of the aristocratic share of the officer corps and the rural component among the other ranks. Furthermore, a propaganda campaign began against Pan-Slavism, against the Slavic flood threatening the Teuton, but also against the French ‘hereditary enemy’. Finally, the Austro-Hungarian ally was restrained until, at the appropriate moment, a Balkan incident should compel it to act in unison with the Reich – in a war in which it had a most important function, namely that of tying down Russian armies until German forces could be thrown against the East.
In the years 1912–14, during which German Near Eastern policy reached its apogee and at once appeared to enter jeopardy, German armaments priority passed from the navy to the army, for it was with the latter, as the great war-scares had made abundantly clear, that the power position of the Reich and the possible outcome of a war were to continue to rest. That is to say, the political fulcrum was transferred from overseas concerns to the bracing of Germany’s Continental position in western, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Yet this by no means signified the renunciation of overseas interests. On the contrary, it was assumed that a victory on the Continent, i.e. the enlargement and consolidation of the Reich’s European base, would also provide a solution to overseas problems – either through the dead-weight of change in this war or by means of a second ‘Punic War’.
Corresponding with the social, economic and military forces within the Reich, this dualism kept in suspense the focal point of German ambitions after the overthrow of France – in the sense of an anti-Western (British) and/or an anti-Eastern (Russian) orientation, a ‘both/and’ in which the historian G. W. Hallgarten professed to see the cause of the over-reaching of German potentialities.
Today it has become fashionable to interpret the origins of the First World War in the July crisis of 1914 as a German death-or-glory gamble born of pessimism and resignation, of ‘fear and desperation’.29 Initiated by Michael Freund, this view has also been extended in continuity to discussions of the origins of the Second World War. Yet it is a construct which finds no support in the sources. Even the Conservatives, who hoped that a war would strengthen the monarchical principle and the existing balance of political forces, acted not from a mood of despair but from the self-awareness of preserving their hereditary position, and hence the prevailing system of domination. Posterity may accuse them of ‘autism’ and inability to learn, but this has scant bearing on the essential facts. To assert that it was an ‘offensively conducted defensive war’ is to adopt the vocabulary of the German Foreign Office of 1919, but a critical historical discipline cannot accept such terminology. (During the First World War the thesis was propounded that Germany had been attacked suddenly and treacherously by a hostile coalition.) Putting aside the ‘preventive war’ question, we may claim as a matter of fact that prior to the First World War war was still regarded as a legitimate instrument of politics. In the words of Zara Steiner, ‘When war was considered it was not thought of in modern terms. Except for a few sensitive observers, military action in the old style was a possible extension of diplomacy.30 A third approach to German policy in the July crisis draws on the theory of the ‘calculated risk’,31 a political science model applicable to crisis diplomacy, such as Kurt Riezler (assistant to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg) presented in his book Prolegomena to a Theory of Politics and to Other Theories (1912) and which the Imperial Chancellor is said to have implemented. And yet in February 1913 during a comparable crisis, when Austria-Hungary was threatening to go to war with Serbia and Montenegro over the question of Albania’s frontiers and Bethmann then wanted to restrain his ally in view of the anticipated reorientation of Britain, the same Bethmann Hollweg called attention to the consequences of such a war. The spokesmen of the peace party in St Petersburg, Sazonov and Kokovtsov, so the chancellor wrote, would be ‘simply swept away by the storm of public opinion if they should attempt to resist it’. Objective analysis revealed ‘that in view of its traditional relations with the Balkan states, it is nearly impossible for Russia to contemplate passively an Austro-Hungarian military action against Serbia without incurring an enormous loss of prestige’.32 Could the same man have ‘forgotten’ this insight one year later? He did not. The difference was that he now believed he had Britain more or less where he wanted her. The answer to the risk question was provided by Jagow’s deputy, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Zimmermann, when he said to Count Hoyos in response to Hoyos’s inquiry regarding the consequences of a warlike action against Serbia, ‘there is a 90 per cent chance that this will mean war with Russia!’33 Where is the risk element here? One might speak of risk if there had been a 10 per cent or a 20 per cent probability of a major war, but if war was 90 per cent certain one can only conclude that the goal was war itself, and war immediately. Thus Szögyény, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, reported to Berchtold on 12 July 1914:
The chancellor’s task was merely to manage the crisis so that national unity was upheld, i.e. by ensuring Social Democratic compliance. In this he succeeded. On 1 August 1914 Admiral von Müller noted in his diary: ‘Atmosphere brilliant, the government has had a lucky hand in being able to depict us as the victims of aggression.’35 Bethmann Hollweg had simply to await the Russian general mobilization, requiring only the ultimatum to St Petersburg in order to be able to ‘stampede’ Social Democracy, as he put it, and make his bid to keep Britain neutral, however briefly. In this he was unsuccessful. By contrast with the wavering moments of the Kaiser and the generals, the chancellor had continued – from 8 December 1912 to 4 August 1914 – to cling firmly to the hope that Britain would move away from the Entente.36 He did so because he believed it possible to influence Grey, via British public opinion and the City, with the notion that Britain’s most dangerous competitors were the USA and Japan rather than Germany. In the 1930s Hitler made the very same attempt to neutralize Britain, which again turned out to be illusory.
The Kaiserreich was not, as portrayed in some of the more recent literature, a ‘polycracy of forces’, each paralysing the other so that political decision-making and activity became impossible.37 W.J. Mommsen, for one, argues from structural-functional premises (supported by Klaus Hildebrand, who also draws on Eckart Kehr’s ‘primacy of domestic politics’ while further availing himself of categories borrowed from traditional diplomatic history) that the Reich was ‘ungovernable’. In this analysis an aggressive war was precluded by the very ‘warps’ in the structure of Wilhelmine Germany: it was impossible by virtue of the ‘polycratic trait in the political chaos of the Bethmann Hollweg era’. In reality, there did indeed exist at the summit of the Reich a degree of collaboration between political and military leaders, embracing propagandist and psychological as well as financial and economic preparations for war. A clear decision was made to secure and extend its European base although, with a view to Britain, the timetable, tactics and line of march might vary. And this decision was taken not from a purely military standpoint to secure a Great Power’s ‘freedom of action’ because in 1916–17 French and Russian counter-measures would be complete; it was made from a long-term power-political, economic and domestic political perspective.
The unity of military, political and economic motives is especially clear in the vindication of the ‘inevitability’ of the ‘imminent’ war against ‘contemporary France’, whose destruction was of crucial importance to supporters of both the western and eastern orientations in German imperialism. German industry was annoyed at French resistance to its ‘pénétration pacifique’. Both before and during the war, it considered the ore-basin of Longwy-Briey as the objective that must be acquired.38 The Kaiser, the Imperial government and the interest groups were embittered that France, of all the powers, should have had the temerity to oppose German economic and political expansion in Turkey. Particularly apposite in this respect is the description given by the Belgian envoy Baron Beyens (after an interview in October 1913 in which the Kaiser and Moltke sought to obtain from King Albert permission for German troops to pass through Belgium) to what he regarded as the ‘real’ reasons for the bellicose attitude of the Germans:
And only two months later, in January 1914, the chancellor repeated such ideas in a conversation with the French ambassador Cambon when he protested against France’s obstruction of German policy in Turkey with the aid of her ‘financial weapon’:
The Social Darwinism manifest in this statement of the German chancellor, reflecting the way of thinking of his acolyte Kurt Riezler, can be found a hundred times over in the political publications of the era. Part of its stock in trade was the idea of the ineluctable biological and economic growth of the Reich. Another aspect was the notion of the biological degeneration and economic decline of France. Yet another ingredient was the image of the biological and future economic rise of Russia. Social Darwinist ideas – whatever one might nowadays sometimes read to the contrary – were therefore by no means peculiar to Hitler. In this respect the latter was, in fact, very much a product of the pre-First World War era, as indeed he was in other respects too – for example, in regard to the idea of the inevitable racial struggle between Slav and Teuton and the concept of Lebensraum, which was already in common use before the First World War. All these ideas had a currency that was by no means confined to the Pan-German movement.
Berlin’s misjudgement of British policy was but one of many illusions afflicting the Imperial government in July 1914,41 even if it was undoubtedly the most momentous of these. Perhaps the German vision had become so clouded by Social Darwinism that the Reich leaders failed to recognize that what was at stake in 1914 was the ‘whole great problem of the European balance’. As a Swiss observer noted as early as 9 September 1914 in relation to Britain’s attitude, this war was about ‘nothing less than the hegemony of one power in Europe, and hence also a question of influence in the Mediterranean, the future of the great colonies of Africa and supremacy over all Asia Minor. Britain was fully conscious of all this; she knew that Germany’s triumph would mean her diminution, possibly her ruin.’42 Out of these considerations, and not for the sake of Belgium or because of secret military obligations, Britain immediately entered the great conflict. This view of the struggle as a global one is reinforced, on the German side, by Kurt Riezler’s interpretation of August 1916, well before the USA entered the war. From the German viewpoint, the ‘threefold purpose’ of the war was ‘defence against present-day France, preventive war against the Russia of the future (as such, too late), struggle with Britain for world domination.43 The concept of ‘world domination’, in the specific sense of conflict with Britain for world hegemony, seems to find retrospective corroboration in an address which General Groener delivered to officers of the Army Supreme Command (OHL) in May 1919. Groener condemned what he called the ‘unconscious attempt to challenge Britain for mastery of the world’ as premature and inadequately prepared and therefore ‘bound to fail’ because it had been undertaken before ‘we had secured our Continental position’.44 (In his opinion, as his reference to Schlieffen indicates, this should obviously have occurred no later than 1905.) It appears significant that Kurt Riezler used the expression ‘world domination’ as early as 21 August 1914, when the German Mitteleuropa plan was beginning to take shape.45 Similarly, in December 1915 the German envoy in Copenhagen, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, later the ambassador in Moscow during the 1920s, forecast as the result of Germany’s revolutionization of Russia that victory in the war would go to the Reich and its ‘prize’ would be ‘the first place in the world’.46 Even if the concept of ‘world domination’ should certainly not be over-valued, it is nevertheless not methodologically possible to attribute exclusively to Hitler a 1914–18 concept that is associated with a clearly delineated ideation.
The German military leaders’ confidence in victory was based on the Moltke-Schlieffen doctrine of the short war, in accordance with the tradition of the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870.47 It was dominated by the pre-eminence of operational thought over a realistic assessment of the numerical strength and resources of the opponent and of one’s own long-term potentialities. This mode of thought was still characteristic of the German military in 1941. In 1914 it held that the Reich could triumph over superior odds because:
(1)it had the better strategy. In 1905 Schlieffen believed the Grand General Staff to be in possession of the ‘secret of victory’;
(2)it was superior in leadership, training, tactics and weapons;
(3)its troops had the higher morale. It was thus a question of making use of the moment when the Reich seemed relatively strong, its opponents relatively unprepared.