If the war which began on 1 August 1914 had proceeded as planned, namely as a ‘short but violent tempest’48 destroying France and Russia, each in six weeks, then the domestic political system would have been stabilized, in accord with Conservative expectations, in the interest of the ruling elites of crown, military, landed aristocracy, industry and bureaucracy. For an indefinite future Social Democracy would have sunk to a negligible quantity or, by recognizing the military state, i.e. the privileged position of the army within the state, have been transformed into a malleable or conformist party, as desired, for example, by the ‘liberal imperialists’.
Externally, the Entente would have been dissolved, thus achieving, as was generally anticipated, a fundamental revolution in European and global power relations. Indeed, this is what lay behind Bethmann Hollweg’s so-called ‘September programme’ (as it is now known), itself drafted in the shadow of an impending military setback. As the ‘general aim of the war’ the Imperial Chancellor envisaged the provision of ‘security for the German Empire to the west and the east for the conceivable future. To this end, France must be so weakened that it can never rise again as a Great Power, Russia must be pushed back from the German frontier as far as possible and its rule over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.’49 This meant two things. In the first place, it entailed the elimination of France as a Great Power – militarily, economically, financially – and its incorporation, together with Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, into a Mitteleuropa economic system dominated by German interests.50 Mitteleuropa was to embrace Austria-Hungary, a Poland severed from Russia, and possibly other neighbouring states (including Rumania) as well. This objective was retained throughout the entire war, even though the course of the war precluded, for the duration, the incorporation of France from being pursued more actively. Recent research has revealed that this aim of a Pan-European market was prosecuted primarily by chemical and electrical industry, more generally by export-oriented industries. It could have been realized only in the face of opposition from agrarian and heavy-industry interests which were more interested in direct annexations and in upholding a possibly modified protective tariff system. Inherent in the Mitteleuropa endeavours, which continued to be pursued in numerous conferences until the autumn of 1918, was a revival of the ideas of Caprivi and the neo-mercantilists around the turn of the century, as were deliberations, such as those of Walther Rathenau, dating from the immediate prewar years. At the root of such endeavours lay a conception of world economic development that was inimical to the free-trade tradition. At the same time, moreover, German policy and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg personally – in case Britain, too, should be defeated – in October 1914 also planned to compel Britain by treaty to abide by her free-trade system and not to adopt protectionism, an eventuality long feared by the Germans. Apart from the French market, the Russian, too, was to be opened to German industry by a peace treaty that would impose on the Russians a long-term trade agreement (going well beyond the 1904 treaty which was already so abhorred in Russia) fixing Russian industrial tariffs at a low level. But in spite of such commercial clutching at Britain and overseas, and towards Russia, the economic consolidation of Central Europe remained the basis of German policy. In 1915, in the context of the Mitteleuropa conferences, a high official in the Prussian Ministry for Agriculture, State Lands and Forestries named von Falkenhausen gave expression to the global perspective of the German Mitteleuropa programme. He described it as being:
This aim was formulated, also in 1915, still more drastically by Schoenebeck, assistant to the Vice Chancellor and Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Clemens von Delbrück, who in his portfolio performed the actual function of an Imperial Economics Minister: it was ‘to create a great Central European economic unit that will enable us to maintain our place in the economic struggle for existence among the peoples and prevent us from sinking into economic impotence in the face of the growing solidarity and burgeoning might of the economic superpowers – Great Britain with her colonies, the United States, Russia, Japan with China’.
The ‘general aim of the war’ was, in the second place, to drive Russia eastwards and to cripple her permanently by separating her ‘non-Russian vassal peoples’ from her.51 As early as 6 August 1914 the German Imperial Chancellor, von Bethmann Hollweg, personally described the object of the war as ‘the liberation and military protection of the peoples (Stämme) oppressed by Russia, the repulse of Russian despotism back to Moscow’. By the outbreak of war the Caucasus and Finland and, above all, Poland and the Ukraine had already appeared in the files of the Foreign Office and the Imperial Chancellery. On 11 August 1914 Bethmann Hollweg and Foreign Secretary von Jagow emphasized to von Tschirschky, the German ambassador in Vienna, how very important it was that insurgency be promoted in the Ukraine, no less than in Poland – partly as a weapon in the struggle with Russia, and partly because, if the war went well, this would facilitate the creation of buffer states between Russia and Germany or Austria-Hungary, such states being desirable as means of relieving the pressure of the Russian colossus on western Europe and driving Russia as far as possible to the east. As early as mid-August 1914 the Foreign Office therefore began to support the ‘League for the Liberation of the Ukraine’, a group of Ukrainian emigrants of a social revolutionary disposition. In like manner the Uniate Church and its archbishop in Lemberg were recruited and supported for liberationist agitation. The Viennese government also saw as its ‘principal objective the greatest possible weakening of Russia’ and hence ‘the liberation of the Ukraine and other adjacent peoples oppressed by Russia … through the foundation of an independent Ukrainian state’. For the rest, Jagow’s greatest worry in August 1914 was how a revived Poland was to be prevented from becoming a crown possession of Austria-Hungary and to be bound to Prussia-Germany instead, as was to happen to Belgium in the west. This remained a bone of contention between the two allies until the end of the war. In this context, the Army Supreme Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff (the third OHL) even envisaged a future war with the Habsburg Empire if Poland should fall to Austria-Hungary because this empire would then have become a Slavic state, clamping an eastern vice on Prussia-Germany. The idea of liberating the non-Russian nationalities was Bethmann Hollweg’s most individual conception, a marked contrast with the annexationist paroxysm of the Pan-Germans. On 1 September 1914 the Baltic German Johannes Haller, professor of history at Tübingen and influential during the Weimar Republic because of his book The Epochs of German History, recorded his agreement with the aims of the Imperial government:
We must compel Russia to cede these territories, for ‘then at last’, said Haller, ‘will be lifted from us the incubus under which even Frederick the Great sighed’. Here Haller employed the expression ‘incubus’ to be ‘lifted from us’ which Bethmann Hollweg and Jagow used again and again during the war when vindicating their persistently espoused policy of disjoining border states.53 In 1915 and 1916 Bethmann Hollweg repeatedly proclaimed the same goal in public speeches in the Reichstag, announcing it as a political and moral duty of Germany to ‘liberate’ from the Muscovite yoke the non-Russian nationalities. He did so, in part, with an eye to US President Wilson and British liberal public opinion. Here he could count on the concurrence of the German left liberals, the Catholics and part of the Social Democrats, while the Conservatives, like the OHL, showed greater interest in direct annexations, such as the so-called ‘Polish frontier strip’, and in Courland and Livonia. This idea of weakening Russia by detaching the non-Russian nationalities was something Bethmann Hollweg had inherited from his grandfather, Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg, who had publicly championed it in the Preussisches Wochenblatt during the Crimean War, when he sought to lead Prussia to the side of Britain and France against Russia. With the object of reminding the grandson of his ‘commission’, the Pan-Germans published the substance of these essays in 1915.54 When, on 23 January 1918, Jagow’s second successor Kühlmann presented to the Reichstag party leaders a defence of the third OHL’s eastern policy, which culminated in the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, as the continuation of the policy introduced by Bethmann Hollweg, he was thoroughly justified in so doing.55 The fulfilment of this 1914 objective, briefly realized in 1918, would have effectively moved the German military frontier far to the east, setting up a virtual glacis of satellite states that would have been fully comparable with the belt of states now dominated by the Soviet Union (including the Baltic states recovered by her in 1940). The German system would have differed only in direction and scale, as it would also have incorporated the Ottoman Empire in addition to the Ukraine and the Caucasus. This continuously pursued (against the ‘Russian colossus’) aim of 1914 or 1914–18 should deter us from attributing authorship of such ideas, and the repeatedly quoted passage on the drive to the east, to the writer of a book penned ten years later, Adolf Hitler. Particularly should it give pause to those who trace the decision of June 1941 back to this book.
In August 1914 the war ran not only, as expected, against France and Russia but also, and contrary to expectations, against Britain. And so the principal currents of German imperialism – the older overseas tendency and the more recent but invariably present, in however dormant a form, Continental stream – met in head-on collision. For Bethmann Hollweg, Jagow and Moltke, Russia was the main enemy. Since victory over France was the precondition for the clash with Russia, France was to be treated with relative mildness. Bethmann Hollweg’s idea was to form, together with France and Britain, a West European ‘cultural bloc’ against Russia.56 This was opposed by Tirpitz and the economic interests allied with him.57 In their estimate, Britain was the principal foe of the German Empire, and for this reason Tirpitz regarded the possession of the channel coastline as the ultimate objective in the west. The same view was held by Krupp, who believed, contrary to all historical experience, ‘we would here be at the spinal cord of British world supremacy, a position, perhaps the only position, that could bring us lasting amity with Britain’.58 Following the collapse of all hopes of British neutrality, or that Britain might wage a mere ‘phoney war’, the Imperial Chancellor came to see the war against Britain as a bitter necessity. In his Reichstag speech of 4 August 1914 he had declared Russia chiefly responsible for the war; in December 1914 he hurled at Britain the charge of being its main instigator, thereby fanning the flames of popular Anglophobia in Germany, already ablaze because of the alleged ‘racial treason’ of the Anglo-Saxons. Tirpitz’s attitude was determined primarily by naval considerations. These inclined him to see the present war as deciding matters of ‘global industrial and commercial power’ even though the German navy was not yet technically prepared for a struggle of this magnitude. Thus originated the conflict between Bethmann Hollweg and Tirpitz. While the chancellor held back the uncompleted navy, with initial concurrence from Tirpitz, so that ‘Britain cannot deprive us of the fruits of our victories over France and Russia’,59 Tirpitz was worried that the army might, in its triumphal progress, decide the war by itself and that for want of naval successes the nation might lose interest in the futher development of the navy after the peace. On 30 August 1914 the Secretary of State for the Navy therefore urged that the fleet be sent into action so that, as he put it, the navy might at least have fought gloriously, if not victoriously. Only in this way would it begin to dawn on the nation that ‘we must have a fleet of equal strength to the Royal Navy, although this natural and singular goal could not be articulated during the last two decades’.60 In this way Tirpitz revealed, if only to close colleagues, his true long-range objective. Bethmann Hollweg prevented the immediate use of the High Seas Fleet in order to have it on hand as a bargaining chip at the peace table, especially since he hoped to be able, with the aid of the ‘war levy’ to be squeezed from France, to expand the navy to the appropriate level, in case it should come to this, for the current war or for a ‘Second Punic War’. What the antagonism between Bethmann Hollweg and Tirpitz revealed was the existence of contrasting options within German policy as well as divergent assessments of the bases of a future German world-power position. Yet the navy was unable to fulfill the expectations held of it or the promises which it made. The subsequent Reich Chancellor Hitler undoubtedly belonged in the tradition of Bethmann Hollweg, Moltke and later Ludendorff. By comparison with their concentration on the Continent, the Tirpitz tradition supported by the navy and Raeder was able to maintain itself only as a ‘second eleven’ that would be brought into play only after the destruction of Russia.
Everything assumed a different aspect after the lost battle of the Marne and the heavy defeat of the Austrians in Galicia. The expectations of the ‘fruits’ of victory over France and Russia collapsed with the failure of the German attack before Paris in mid-September 1914, to be finally abandoned with the failure of the German offensives in Flanders, at Langemarck. It is open to question whether the idea of eliminating France with one blow was a realistic one. Even if the question is answered in the negative, the crucial facts are that the German military and political leaders considered it possible and that both the outcome of the entire war and the realization of German war aims were dependent on this decision. Also worthy of consideration is the fact that it was a war of coalitions after the London Agreement of 5 September 1914 converted the loose Entente into a wartime alliance precluding a separate peace. It should further be borne in mind that the real resources of the Allies exceeded those of the Germans, particularly if Italy and the USA were counted as being in the enemy camp, which the Germans did not reckon with prior to 1914 because the one was regarded as an ally while the other was deemed a friendly neutral. Soviet research sees this as the factor which ultimately decided the war. For the purposes of this investigation, however, we are concerned exclusively with German expectations and the German image of war prior to the outbreak of the conflict. It is true, no doubt, that a line of continuity can nevertheless be traced to the Second World War in that here, under very similar circumstances, the problem of these decisive military factors again presented itself.
In the autumn of 1914 the new Chief of the General Staff-cum-War Minister Falkenhayn told the Reichstag deputy Erzberger that after the battle of the Marne the war was ‘actually lost’.61 In early December, in a discussion with the Imperial Chancellor, he called the German army ‘a ruined instrument’. In fact, the army had lost 50 per cent of its complement and, following its heavy losses in the officer corps and cadres, was effectively recast as a ‘militia army’, as the official history of the First World War edited by the Imperial Archives noted at the close of 1914. With each passing day, the war conceived as a ‘Blitzkrieg’ and designed to last for two campaigns turned into a war of attrition in which the limits of German material and manpower resources began to tell. This transformation was not made known to the German people, overwhelmed as it was by the euphoria of the outbreak of the war and the initial successes in Belgium and France, by Tannenberg and U-boat 9. Indeed, the change was deliberately concealed through manipulation of military bulletins and by the Imperial Chancellor’s decision, taken against the conviction of Falkenhayn, to allow no public reference to it for fear of precipitating a collapse in the morale of the German people. If at this juncture, as Karl Heinz Janssen maintains, the war was objectively lost, the point was not grasped even by those Germans at the head of public affairs, or if they did see the truth they were unwilling to draw the appropriate inferences. In reality, such an admission and its consequences might well have resulted in the collapse of the political system from within. What happened, on the contrary, was that the war-aims demands (dating from the very first days of the war) of politicians and interest groups, the Pan-German League among them, and despite the ban on public discussion of this matter, reached a peak in the summer of 1915 in the memorials of the six economic interest groups and in the so-called petitions of the intellectuals. From 1915 to 1917 the German professoriate, whose numerous publications had provided the war with a rationale in the ‘ideas of 1914’,62 having denounced Russian despotism and (still more shrilly) the Jacobin and commercial West, and having embraced even Prusso-German ‘militarism’ against the charges of world opinion over the Belgian ‘atrocities’, now in their vast majority espoused the most far-reaching war aims of all.
All this transcended personalities. Analysis of the war-aims programmes jointly developed by the two pillars of the conservative Prusso-German system, industry and agriculture,63 reveals the dualism of the cast of mind and the specific interests of these dominant groups. The representatives of industry, people like Krupp, Stinnes, Thyssen, Hugenberg, Roetger and their parliamentary lobby in the Reichstag and the Prussian diet, men such as Erzberger, Stresemann and Bassermann, vied with one another in securing the desired gains – in France through annexation of Longwy-Briey and the acquisition of the whole of the French market, in Luxembourg and Belgium, in the Ukraine and the Transcaucasus, in Rumania, in what was to be left of Russia, as well as in Turkey and, not least, in the anticipated additional colonial acquisitions. To agriculture, in return, they were prepared to concede large tracts of eastern Europe. The ‘Polish frontier strip’, Lithuania, Courland, Livonia, Estonia and possibly White Russia were to be dominated by the Reich either indirectly or by means of direct annexation. Both in a trade treaty to be imposed on a defeated Russia and in the treaties with an independent Poland and Lithuania the unrestricted admission of seasonal rural labour formed an important provision. Added to this was the duty-free admission of German manufactures to the whole of the territory of each respective country, together with the unhindered export of raw materials from each. Moreover, ‘internal colonisation’, believed to be a threat to the great estates, was to be diverted to the eastern forefield of the Reich through the acquisition of land for the voluntary resettlement of small farmers and war veterans. This was to yield the additional advantage of simultaneously broadening that ‘state-preserving’ and prolific class which might serve as a counterweight to urbanization and to the inevitable growth in the industrial workforce as industrialization advanced. Leading experts in German agricultural science and in eastern migration were engaged to realize plans for new ‘living-space’ in the north-east, in ‘New Germany’ as it was then called. The Ukraine, too, was considered as an important potential supplier of raw materials for industry, indicating that Hitler’s utterance to Carl Burckhardt in 1939, ‘I must have the Ukraine’, was again anything but a novel idea. Furthermore, even during the First World War the Lebensraum plans were also a goal of Imperial policy (in 1919, under changed circumstances, they were still being pursued in Latvia by August Winnig and still kept alive by the ‘Baltic volunteers’ after their return); they were therefore not at all an original invention of Hitler’s. Certainly, there was, as yet, no talk of subjugating the Russians as helots. Yet they were feared by virtue of their numerical superiority, although they were considered still undeveloped (by Moltke, for example) and the Estonians and Latvians were defamed (by Otto Dibelius) as ‘indolent and uncivilised’. A pinnacle of German cultural interest was the reopening of Dorpat University as a German university as early as September 1918. A Germanizing of both these territories appeared possible.64 The feasibility of such ideas may seem doubtful; their political wisdom, still more so.
Here there is a discernible gulf between illusion and reality, a continuity of error pointing back to Wilhelmine ‘world policy’.65 Even the decision in favour of unrestricted U-boat warfare, in which it fell to the Centre to occupy the key position in the parliamentary discussion, and during which the entry of the USA into the war was intentionally risked, was characterized by a crass underestimation of the possible military strength of this power, and still more of its political and economic clout – a miscalculation which found its analogue in the Second World War. The voices of luminaries of German historical and philological scholarship, such as Eduard Meyer and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, vied in this regard with spokesmen of the army and navy over the efficacy of the U-boat and the repercussions of a possible American entry into the war, which was finally to decide the war against Germany. Thus, with typical grandiloquence, Hindenburg was able to say, ‘we are armed against all eventualities, against America, Denmark, Holland and even against Switzerland’. Tir-pitz’s successor Capelle asserted that American troop transports would be sunk by German U-boats: ‘So, militarily, America amounts to zero, a complete and absolute nothing, a less than nothing!’66
The miscarriage of the war plan in September and its final bankruptcy in November 1914 meant strategically the continuation of the struggle as a ‘war of stopgap measures’ and, in foreign policy terms, the attempt to conclude a separate peace either with France or with Russia. The latter was demanded by Falkenhayn, also at the insistence of Tirpitz. That meant attempting to terminate the struggle with one side in order to be able, at the very least, to force a victorious and dictated peace on the other. The Imperial Chancellor explained:
This had nothing whatever to do with an abstract desire for peace. Indeed, just as the Belgian question stood in the way of a settlement with France, even in the case of Russia the so-called security-frontier strip objective (Poland and the ‘liberation’ of the non-Russian nationalities) stood in the way of bids for a separate peace, in so far as the matter depended on Germany. In any event, as already noted, the Entente had meanwhile become a wartime coalition which forbade a separate peace.
With the foundering of German military operations in September and November 1914 began the war of attrition that was to go on for another four long years – the ‘world war’ mirrored in the schoolbooks and subsequently analysed as the model of future wars. In military terms, what now commenced was a positional war or war of materiel. Hence the stepped-up production in war industries, the introduction of wartime controls on raw materials and foodstuffs, and state direction of production and the labour market. In a word, there now materialized what was known as ‘war socialism’, with its numerous semi-governmental war corporations going well beyond prewar moves towards the ‘interventionist state’. This wartime supply system was enormously broad in its ramifications and begat a prodigious quasi-governmental bureaucracy which proved ultimately constricting to business and, in particular, to farmers, while providing little benefit to the bulk of the population. Yet these were improvisations conceived in a state of emergency and did not alter the system, i.e. the entrepreneurial system of private capitalism, especially since the latter found its security protected by the traditionalist authoritarian state. In contrast with the interpretations of Kocka and Zunkel, which suggest that such changes were of a structural nature, 68 I would emphasize the persistence factor. Entrepreneurs’ relative dissatisfaction with the state should not be equated with a general readiness to change the system, for this did not exist. Widely discussed plans for a ‘social economy’ must therefore not be over-estimated. Industry and commerce both pressed for this quasi-governmental system of war corporations to be dismantled as quickly as possible, perhaps after a brief period of ‘transitional economy’. If this system tended to strengthen revolutionary proclivities within the workforce, it is highly improbable that these would have amounted to anything but for the impending defeat and finally the plea for an armistice, particularly since the authorities succeeded in diverting part of the unrest against ‘war profiteers’, in which process anti-Semitism was used as a manipulative device.
As early as 1914 and 1915 the unexpectedly long duration of the war led to at least verbal concessions to labour in the form of the so-called ‘new-orientation’. As an expression of the future political hopes thus aroused, one might consider the symposium edited by Friedrich Thimme and Carl Legien, Labour in the New Germany,69 in which social reformist professors, representatives of the right wing of Social Democracy and trade-union spokesmen proffered their political suggestions. Yet even this moderate and relatively modest proclamation of postwar co-operation between labour and the state, promising also a continuation of social welfare policies, created alarm in conservative quarters and strengthened their opposition to the Bethmann Hollweg government.
The appointment of the third OHL of Hindenburg and Ludendorff during the great crisis of the war in 1916 (the battles of Verdun and the Somme) led to the attempt to effect a total mobilization of all manpower and economic resources, providing the prototype for the twenties’ and thirties’ theory of ‘total war’. This latest phase in war leadership revealed an army-labour partnership of such intensity and hitherto unknown intimacy, transcending the organization of the war economy in the so-called Hindenburg programme, as to include even deliberate psychological influencing of the masses (for instance, the introduction of patriotic instruction at the front in 1917, and the recourse to so-called home propaganda). In the implementation of this programme concessions were made to the trade unions (in their capacity as guarantors of the loyalty of the masses) through the introduction, in late 1916, of the so-called auxiliary service law which greatly strengthened the trade unions’ legal position.70 This tactical concession dictated by the requirements of war was regarded by the more authoritarian element in industry as much too generous and dangerously close to being irreversible. The auxiliary service law was in part resisted and in part evaded. Looking back in 1932, and speaking on behalf of many, a heavy-industry spokesman could still say that Germany’s misfortune had begun in November 1916 with the recognition of the legal position of the trade unions and that this situation could be rectified only through their destruction – which soon followed.
By comparison with such social-policy measures, the general political concessions of the spring and summer of 1917 (such as the promise, made under the impression of the February Revolution in Russia, to abolish the three-class suffrage in Prussia) naturally appeared far more alarming still. In reaction to them, the growing consolidation of the diehard borussisch authoritarian camp led not only to the fall of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg but disclosed qualitatively new forms of mass mobilization on the right. The struggle between supporters of a ‘victor’s peace and those of a ‘compromise peace’ now became synonymous with a struggle between the supporters of the existing system and the weaker group of reformists. The ‘Fatherland Party’ founded in autumn 1917 in response to the majority parties’ ‘peace resolution’ already revealed unmistakably ‘pre-fascist’ traits in the sense of an extra-parliamentary ‘Sammlung’ (consensus) and non-partisan ‘unity party’. Its object was to provide a plebiscitary basis to the de facto dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. With over a million members, mostly from the lower middle classes, it overtook the mass party of Social Democracy and attempted to penetrate the workforce by founding workers’ committees in order to form a counterweight to ‘Marxism’, to Social Democracy and the Free (socialist) Trade Unions. At the head of one such committee (‘for a good German peace’) in Munich was Anton Drexler, the subsequent founder of the ‘German Worker’s Party’, which gave birth to the NSDAP or Nazi Party. In common with the older Pan-German League, the Fatherland Party was not in principle anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitic propaganda became a definite admixture to its agitation in the countryside and among the industrial workforce. Yet it never managed to win a significant following among the urban workers. Compared with the later Hitler movement, the Fatherland Party as a new movement remained fixed on an older model; its leadership was recruited predominantly from the traditional upper strata, with a high proportion of Protestant clergy; its political norms were still cast in the mould of the traditionalist authoritarian state; and it made no use, as Hitler did, of the manipulative appeal of anti-capitalist agitation. In the realm of foreign policy, the programme of the Fatherland Party once again signalled unbroken adherence to the now familiar aims in both the east and the west.
Following the October Revolution in Russia, to which the German government’s policy of fostering revolution had contributed significantly (Lenin’s ‘sealed train’, for example), the peace settlements with Russia and the Ukraine at Brest-Litovsk and the peace with Rumania at Bucharest gave Germany that objective in the east which had been aspired to since 1914. If Ludendorff prized the Ukraine primarily as a means of securing the supply of raw materials and foodstuffs so that the war in the west might be brought to a successful conclusion and the British world empire then tackled in earnest, in the eyes of the Foreign Office, the Imperial Ministry for Commerce and the economy generally the Ukraine and the Caucasus were part of that bordering-states policy whose object was to weaken Russia permanently and to bolster the economic basis of the German Empire in the long term.71 For this reason the German leaders assembled on the spot a group of prominent experts who, in collaboration with General Groener, were to develop the Ukraine into an independent allied state or into a ‘spring board’ from which an all-Russian confederation might be penetrated. Via Skoropadsky, the man appointed hetman of the Ukraine, who became a co-founder of the Völkischer Beobachter in Munich after the war, this eastern policy was passed on directly to Hitler, who in 1926, in the second volume of his book Mein Kampf, proclaimed the goal of reacquiring the Ukraine, and in 1941 he actually realized it for a time.
The OHL’s decision in the spring of 1918, after Russia left the war, to try for victory in the west through a last great offensive reawakened the most extravagant expectations in the whole of bourgeois Germany during the months of March to May 1918. Had this offensive succeeded, all the evidence suggests that the war aims laid down in 1914 for Continental Western and Central Europe would have been implemented, and the Western Powers and America would have been compelled to accept the power position gained by the Reich in the east. Consideration for the masses now seemed no longer necessary.72 The National Liberals walked out of the Reichstag’s inter-party parliamentary committee, Stresemann declaring, ‘Never has our policy been more favourably situated than at present. We are poised to strike the final blow.’ On 2 May 1918 the two Conservative parties in the Prussian House of Representatives, possessing a majority by virtue of the three-class suffrage, defeated the government’s bill (and thus also the publicly avowed will of their king and emperor) to introduce the equal suffrage, and the party leader von Heydebrand openly stated that it was a question of power, rejecting electoral equality as unacceptable because ‘the decisive importance of the undifferentiated masses, especially the labourers of the cities and the industrial centres’, would then be anchored in law. What would happen if 120 to 130 Social Democrats got into the House of Representatives was: taxes would be fixed by the propertyless classes and the propertied would have to pay them. As later on in 1945, faith in miracle weapons became common, and again there was talk of ‘world domination’. To combat foreign propaganda and the exhausting effects of the war, a massive propaganda campaign was launched at the front and at home. This was not, it is true, co-ordinated, as Ludendorff demanded, by an ‘Imperial Office for Public Enlightenment’ that would have been comparable to the subsequent Goebbels ministry of 1933, but a comprehensive ‘Central Office for Publicity and Public Instruction’ was set up, under Ludendorff’s political counsellor von Haeften, for this purpose. As in 1914 and 1915, so it was again in 1917 and 1918 the Protestant churches and their representatives who stood in the firing line of this campaign. Thus Otto Dibelius on the question of peace in 1918: ‘The answer is no! Not renunciation and accommodation but utilisation of our power to the utmost – this is the challenge of Christianity, the peace terms that it demands of us German Christians.’ After hailing, affirmatively, the peace of Brest-Litovsk as a truce of God, Dibelius said the following during a sermon intended to strengthen confidence for the spring offensive: ‘What God has begun he also completes; he does nothing by half. Confidently, we look toward the impending consummation in the west; and it seems to us to be a sacrilege not to trust in God to provide this consummation.’ How was a society stamped by such thinking to come to terms with the defeat of 1918? This was repressed and attributed to the failure of the people to fulfil God’s commission to the Germans. In October 1918 Protestant theologians were the first to formulate, against the cabinet of Prince Max of Baden, the ‘stab in the back legend’ and to proclaim it as a case of the fighting troops being let down by the home front.73
This notion is a crass distortion of historical truth, for it was not the ‘collapse’ which followed the revolution but the revolution which was a result of the defeat. What it overlooked was that the allies of Germany – Turkey, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary – had collapsed well before the internal disorders in the Reich and had granted the Entente the right to pass through their countries. It was equally overlooked that the American army was growing stronger every month while the manpower and material resources of the Reich were exhausted. To have been cheated of victory by traitors! Here was a notion that was to have world-historical consequences through its impact on the ideas of Hitler: it became his trauma. But only because he shared it with millions was he later able, by promising that there would never again be a repetition of 9 November 1918, to seduce and fanaticize these millions. Yet the primary question facing the historian is not the individual and social psychology of this trauma but who invented the stab-in-the-back legend which gave rise to the trauma, who derived benefit from it, and by whom it was disseminated. It was the pillars of the Kaiserreich (the army, bureaucracy, industry, the churches and universities) who, with the aid of the press, sermons, memoirs, lawsuits on trumped-up issues and the historical profession (particularly official historiography), created this legend in order to distract attention from the locus of responsibility for the war and the military defeat, and to place the burden of these on Jews and Social Democrats. In October 1918 the chairman of the Pan-German League, Class, called for a ‘spirited nationalist party’ to wage a ‘resolute struggle against Jewry’, against whom the ‘legitimate anger of the people must be diverted’.74 In this manner such groups proposed to rescue their position in state and society and to slander the republic as one of ‘November criminals’, and in this they succeeded. In a similar manner a twenty-year campaign was directed against the so-called ‘war-guilt lie’, which prevented a rational and critical study of the roots of German prewar and wartime policy, rendering impossible the inevitable distancing of the republic from the Kaiserreich.
It was a no less gross misrepresentation of the historical facts when in late November 1918 the then Major Beck, later Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff and a major promoter of German rearmament, spoke of the ‘cowardly’ attack by the revolution against the rear of the fighting forces ‘during the most difficult moment of the war’ – as if the war might still have been won. What also played a part here was shock at the realization that the political status of the officer corps had been severely shaken, undermining the position of an Imperial elite which regarded itself as the core of the Prusso-German state. To von Manstein, later one of Hitler’s field marshals, the events of the revolution appeared as the end of the world’.75 This reaction to the Kaiser’s abdication and flight demonstrates that the domestic transformation that began as a consequence of defeat was perceived as being far more drastic and threatening than defeat itself. Not the least of the reasons why this was driven from the conscious mind was the determination to conserve the prestige of the officer corps and the General Staff, together with the myth of the state tradition and all the imponderables associated with the ideal of the military state. But even here the disenchantment occasioned by the outcome of the war could gain expression in harsh criticism of the person of the monarch and of the German people. Thus Vice Admiral Hopmann wrote on 6 October 1918:
However, Hopmann’s hope that German political life would in future exhibit greater maturity was not to be fulfilled.
The armistice and the Versailles Treaty, together with their repercussions, were simply blamed on the weakness of the Weimar Republic rather than recognized as the result of the politics of Imperial Germany and the lost war.