Berlin, September 25, 1919

Count Bernstorff, former German Ambassador in Washington, called upon me on Monday afternoon. He was looking well. He said he had enjoyed his nearly three months’ vacation in the country. He had left Berlin on the last day of June, after his party, the so-called National Democrats, had split upon the question of signing the Peace Treaty. He said to me that he, himself, had been in favor of signing, but as the majority of his party voted against it, he felt he could not accept the post of Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office which had been offered to him at the time. Bernstorff said that he was present at the recent caucus of the Democrats in the Parliament building, several days before our interview, and that he had successfully urged his party to accept the offer of the Ebert administration, that is, they were to support the present government (the Majority Socialist) and in return the Democratic party was to have three men in the Cabinet, that is, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Transportation, and one Minister without portfolio. While this deal was in progress, Bernstorff told me that he had been offered once again the position of Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office, but the condition with which it was saddled had proved unacceptable. He was willing to serve in the Foreign Office, but he wished also to be permitted to run for the National Assembly at the approaching elections upon the Democratic ticket. He had not heard definitely, but was inclined to think that President Ebert did not see his way to allowing him to serve both in the Assembly, as a party leader, and in the Foreign Office as a government official. It was quite evident from much that he said and much that he left unsaid that Count Bernstorff regards himself as a political possibility of the greatest importance in Germany. I was also struck with the fact that the Germans of all political colorings with whom I have spoken since my arrival here were inclined to think that if his advice from Washington had been followed, the Empire would not have gone down in the great disaster by which the Reich is now involved.

He said, “Of course I do not have to tell you that our situation politically as well as economically is very critical. What should be most emphasized, particularly to an American inquirer, is the question of raw materials. If we get the raw materials and the present administration secures a little moral support or even merely countenance from America, as against our reactionary and radical opponents, we may pull through. I say ‘pull through/ but only and always if the winter is a mild one and we can manage to get along with the coal that is in sight or available to us now after the various annexations have been put through. But if we have a severe winter, I am afraid nothing can save the government of the day, which will be made responsible for the weather as well as for so many other untoward events which, however, as you know, are quite beyond our control.”

The Bernstorff who stood before me was far from being the “glass of fashion and the mold of form” he had undoubtedly been during the long years of his mission in Washington. His shoes were cracked, his cuffs were frayed, and his trousers—how they needed pressing! Those who were in Washington during the last tense months of his mission (I was in foreign parts) are in agreement that the vast propaganda sums that were placed at Bernstorff’s disposal were not all wasted in printing pamphlets or even in blowing up munition plants. Much was spent in furnishing his table with delicacies, and it was conceded that his wines and his cigars were superb. With this reputation in mind I had some natural hesitancy in offering the Ambassador one of my army cigars, a crime of the Service of Supplies, and indeed I only did it in answer to his silent but hungry appeal. (When, later, I turned over to him a box more than half full of these stogies, Bernstorff, though long trained to conceal his feelings, went to pieces, and the thanks he proffered bordered on the hysterical. “You cannot appreciate the pleasure you are giving me,” he stuttered. “And I hope you never will, for that would mean that you had lived as I have for months without the soothing influence of the Divine Weed. Yes, for the last six months I have been reduced to smoking brown paper, brown flypaper, I think, puah!”)

“The German revolution,” explained Bernstorff, “was after all but a disease of demobilization, and we cannot be sure that maladies of this nature have run their course or that our people can be said to be immune to a recurrence in the near future. The very stiff notes, I use a mild word, though of course you must know that the great majority of our people regarded them as insulting—those very stiff notes that came from the Peace Conference, or the Supreme War Council, certainly have had a very unfortunate effect on the country.

I estimate, conservatively, I think, that each one of them costs our present government at least fifty thousand votes in the elections which are impending, which will be put off as long as possible, but which, after all, will have to be held at a relatively early date.

“It is true our people want to go back to work now, though it is also true that many of the men who were long in the trenches are unfit for hard labor and also not a few are not anxious for it. Whether they work or whether they just wait for something to turn up, we keep on paying them just the same pittance and, as long as that continues and as long as our depreciating currency buys something that will at least keep body and soul together, the Government can hobble along, but (as every new printing of currency reduces the value of the paper already in circulation) it is only too evident that the time is fast approaching when printing-press promises to pay will only be worth the paper they are printed on—if indeed that.

“Please tell Colonel House that I recall my official and personal intercourse with him and the negotiations upon which we were engaged as by far the most interesting incidents of my career. I only regret, as I am sure he does, the circumstances beyond our control, which rendered our negotiations fruitless and made it impossible to achieve the results for which we worked with, I am sure, equal sincerity, and which, I think (and I believe the Colonel will agree with me), came so near at one time of being crowned with success.

At this point I called the former Ambassador’s attention to the German forces under General von der Goltz, active in Finland and in several of the other Baltic States, a problem that was causing the Supreme War Council in Paris considerable anxiety. I asked would these men obey orders from Berlin? Was Berlin disposed to bring them home?

“This question,” said Bernstorff, when I broached it (as instructed), “is complicated enough, but not nearly so complicated as it would appear to observers in western Europe. The Supreme Council in Paris seems to forget that shortly after the Armistice von der Goltz had begun to disband his forces and he was withdrawing from the territory which we had conquered, when, at the request of the still-weak governments of the new Baltic States, he was urged to remain, and later in fact he was ordered to remain by the Supreme War Council as a bulwark, and perhaps for the moment the only available bulwark, against the advance of the Bolshevik forces. The members of the

Supreme War Council in Paris have also probably forgotten that these German troops were in large numbers transported back to where they now are, in English ships, placed at their disposal by the British Government.

“So much for that phase of the question. Now, of course, other aspects of the situation are attracting the attention of these men and should be considered. These soldiers of the Baltic armies, and the young adventurers from home who have joined them since, know at least one thing, and that is, that they are better off where they are than their fellows in Germany. They are living without strenuous manual labor and without very great physical effort. They are living off the country which they control and occupy. Courland, and the surrounding districts, is a rather vacant land today, and each of these men thinks it may be possible for him to carve a farm out of the unoccupied or deserted districts. I should say that General von der Goltz is an opportunist. He may change his plans, but at present he undoubtedly hopes to link his forces up with Kolchak and Denikin for the purpose of fighting Lenin. With this end in view, he probably hopes to secure money and material support from the Allies of the west and perhaps from Berlin. Most of the people who are with him and their reactionary friends at home in Germany are inclined to think that when the Russian Reds are beaten, von der Goltz and his men will come home laurel-crowned and begin to drive out of office and government those whom they regard as the Reds in Germany. This is what they think, and it may be correct, but it is taking a long view of the situation and looking much farther ahead than I would care to do at this moment when our national life is a daily and an unremitting struggle for existence.

“As to my own activity, I try to talk sense and to turn my countrymen away from the dreams and from the fantastic mirages with which their eyes and their thoughts have been put out of focus for so many years. I tell them that Japan and America have money but that the rest of us are caput— down and out.’ Some people think that I am a little too pessimistic and ought to speak words of cheer, but as I am convinced that the winter that is approaching is going to be the worst of our war experiences, I think I am right in trying to prepare our morale for the last great test to which it must be subjected. Tell Colonel House if we could get a little raw material, a little moral support, a little of what would be regarded here as common civility to the unfortunate men who are at the head of the German state today, we will get out of the woods, I think, BUT—that is quite a considerable ‘but.’ Please tell the Colonel I believe in a League of Nations, but of course only one in which -all are represented, the vanquished as well as the victors. I also hope the Colonel will use his influence to see that our armed forces are not reduced immediately to 100,000 men. We agreed to this when we were ordered to do it, but it would mean anarchy if we comply today. We have about 300,000 men under arms, and we shall need them until next spring. Today, if the Government only had 100,000 men at its disposal, von der Goltz with his 70,000 men in the Baltic States would be in control of the situation. As it is, he is merely a factor of considerable importance.”

On the following day (September 26th) I called upon Walther von Rathenau in his office in what was once the palatial quarters of the famous Allgemeine-Elektrizitats-Gesellschaft. It is now in need of paint and run down at the heels and everywhere else. I should say he is not immediately accessible to all callers, but a copy of his most recent letter to the Colonel, which I had been authorized to use,¹ soon swept away all defensive barriers. He is nervous and greatly depressed, unlike the hopeful Bernstorff, and he opened our talk by saying:

“What has been done in Paris is a crime against humanity and civilization, none the less great because some of the gentlemen who did it were perhaps not aware of what they were doing. They have Balkanized and Mexicanized the Continent of Europe—east of the Rhine. Today there remains only one relatively strong power on the Continent of Europe, and that is France.”

In answer to my remark that the few people I had met in Germany seemed fresh and hopeful, especially the country people, he said: “Of course they do, and they are hopeful and planning energetically for the future. They have not the remotest suspicion of what has happened to them. They have all been war-crazy for five years and as yet they do not appreciate the straits into which defeat has thrown them. Let us hope that the realization of the true situation will not come to them suddenly—or yet completely; that would indeed be a fatal awakening.

“Yes, as you say, they are cheerful and not disinclined to work. They are beginning to put their shoulders to the wheel but if they had, as I have, and perhaps a score of other economists in Germany have, a realizing sense that however industriously and ardently they may put their shoulders to the wheel they will never get the cart out of the mire—not under present conditions—that would be the end of Germany and of the Germans as a nation. They would scatter to the four winds, as you see they are doing today—that is, the few who can secure transportation. Fifteen millions of Germans must emigrate or starve, so the posters say. Well, that statement is not exaggerated. The crisis is so terrible that it cannot be met, however, by emigration to the Argentine, and to Paraguay, and Brazil; some may escape in that way, indeed some have, but the great bulk of us have to face the situation here, and what we shall have to face will depend in a large measure upon America.”

Here again Herr Rathenau came back to the remark which I had made to the effect that I found Germans almost everywhere going about their business and seriously taking up the struggle for life with good courage, although to my mind by no means unaware of the great catastrophe in which they and their fortunes were involved.

“Yes, of course,” he said, “they are bearing themselves bravely, as you have noticed. They are in the plight, I take it, of fever patients. People come in, look them over, and they are surprised to find how well the patient looks; they say, never did he have a better color; never were his eyes so bright. But the doctor knows what the flushed cheeks and the flashing eyes portend and knows also that the course of the fever may well in a few hours leave the patient a corpse or a skeleton. In this latter case, it is still uphill work, and careful nutrition is necessary to bring the patient back to life and usefulness again. Now, the fever of misunderstanding, the great madness under which we Germans and some others of the peoples of Europe have been suffering in a hardly less degree, mind you, has not run its course; it may be fatal still, or we may escape a fatal issue, but look, what is there left us to build up upon? How can we reconstruct the waste of tissue? No one can contradict me when I say there is absolutely nothing left us beyond a possible bare subsistence. Our potash is gone with Alsace-Lorraine, and our export coal with the Saar Basin. Of coal and iron, we have not enough of them left in sight for our own needs, and for years to come there will be nothing to export. For the last sixty years before the war the Germans had ceased to be a selfsufficient people, and we could not survive except by and through our export trade. That, you see, was our money crop. What is to take its place? Remember, we have no ships now. We have simply idle factories and a peasant population that is working hard to fill its belly, and an industrial population that is drawing non-employment pay. Even if you let us do it, how can we purchase raw materials with our mark quoted at about three American cents? Mind you I am not discussing these questions politically, but merely from the standpoint of the economist. It seems to me some leading people in western Europe are expecting us to pay for all the damages caused by the war and at the same time are inflicting a fatal knockout blow not only upon our prosperity and our capacity to pay, to repay as they say, but upon our very existence. Today, economically, Germany is dying, and the gangrened corpse that will result, I tell you again, speaking as an economist and not as a politician, I tell you that gangrened corpse will infect the whole world.

“I must try to make you see that outside of France you have not left standing a single strong state east of the Rhine. I must tell you again, the Paris Peace Conference has Balkanized and Mexicanized Europe. Of course I know that the American representatives in Paris did not propose to do anything of the kind, and I am inclined to think that many representatives of other powers are equally guiltless of planning this thing in cold blood, but you have done it all the same. What are these states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia which you have created? Let me tell you: nothing that will last except the shame of them; nothing that will advance humanity; nothing that will redound to the credit of civilization. Should you, Colonel Bonsai, come back here in ten years you will shudder with horror at the sight of the human suffering and the human destruction for which your country will be in a large measure to blame. This is a terrible outlook, and the consequences, the inevitable tragic consequences of it, I believe, unless the peace conditions are radically changed, will not be borne by us Germans alone. The whole world will be involved and permeated by the lawlessness of the new situation, and the era in our history which began with a laudable attempt (I have no doubt of this) to civilize the Balkans and to bestow civilized government and respect for the law where it was lacking, will end, indeed it has ended, as I have already told you several times, by the Balkanization of that Europe from whence came life-giving blood and the heart impulse of the whole civilized world.

“What a waste of time it is to talk about the responsibility for the war,” continued Rathenau. He was here referring to the flood of pamphlets and controversial books about the peace negotiations with which the newsstands and bookstores of Berlin are flooded. “The only vital, the only important thing to do today is to get together and see whether we can save ourselves and our children from the terrible consequences of the disaster in which, whatever may be our separate responsibility and individual guilt, we are all involved. Even our Emperor (what folly to think otherwise!) he did not plan or plot out the war. He and those who were with him stumbled into the war like a lot of drunken sailors who did not know how to take care of themselves, much less to take care of the people whom it was their bounden duty to protect. The Kaiser,” he continued, “what an idiot! What a coward he was! In the end, why did he not place himself at the head of a chosen band and throw himself upon the enemy? There are many who would have rallied around him, had he shown a spark of manliness, who would have been happy to have accepted their probable fate. But, after all, this repining is foolish too. The only thing to do, that is worth while, is to plan and build, to put up the barriers and the dykes, to save what yet remains, from the threatening floods of devastation and demoralization which the war has left without control.” At this point Herr Rathenau went into, with great wealth of detail, what he considers was his momentous, indeed his all-important interview with Field Marshal von Ludendorff at the headquarters of the army in June 1917. “It was then that the worst that could happen had happened, and America had entered the war against us,” he said. “Everything was lost, and everybody knew it, apparently, except the blind bande in control. Colonel House will, I am sure, remember what I told him in our talks in 1915 and in 1916 when he was in Germany, before you entered the war. I recall with pleasure that he thanked me for the frankness with which I spoke and that in 1916 he congratulated me upon the correctness of my predictions in our 1915 talks. I was as frank as I dared to be, and there were, as Colonel House intimated at the time, very few who cared or dared to talk frankly. Well, I told him then that the war could only end in two ways: By the energetic intervention of the United States to enforce peace, or by her intervention on the side of the Entente Allies. And again, and as a last resort, on my return from a short trip to America, I tried, for the last time, these arguments upon Ludendorff, upon whom I literally forced myself. In the interview, we talked in terms of chess, a game in which we are both adepts, and I said to him I was trying all the time to save my country and the thousands of lives that were being thrown away every minute. I am not so sure that I then fully appreciated that I was also trying to save the life of the world. Ludendorff, of course, stressed his ‘invincible army,’—as became the miles gloriosus.

“ ‘Yes, these, your successes,’ I said. ‘I admit them, but where are they leading us? What is your end play, your victory stroke, to be? What is the result that will justify all this wastage of blood and treasure? Can you inform me?’ I found out (he admitted it when I forced him into a corner) that our great general had no end play planned. He was just hoping that the other fellows would grow weary of the butchery before we did. Well, I talked with him until noon, and when our interview was interrupted by official business, I found the general still interested, and he asked me to come back in the afternoon and we would talk some more. When I came back in the afternoon, I drew my illustrations as to the hopelessness of the situation from the war of 1870. Then I said, ‘General, we had Paris surrounded, was that an end?’ ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Then we had Paris under bombardment; was that an end?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then came the revolution. Now was that an end play? So,’ I continued, ‘you have got today to besiege London, Paris, and New York. You have got to bombard them, one and all, and then revolutions have to follow. Can you do that, are you sure of your ability to do that?’

“He was silent for a long time and then he said: ‘You have convinced me of many things. I recognize how serious is the situation, but I still have a feeling that we are going to win, that our victory stroke will come by means of the ruthless submarine warfare.’ Well, we talked on that subject until nightfall. I think I conclusively proved that you Americans would be building more ships in six months than we could sink in nine. As it now turns out, I overestimated your effort of the first six months and I underestimated what you did in the second six months. I still think you could have lived up to my figures or even exceeded them in the first six months, only you were not fully aroused to your danger. I think Ludendorff was forced to see that I had him in logical argument or else a man of his admirable mental gifts would not have taken the course which the field marshal now did. Suddenly he swept all our figures and all our memoranda from the table. ‘All you say may be so,’ he admitted, ‘but you do not convince me. I have a feeling that the U-boat warfare is what will prove our salvation,’ and he repeated it over and over again. ‘lch habe das Gefuhl‘ — l have the feeling that through it we shall win.’ Well, there was nothing more to be done or to be said. Our leader had taken refuge in the guidance, not of his brains, but of his feelings. All indeed was lost!

“I will give you a direct answer to the inquiry you bring from Colonel House, but I should warn you not to attach any great importance to it. Neither I nor those who think as I do are in the Government now and we may not even be listened to in the council chamber. But we have agreed to urge a policy of fulfillment. The fact that the Treaty cannot be carried out does not release us from the duty of trying. We lose no opportunity of insisting upon this attitude. Of course the terms of the Treaty are impossible, but we think that the only way to demonstrate this is’ to attempt a policy of strict fulfillment. In this we are not guilty of bad faith to you or to our own people, but we do think that in this way, and in this way alone, can we hasten a return to sanity which it seems to me is as greatly needed in Paris as it is with us here.”

Often in the course of our long interview, which continued for several hours, Rathenau would turn his thought from the turmoil in Europe and from the many groups of armies which still faced one another in hostile array, and in some quarters, particularly in eastern Europe, were still fighting. “If the world is to survive, and I am not too sure of that, although I admit that this is a tough old world,” he repeated, “a new society must be formed, and in my judgment the basic principle of that new society will be the insistent demand that every man and every woman shall perform every day some useful physical labor. The dignity of labor must be re-established. In the new society there must be no place for hereditary landlords controlling large areas of idle lands or for coupon-clipping parasites.” And he added somewhat sadly, “I may not witness this transformation, but you will, I hope. It is absolutely necessary if civilization is to survive.”²

Some months later Rathenau became Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Weimar government and in June 1922 he was assassinated³ because, within what he considered were the limits of the possible,⁴ he attempted to carry out the Versailles Treaty. Rathenau was the leading spirit in the second Wirth ministry, and the fate that befell him did not encourage any of his successors to continue the policy of fulfillment.” Indeed, a very few weeks after their conviction his assassins were liberated—and feted!

Rathenau continued to talk at length, and, I must admit, with great eloquence, of the socialized society of which he dreamed. It was only with difficulty that at last I brought him back to the living, struggling world with which we are confronted—with which my mission in Berlin is immediately concerned.