September 26, 1919

I could not have imagined that the war records of the Great General Staff would have been opened to me at this early day, or indeed at any time, but as a matter of fact this surprising thing has happened. I understand, of course, the political reasons which have induced prominent members of the Weimar government who must be nameless to take this step; in any event, I am glad to profit by it. Ever since the Armistice old Prussian officers without number have been insisting that at the front the army could have continued to face a world in arms, but that it was the disloyal strokes, the Dolchstösse in the back, inflicted by the Social Democrats, that brought about the military debacle (it was only months later that a large measure of responsibility was assigned to the Jews).

These legends will, in the course of time, be generally accepted, I have no doubt, the Germans, like other peoples, being inclined to believe what they want to believe, and the records which prove the contrary will be doctored or entirely suppressed. But the fact is that, as the archives now opened to me disclose, Ludendorff lost hope of a military victory after August 8th, which he describes in his official report as a day of mourning for the German Army.” Weeks later, as archives further reveal, lamenting the disaster to the Bulgar and the Austrian contingents on the Salonika front (September 25, 1918), he wrote:

“This seals the destiny of the Quadruple Alliance.”¹ A few days later in an official report he describes how six or seven German divisions with hitherto fine records have allowed themselves to be cut to pieces. There is also in the dossier an unsigned memorandum describing in detail the War Council of September 29th (1918), at which, among others, were present Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and von Hintze, the new Secretary for Foreign Affairs, whom I knew so well in China. The Emperor presided and the soldiers and the diplomats, for once in agreement, said:

“Sire, the army demands and requires an immediate armistice.”

The Emperor protested against this decision, advancing “face-saving” arguments, but finally was forced to the following admission: “We have come to the end of our tether. I, too, recognize we must end the war as best we can.”

Let us examine further the tale of disaster and humiliation which the record discloses. On October 1st Ludendorff sent Lersner, his liaison officer, to the Chancellor with an urgent demand for peace, and in these words explained the necessity of it. He wrote:

“The troops hold today, but no one can foresee what will happen tomorrow. The break-through may occur at any moment, and upon a vital point a division may fail to do its duty.”

In another dispatch, under the same date, Ludendorff admits that in round numbers some forty thousand of his men, mostly infantry, have deserted and crossed the frontier into Holland. In the same dispatch the field marshal officially conceded the increasing demoralization of his army and for the first time speaks of propaganda. He says: “The minds of many are poisoned by the tracts that are dropped upon them at the front.” (This “poison” would seem to have been distilled or at least purveyed by open Allied fliers and not from the traitors who skulked at the rear,” of whom we are hearing so much now.)

On the third of October the height of the crisis was reached and Hindenburg sent this blistering message to Prince Max of Baden, the new Chancellor:

“As a consequence of the disaster on the Macedonian front, and owing to the disappearance of our reserves, making it impossible to secure replacements for our heavy losses, there is not the least hope left of imposing peace upon our enemies. We insist upon our demand for an armistice.”

A letter from the Crown Prince, or rather the certified copy of it that was sent on to the Reichstag Committee by the War Ministry, was also placed before me. It is dated September 18th (1918), and reads:

“After the Battle of the Marne I never believed that a complete victory was possible. After the check of the 1918 offensive, the situation became truly critical. It is necessary to make peace as quickly as possible.”

Letters from the Archduke Ruprecht in command of the Bavarian Army are equally enlightening, and they seem to have had great influence on his cousin, Prince Max, the new Chancellor. They came from the man who commanded the Bavarians, generally regarded by the Allies as more sturdy and obstinate fighters than even the Prussians.

“I do not think we can hold on throughout the coming winter,” he wrote (on October 4, 1918). “It is even possible that disaster will overtake us before then. The Americans are increasing very rapidly, much more rapidly than was foreseen; they have already thirty-one divisions in France. Our reserves do not suffice to replace our daily losses, and owing to the lack of officers, and to sickness, and to the wretched food, they are inferior to our adversaries.”

On October 18th Ruprecht wrote again and more insistently to Prince Max:

“Our troops are vanishing in an alarming manner. The number of fighting men in our infantry divisions rarely equals three thousand. We have lost many machine guns and we lack good marksmen; the resistance of our troops diminishes hourly. If we do not receive more petrol from Roumania, our air force will have to be grounded. I do not think we can hold out beyond December, and a disaster may occur at any moment. Ludendorff does not appreciate the gravity of the situation; it is absolutely necessary to secure peace before our adversaries have forced their way into Germany.”

So much for the ever-victorious, the unconquered army!

If I had the time I should copy these records² more fully than I am doing. I have an idea that they will not always be available. There are people out of the picture now who may come back and who have a vital interest in their destruction. But time is lacking, and, after all, the purpose of my mission here is to ascertain and weigh future probabilities and not to hold a post-mortem over the corpse of what was so recently a “mighty empire.”

In this account, however fragmentary and sketchy, that I am taking from the official reports, I must not overlook the part, indeed the very leading part, that the navy played in the debacle.³ These reports show that as far back as six months before the end a sharp lowering of morale was noted and deplored by the ranking officers in both Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. The climax came when (October 9th) Admiral Scheer ordered the sailors to take the ships, so long harbor-bound, to sea, to break the strangle hold of the British High Sea Fleet, to fight a liberating battle, or to go down with flying colors. Whereupon the men not only refused to sail but murdered quite a few of their officers who pointed out to them the path of duty. In some of these reports it is noted that Prince Henry of Prussia, who was given the command of the devoted fleet by his imperial brother, failed to rise to the heroic occasion, that in fact he stayed on shore in the arsenal. It is also worthy of notice that the first outbreak of disobedience took place in the navy, where there were no Jews, while in the army there were many whose gallant conduct was rewarded with Iron Crosses. Admittedly, the naval forces afloat and in the yards and arsenals were purely “Aryan” bodies; however, once they were convinced that the army was defeated, the sailors were unwilling to sacrifice their lives for a cause that was already lost. It was these practical men, certainly not heroes, who started the uprising in Kiel on November 1st, and a few hours later in both the naval bases the Social Democrats joined with them—and the much-vaunted German marine came to an inglorious end.

Twice-told tale though it was, I copied these revealing dispatches in part because my new-found Social Democratic friends were insistent that I do so. And the fact that I had sat at Halle with Bebel and the elder Liebknecht in the first Sozialisten-tag that was held after the repressive Bismarck laws had been repealed, made them regard me as one of “theirs.” They wanted the widest publicity given to these confessions of failure and defeat. They knew how persuasive was the “dagger-in-the-back” slogan, as an explanation of the military collapse to a people who have always had an exaggeratedly high opinion of their military prowess and wished to hold fast to it.

But I made one condition, although I did not emphasize it. One good turn deserved another was the line I took; and I did want to know, as far as the documents revealed, under what circumstances and through what pressure the unrestricted U-boat warfare was decided upon, the step that brought us into the war, the Emperor to flight, and the German people to ruin. Readily they agreed to my proposal—for such it was—and as a matter of fact it soon became clear to me that the members of the National Assembly, at least those with whom I came in contact, were as ignorant of the circumstances leading up to this tragic decision as we were on our side of the Atlantic. Perhaps indeed even more so; but they set about getting the incriminating documents with considerable enthusiasm. As they said, proudly and truthfully, “no member of the present National Assembly was involved in those fateful decisions.”

The official records show that while the debates had raged for a year, it was only during the session of the Reichstag Committee on January 31st (1917) that final approval of unrestricted U-boat warfare was secured, the German Empire signed its death warrant, and Admiral von Capelle achieved an immortality which will prove irksome with the passing years. This admiral is not now highly regarded, and apparently never was, in naval or political circles, but as he was accepted at this critical moment as the mouthpiece of von Tirpitz, his words carried weight. And according to the record these were his words:

“We do not have to worry about the United States; not one ship or its complement of men will reach this side of the ocean; that is why we have U-boats and that is just the kind of prey we wish to hunt down and destroy.”

Admiral Koch followed. He was less theatrical but equally positive. “U-boat warfare will force England to sue for peace,” he insisted.

The chairman of the Committee then drew up the following resolution:

“As conditions are now, it is clear we shall by means of a rigidly enforced submarine campaign be able to compel England to accept peace at our hands within five months.”

The resolution, the order for full steam ahead, the removal of all restrictions on the steel sharks, which many of the naval men had wanted for so long, was then sent on by special messenger to both the Admiralty and to von Hindenburg at Army Headquarters. On the following day von Capelle returned to the Committee room bearing with him what he said was the grateful thanks of the navy, and he added: “I can also give you the assurance that, viewed from the military standpoint, the assistance which will result from the entrance of America into the war on the side of our enemies will amount to exactly nothing.” That also is in the record.

In the face of these demands, for an “all-out U-boat campaign” now in January 1917, insisted upon both by the army and the navy and enthusiastically endorsed by the press, the position of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg clearly became exceedingly precarious. He was now even deprived of the slender prop he had availed himself of six months before in his conflict with von Tirpitz. He could no longer claim that there were not available enough U-boats to accomplish their diabolical purpose; at least one hundred and twenty new and more formidable submarines had been launched during the intervening months and as many more were in the yards, nearing completion.

A Herr Schultze-Brombert, who, though a member of the new National Assembly, is fighting, almost single-handed, to preserve the fair name of the old imperial crowd, has brought me another long letter from the former Chancellor, not addressed to me, but to a friend who was urged to use it in any way he sees fit, which, he says, sets forth the essentials of the defense which Bethmann-Hollweg proposes to make before the Committee now in session, if given an opportunity to do so.

In this communication Bethmann-Hollweg argues: It is not fair to say that our alternative was U-boat warfare to be pushed in the most unrestricted manner, or a continuance of the military stalemate on the Western Front and increasing starvation at home.

“There was the chance of a negotiated peace through the mediation of President Wilson. While our Washington plans had not prospered fully, I am sure Count Bernstorff will bear me out that hope in that direction had not been abandoned when the new navy policy ended abruptly and absolutely all negotiations.

“It is true we had been disappointed; the something forthright and tangible we had long expected from Washington had not come, but I could see the difficulties of President Wilson’s position and at this time, at least, I did not question his good faith. Clearly Wilson could not afford to make a proposition to us which the Allies would decline. What would they accept in the way of terms to end the war so disastrous to us all? Wilson did not know, nor did he know what terms we would accept, and, frankly, I did not know myself what terms would be accepted by the Emperor and the Reichstag. Bernstorff could not pin Wilson or House down to a concrete proposal, and most certainly I could not present one that had any but the most remote chance of success. We should all bear in mind that only fifteen months later would the army even consider the restoration of occupied Belgium and that step was for the Allies, of course, a sine qua non. So we kept swirling around in a vicious and what seemed a hopeless circle.

“We were in this dilemma when in January 1917 the formal demand for the U-boat campaign was made by the army, the navy, and the press, and, in this instance, there can be no doubt, the press was interpreting the well-nigh unanimous will of the people. The demand was now formally reduced to writing, and it read, ‘unrestricted U-boat warfare must be undertaken immediately and be prosecuted with the utmost resolution.’ It also asserted that there was complete agreement in the fighting forces that the war situation demanded the employment of this weapon to the fullest extent of its possibilities, and the admirals, on their high authority, gave the assurance that ‘so used this weapon would prove invincible.’

“Now what did this mean?” said Bethmann-Hollweg. “Surely it was an admission that the land war had ended in a stalemate and that in view of the increasing severity of the blockade the day was not far distant when in all probability we would not be able to maintain even our present far-from-brilliant positions. ‘Without the use of this weapon we cannot guarantee a successful conclusion of the war with it we can,’ asserted the High Command.

If anything definite in the way of possible mediation and acceptable negotiation had come from Washington I might have continued to oppose this step as I had done successfully in 1916, but nothing definite came. In view of the attitude of the Entente powers I had no reason to expect anything would come, and so I could not advise the Emperor to reject the plan which his military advisers considered as offering a chance of success, even though I thought, as I most certainly did, that the chance was not a very good one.”