German History by Hans Kohn

Author:Hans Kohn [Kohn, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Germany
ISBN: 9781000008173
Google: _RApMwEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

The weakness of political leadership in the face of the military probably explains the relation of Imperial Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg to the military. In his memoirs, Bethmann-Hollweg, who was in general so critical of the military, stressed that, with regard to military operations, he had been compelled, as a civilian and a layman, to bow before the judgment of the military expert, and that he therefore avoided interfering with the conduct of such operations. But that meant giving up full control over the course of events once war broke out. He voluntarily abandoned the primacy of politics in war time. For it is in the nature of things that the great military decisions about operations cannot be separated, in a pure state, from problems of the political conduct of war. To make military leadership the task of a special expert is to erect a cult of the specialist which drives a wide cleavage between the statesman and the military commander. This is inalterably opposed to the political conceptions of western Europe. There all the essential decisions in politics and the conduct of war are brought together into the hands of the political leader, the statesman, who has the benefit of the expert advice of the military man.

This supremacy of the military brought tragedy to Germany at the very beginning of the First World War. At that time the invasion of Belgium was begun with the passive approval and cover of the imperial chancellor. Yet this decision arose from purely military considerations, though there were already evident political objections to it which later events confirmed. The more hopeless the situation of Germany became during the course of the war, the greater became the effort to find a strictly military solution. But the war had been lost politically at the start, and its loss was sealed at the very latest by the entry of the United States in 1917.

From 1917 onward, therefore, Ludendorff was to reject with increasing vigour the interference of political forces and to make the conduct of war a purely military matter. Bethmann-Hollweg, who had permitted the invasion of Belgium in 1914, was quite aware of the disastrous effect which renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare would have in Washington. He therefore resisted a decision in its favour as long as he could. He finally gave in when the military leaders told him that unless this extreme method of warfare were adopted, the war would be lost for Germany. The supreme army command determined the form which the total mobilization of economic and social life would take, as in the case of the auxiliary service law of 1916. But it was already a question whether, in the face of a world of more powerful enemies, increased mobilization of the people’s energies did not do more harm than good, whether there remained any political justification for such mobilization. In the course of constant pressure upon the political leaders, who kept submitting, the supreme army command also maintained its supremacy in deciding

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