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Raphael’s The Meeting between Pope Leo I, the Great and Attila depicts Leo, escorted by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, meeting with the Hun king outside Rome

And from your city do not
Wholly banish fear,
For what man living, free from fear,
Will still be just?

Aeschylus “The Eumenides“, L. 698

Deos fortioribus adesse.
The Gods are on the side of the stronger.

Tacitus “Histories“, Bk. 4, Ch. 17

Peoples do not, and neither do nations, come into being in a year or two, much less on a single day. Neither do languages and cultures. Consequently, one cannot point to a definitive date on which the natives living north and east of the great rivers of the Danube, Elbe and Rhine became “Germans”. The word “German” itself was not commonly used until, at around AD 100, the Roman historian Tacitus employed the term in a book and thus became godfather to the eventual nation.

The first peoples relevant to this account, who were populating the western and northern reaches of the continent while Rome was still a city-state, were the Celts, or Gauls. Leaving their indigenous settlements in the western heart of Europe around today’s Belgium and central France in the fourth century BC, they migrated for the better part of the next two hundred years over great parts of the continent, the neighbouring isles, and in particular to the south and east: following the Danube river into what are today Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Romania.

Others went north and over the sea. The Celtic colonization of the British Isles and the petty kingdoms they subsequently established are best known to us by the literary influence they extended on the legend, and perhaps the deeds, of King Arthur, the sword Excalibur and the Knights of the Round Table. Written down by Sir Thomas Malory in the fourteenth century and titled “Le Mort D’Arthur”, the tale has become a part of Western culture. T.E. White’s “The Once And Future King” is perhaps the most charming rendering of the epos.

The farthest branches of the Celtic migration expanded as far as Spain, northern Italy and Greece; a few fragments made it as far as Anatolia, then called “Asia Minor”. There they founded the Kingdom of Galatia, with Ankyra [Latin “Ancyra”, today’s Ankara] as its capital, which eventually became a client kingdom of Rome. After frequent clashes between Romans and Celts in the third and second centuries BC, the recurrences of conflict diminished, and subsequent improvement of neighbourly relations eventually gave rise to the spread of Roman civilization into Gallia Transalpina, Gaul on the further side of the Alps. Today’s Provence became the province of Gallia Narbonensis and its great ports of Massilia and Narbo, today’s Marseille and Narbonne, traded goods from near and far. Over a period of roughly a century, a number of adjacent Celtic tribes were introduced to the Roman fold, initially awarded the status of allies, and later that of citizens of Rome.

In 58 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar arrived in “Gallia Comata” (‘long-haired Gaul’), the northern and western unromanized parts of the land, with ten legions, and within seven years transformed all of today’s France, Belgium and the Upper Netherlands into Roman provinces. While he did have temporary problems with the particularly wild tribes of the Belgians, he was aware that the real danger for Rome lurked on the eastern, the far bank of the Rhine; a land where a wholly different and far more ferocious congregation of barbarians skulked in the forests, longing for the riches of civilization. Caution was advisable.

Germanic warriors as depicted in Philipp Clüver’s Germania Antiqua 1616

Caesar knew as much about these wild tribes as it was possible to know at this time, as told by his great-uncle Gaius Marius. Not since the days of Hannibal had the Roman Republic faced an adversary able to threaten her very existence; the “German” danger, however, commanded vigilance and preparedness. This was particularly true after the debacle of Arausio, in which Quintus Servilius Caepio had managed to lose the complete Roman army; that the German throng had not proceeded straight into Italy had been pure luck. For reasons unknown, the victorious German tribes had undertaken various detours, first into Spain, then back to northern Gallia, reaching the beaches of Normandy in the summer of 103 BC, but were back, in the fall of the next year, less than fifty miles from Arausio, at Aquae Sextae, today’s Aix-en-Provence.

Related Post: The Heist of the Millennium – The Gold of Tolosa and the Catastrophe of the Battle of Arausio 105 BC

This time, however, a welcoming committee was ready, commanded by the former hayseed from Arpinum, Gaius Marius, and his newly formed army of “head count” soldiers. That these impoverished fellows would primarily depend on their general for their retirement was a foregone conclusion Marius did not forget for a second and planned his long-term goals accordingly: upon leaving service, his veterans would receive a bit of real estate and a small pension; the veteran might farm a bit, have sons, enjoy the sun, and, if need be, visit Rome and vote for his good friend, the general.

At Aquae Sextae, Marius found out that he was confronted with the Teutones only, who had split from the other tribes and were on their way along the Tyrrhenian Coast to Genova. Marius did not hesitate and led the legions to a complete victory over the disorganized enemy, and about 30,000 women and children who survived their men, fathers and suicide were sold on the slave markets of Massilia, the proceeds going, by tradition, to the general alone.

The wives of the Teutones kill their children and commit suicide to escape capture and subsequent slavery at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, by Heinrich Leutemann

A year later and with the help, or, as some said, despite the hindrance of his co-consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, Marius repeated the success of Aquae Sextiae against the second half of the original German horde, the Cimbri. They were coming down from the slopes of the Alps, which they had crossed by way of the Brenner pass and were on the descent into the riches of the Po Valley when they were checked by Marius’s legions before they could rest or gather supplies. At Vercellae, near today’s Rovigo, the legions won another victory and Marius’s purse pocketed the proceeds from the sale of another 20,000 women and children to the slave markets of Rome [101 BC].

The Defeat of the Cimbri, by Alexandre Gabriel Décamps

Gaius Marius’ victory over the Cimbri by Francesco Saverio Altamura

Yet victory did not always smile upon the legions. Less luck than Marius had had fell upon Proconsul Gaius Varus and his three legions a little over a century later (AD 9). He had been dispatched to Germany by Emperor Augustus in return for a few border violations and a couple of plundered villages. The expedition crossed the Rhine and pursued the malefactors into the lands of the Cherusci, around the Weser River, somewhere in the vicinity of today’s town of Bielefeld.
The Cherusci were commanded by Arminius, a man who had served in the legions and was familiar with their tactics. He laid an ambush in a particularly dense forest which the legions had to traverse, thereby creating a scenario in which he hoped the biggest advantage of the legions, mutual support in a tight formation, would be nullified. The forest split the legions into small groups: not a single man survived. Varus and his men disappeared without a trace, an occurrence unprecedented in the annals of the legions. Rome concluded that the German danger merited unprecedented attention and decided upon the eventual fortification of the border. Jared Diamond comments on the early relations of Romans and barbarians as follows:

Attack of the German warriors, by Otto Albert Koch

All but a few historical societies have been geographically close enough to some other societies to have at least some contact with them. Relations with neighbouring societies may be intermittently or chronically hostile. A society may be able to hold off its enemies as long as it is strong, only to succumb when it becomes weakened for any reason, including environmental damage. The proximate cause of the collapse will then be military conquest, but the ultimate cause – the factor whose change led to the collapse – will have been the factor that caused the weakening. Hence, collapses for ecological or other reasons often masquerade as military defeats. The most familiar debate about such possible masquerading involves the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Rome became increasingly beset by barbarian invasions, with the conventional date for the Empire’s fall being taken somewhat arbitrarily as A.D. 476, the year in which the last emperor of the West was deposed. However, even before the rise of the Roman Empire, there had been “barbarian” tribes who lived in northern Europe or central Asia beyond the borders of “civilized” Mediterranean Europe, and who periodically attacked civilized Europe (as well as civilized China and India). For over a thousand years, Rome successfully held off the barbarians, for instance slaughtering a large invading force of Cimbri and Teutones bent on conquering northern Italy at the Battle of Campi Raudii [i.e. Vercellae] in 101 B.C.

Eventually, it was the barbarians rather than the Romans who won the battles: what was the fundamental reason for that shift in fortune? Was it because of changes in the barbarians themselves, such that they became more numerous or better organized, acquired better weapons or more horses, or profited from the climate change in the central Asian steppes? In that case, we would say that barbarians really could be identified as the fundamental cause of Rome’s fall. Or was it instead that the same old unchanged barbarians were always waiting on the Roman Empire’s frontiers, and that they couldn’t prevail until Rome became weakened by some combination of economic, political, environmental, and other problems? In that case, we would blame Rome’s fall on its own problems, with the barbarians just providing the coup de grace. This question continues to be debated. (1)

The rise of a threat beyond the banks of Rhine and Danube persuaded the Roman historian Tacitus to investigate the barbarians. Soon he found himself in need of a general classification of the tribes who lived north and east of the rivers, in a land that was covered to ninety per cent by swamps and forests. He christened them “Germani, after a tribe who lived close to the Rhine near Bonna, today’s Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, in his book “De Origine et Situ Germanorum” [“About the Origins and Places of the Germans”], published in AD 98.
Tacitus never saw the land and the people he described: he relied on the words of mouth, perhaps of soldiers who had served there or perhaps on talking to the one or other Latin-speaking German he could find in Rome. Yet by virtue of his one being the only book on the subject, it received attention for centuries to come. He compared, not unfriendly, the simple virtues of the Germani, their sense of family, braveness and honour, but also their impressive vices, a certain predilection for rape, pillage and slaughter, with the decadence prevailing in Imperial Rome. He was the first author to describe the customs of the Germani extensively; earlier contact reports had been restricted to a syllabus of the battle and a count of limbs and bodies. As we have seen, the military results were mixed: Marius won, Varus lost, and the protracted campaigns of Drusus, Tiberius and Germanicus during the principate of Augustus [ca. 12 BC-AD 16] ended indeterminate.

Principal Germanic Movements 750 BC – 1 AD

After a few invasive campaigns, the Romans confined themselves to defensive measures along the Limes, a fortified line of earthworks, moats and watchtowers that protected the area between the Danube, Rhine and Moenus [today’s Main] Rivers. The final offensives into German territory were undertaken by Emperor Marcus Antonius Aurelius [AD 161-180]. The Germani, however, turned out a rather undistinguished tribe; after they crossed the Rhine in the direction of central France they disappeared in the mists of the past; no one knows what happened to the original Germani. Tacitus was intrigued by the strange political customs of the Germani as outlined by Edward Gibbon:

Some tribes, however, on the coast of the Baltic, acknowledged the authority of kings, though without relinquishing the rights of man, but in the far greater part of Germany, the form of government was a democracy, tempered, indeed, and controlled, not so much by general and positive laws as by the occasional ascendant of birth or valour, of eloquence or superstition. Civil governments, in their first institution, are voluntary associations for mutual defence. To obtain the desired end, it is absolutely necessary that each individual should conceive himself obligated to submit his private opinions and actions to the judgement of the greater number of his associates. The German tribes were contented with this rude but liberal outline of political society. … The assembly of the warriors of the tribe was convened at stated seasons, or on sudden emergencies. The trial of public offences, the election of magistrates, and the great business of peace and war were determined by its independent voice. … For the Germans always met in arms, and it was constantly to be dreaded lest an irregular multitude, inflamed with faction and strong liquor, should use those arms to enforce as well as to declare their furious resolves. (2)

Rome faced the problem that these tribes accepted no higher authority, knew no superior body that could arrange a truce or binding peace, nor declare general war, for that matter, and thus Emperor Domitian at around AD 80 came up with the idea to erect a wall between civilization and wilderness along those borders that were not naturally defended by a river. The line of what would become the Limes originated near the Danube’s northernmost point at Castra Regina, today’s Regensburg in Bavaria, then zigzagged through south-western Germany until it met the Main river, then zigzagged a bit more, over the heights of the Taunus Hills, and ultimately reached the Rhine at Bonna. A few miles ahead, down the river, another extensive Roman settlement was founded, Colonia Claudia, today’s Cologne.

The most decisive change of Roman organization relevant to the fate of the German tribes occurred when, as a reaction to the great migration beginning in the fourth century AD, Emperor Diocletian restructured the administration of the Empire. From now on, the state was not to be ruled by a single man but four. He had associated three colleagues in the exercise of the supreme power; and as he was convinced that the abilities of a single man were inadequate to the public defence, he considered the joint administration of four princes not as a temporary expedient but as a fundamental law of the constitution. It was his intention that the two elder princes should be distinguished by the use of the diadem [the Greek equivalent to a crown] and the title of Augusti, that, as affection or esteem might direct their choice, they should regularly call to their assistance two subordinate colleagues; and that the Caesars, rising in their turn to the first rank, should supply an uninterrupted succession of emperors.

The empire was divided into four parts. The East and Italy were the most honourable, the Danube and the Rhine the most laborious stations. The former claimed the presence of the Augusti; the latter were entrusted to the administration of the Caesars. The strength of the legions was in the hand of the four partners of sovereignty, and the despair of successfully vanquishing four formidable rivals might intimidate the ambition of an aspiring general. In their civil government, the emperors were supposed to exercise the undivided power of the monarch, and their edicts,
inscribed with their joint names, were received in all the provinces as promulgated by their mutual councils and authority. Notwithstanding these precautions, the political union of the Roman world was gradually dissolved, and a principle of division was introduced which, in the course of a few years, occasioned the perpetual separation of the Eastern and the Western Empires. (3)

GERMANS AT THE ROMAN BORDER AROUND AD 100, ACCORDING TO TACITUS – AS IT IS EASY TO SEE, THE MAIN BORDER RUNS ALONG THE RHINE AND DANUBE RIVERS.

Governmental Division of the Empire under Diocletian

As far as the German tribes were concerned, the most direct result of the reform was that, from now on, Roman policies affecting them were not formulated in distant Rome any more but in the new residence of the Western Caesar in Augusta Treverorum, today’s Trier at the Moselle River, only fifty miles west of the Rhine, or in Constantinople or Antiochia. This fostered particularism and diminished the already weakened unity of Roman executive coordination. The preponderance of military power went to the two most threatened borders along the Rhine and Danube and the Asian border in the provinces of Syria and Cappadocia facing the Parthians. This, in turn, gave the local commanders power that increased with the number of the legions under their personal control. Many of the usurpers of the Imperial purple in the second to fourth century AD were generals from border provinces who claimed their imperial purple through the strength of their legions.

(1) Diamond, Jared, Collapse, Penguin Books 2005, 0-14-30.3655-6, p.13

(2) (3) Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modern Library, First Citation: Mass Market Edition 2005 Second Citation: 4th Edition 2003-4, ISBN 0-345-47884-3, pp. 157 (135); 243 (207)

Related Post: The End of the Legions – Gothic Invasions and the Economic Breakdown of the West

Children of the Lesser Men

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 24, 2019

In Adolf Hitler

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Preceding Blog Entry: In Austria Before the War – Adolf Hitler’s Parents

Gnothi Seauton
(Know Thyself)
The Oracle of Delphi

And love’s the noblest frailty of the mind.
John Dryden “The Indian Emperor”, Act 2, Sc. 2

The Youth of Adolf Hitler

Our protagonist thus enters the stage and a few remarks are in order. There is little in the available sources regarding Hitler’s childhood and adolescence that has not been subjugated to interpretative efforts in the furtherance of the one or other psychological or political theory. Ian Kershaw observed that …

The historical record of Adolf’s early years is very sparse. His own account in Mein Kampf is inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation. Post-war recollections of family and acquaintances have to be treated with care and are at times as dubious as the attempts during the Third Reich itself to glorify the childhood of the future Führer. For the formative period so important to psychologists and “psycho-historians”, the fact has to be faced that there is little to go on which is not retrospective guesswork. (1)

That the early familiar environment, the experiences of youth and adolescence, are of paramount importance in the gestation of the adult mind is a commonplace, yet even in regard to the basics of Adolf Hitler’s family life a lot of speculation remains. Ian Kershaw, for example, arrives at a more critical judgement of his father Alois Hitler than many earlier biographers did – the question of course is what would he have expected from an Austrian Customs officer in the age of nationalism?

Family life, was, however, less than harmonious and happy. Alois was an archetypal provincial civil servant – pompous, status-proud, strict, humourless, frugal, pedantically punctual, and devoted to duty. He was regarded with respect by the local community. But both at work and at home, he had a bad temper which could flare up quite unpredictably. … He took little interest in bringing up his family and was happier outside rather than inside the family home. (2)

Our knowledge of early Hitler family affairs experienced an unexpected amelioration when Anton Joachimsthaler published 1989 in Munich his work “Correction of a Biography – Adolf Hitler 1908-1920”. [FN1] He presented many previously unknown or hard-to-find documents, unearthed police files, personal letters, paintings and drawings, photographs of Hitler’s war and post-war friends, their activities and much more. Of particular importance are military documents of the immediate post-war period, which suggest that Hitler developed his political convictions not, as he claimed in “Mein Kampf” and some historians have incautiously taken for granted, in Vienna before the war but in post-war Munich, and second, that his initial political sympathies in this era may have belonged to the Social Democrats. These interesting discoveries will be discussed in their proper context.

[FN1] Original Title: “Korrektur einer Biographie – Adolf Hitler 1908-1920”. In 2000, he presented an extended version, “Hitler’s Weg begann in München” [‘Hitler’s Path began in Munich’], that provided additional documentation. See Bibliography for details.

Most of Joachimsthaler’s findings relate to Hitler’s period before and after WW I in Munich, but some are relevant to his earlier life. Anton Joachimsthaler published, for example, the Legalisirungs-Protocoll of Alois Hitler discussed in the preceding chapter, and there will be a few more references to his work before we follow Adolf Hitler to Munich.

At this point in our account, Baby Adolf is being baptized, two days after he entered this world, by Father Ignaz Probst in the Catholic Church of Braunau. His name was given as Adolfus Hitler and is so recorded on the birth certificate. The family resumed life in the Gasthaus Pommer, comfortably, as far as we know. It seems that Klara, who has been promoted from chambermaid to nurse, from nurse to mistress, and from mistress to wife, acquainted herself well. At first, she had continued to address her husband as “uncle”, and remained shy for a time; but eventually, she found contentment in her homely duties, her devotion to the elder children Alois Jr. and Angela, and the care for the younger ones that arrived at regular intervals. The early deaths of her first three children, however, caused a crisis in the household, and Klara required some time to overcome the successive tragedies. She did not become pregnant for two years after Otto had died, only a few days after his birth, in the autumn of 1887.

The Braunau Customs Station, Alois Hitler’s place of work.

Alois’ life revolved around the usual quarters very much: the Customs station at the river bank, the inns, and the beehives that were his hobby since childhood. He continued his work in good standing and was promoted again in 1892 when Adolf was three years old. The family moved to his next duty station, Passau, fifty miles downriver.

The change of residence was to exert a profound influence upon young Adolf. Braunau was a provincial, sleepy border town, which had only provided a tiny footnote to German history. During the Napoleonic wars, the book trader Johannes Palm was executed in Braunau by French troops, for having written a pamphlet critical of the French emperor. The tract was titled “Germany in the Hour of her Deepest Humiliation”; Napoleon took umbrage, and the author was fusilladed. The execution remained a fixture of German nationalist complaints and was remembered with a vengeance in 1870/71.

The former Imperial town and Episcopal see Passau was of a different calibre. In the Middle Ages, the Prince-Bishop of Passau had ruled over the important market, bishopric and county at the confluence of the Inn and Danube Rivers; splendid churches, castles and palaces bore witness to the glory days of the town. Although Passau was on the German bank of the river and border, the Austrian Customs inspection was located, by the mutual disposition of the respective governments, on German territory, where, by a favourable happenstance, the inns closed an hour later at night.

Yet for the family in general, and Alois in particular, the change of posting seems not to have been entirely welcome. Alois had lived seventeen years in Braunau, where he had buried two wives and had developed affection for the small town. There was also the fact that in Braunau he was necessarily a bigger fish than in the much larger Customs office in Passau, and, in addition, the position in Passau was a provisional appointment only, subject to confirmation by his superiors.

It was perhaps only for the youngest member of the family, Adolf, three and a half years old, that the new town was an unmitigated success; he was in the impressionable age in which a child leaves home for the first time and is unfailingly altered by the first impressions of the new environment, the sight of the buildings, the sound of the language.
For the rest of his life, Adolf Hitler would speak the distinctive dialect of Lower Bavaria that was spoken in Passau. He insisted later that, from his time in Passau onwards, he had always felt more German than Austrian, and the old town’s cultural and historic pedigree certainly provided a different impression than sleepy Braunau. In all probability, he spent two carefree years in Passau.

When he was almost five years old, his mother gave birth to another son, Edmund. Only a week later, the father, obviously having satisfied the expectations of his peers, was promoted and transferred again: from the provisional appointment at the German border to a new post in Linz, the provincial capital. Because of little Edmund, the rest of the family remained in Passau for another year, which gave Adolf, freed from paternal supervision, lots of opportunities to roam about town. He enjoyed twelve months of freedom, and it was perhaps in this picturesque town, that commanded buildings in Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance style galore, that his lifelong interest in architecture awoke. Since he was not yet in school, time was on his side.

In addition, he had his mother for himself when his elder siblings were at school. Not only the Freudian faction of psychologists has commented at length upon Hitler’s devotion to his mother and hostility versus his father. Hitler was aware of his feelings and never thought of hiding them. All sources agree that he carried photographs of his mother at all times, until the last days of his life. In the cauldron of the final Russian attack on Berlin in April 1945, more than fifty years later, a framed photograph of his mother was the sole decoration of his bunker bedroom. Of his father, he spoke with fury or contempt.

As one would expect, it has been argued that a fixation on his mother as the unattainable ideal of womanhood destroyed his future relations to women; that he would subconsciously compare every other woman to his mother and consequently find them all wanting. A related theory held that he, unable to overcome this frustration, would develop homosexual tendencies. This theory perhaps confuses his friendship with Erich Röhm and the latter’s predilection for young and slim SA men with authenticity; anyway, no facts support the meretricious, not meritorious, theory. Hitler’s adult love life, as far as it will surface in this account, was less determined by his actual feelings for the young ladies themselves but his functions as revolutionary, party leader, chancellor and warlord that took up most of his time. Hitler met many women, and some were his mistresses, one of whom he married, in the end. Most, however, are best described as his “fans”, ardent supporters of his cause and person, socialites like Winifred Wagner, Unity Mitford or Helene Hanfstängl, who did him many favours and introduced him to the salons of the “better society”. He did go through a somewhat tragic love affair later in his life, which will be discussed in its proper place. Manifestly true is the observation that he was able to mobilize German women in his support as they had supported no other politician before him, but, then again, we don’t know how much of this support was based on erotic or maternal instincts. But the female vote was one of the pillars of his eventual success.

When the family followed the father to Linz in 1895, Adolf’s carefree life drew to a close. His father practised education by the standards of authoritative Austria and based his pedagogy on the cane – as it was the custom of the age. His stern character clashed easily and regularly with the imperfections he was wont to observe in the conduct of his two sons. From the spring of 1895 on, after Alois had decided to retire from His Majesty’s Customs Service, and spent most of his time at the family home, he had even more opportunity to correct the comportment of the children and hence father and sons collided even more often. Alois then bought a farm about thirty miles or fifty kilometres south-west of Linz, in the small village of Hafeld in the community of Fischlham near Lambach in Upper Austria. (3)

Hafeld was a tiny hamlet of about two dozen houses and harboured perhaps a hundred souls. If one remembers the hilly settings of “The Sound of Music”, one has a good impression of how the settlement must have looked like. A sub-alpine village high on a crest, between trees, orchards and meadows, accommodated the nine acres of Alois’ farm on a gentle ascension. The house, called the “Rauschergut” was pretty and substantial, laid out on a slight slope; split-level, Californians would call it, and featured a small apple orchard, stables for the cows and horses, and that great prerequisite for kids´ play on a farm, a hayloft. A rivulet completed the picture.

Yet there was one problem. Alois was a farmer by heart; he was an ardent beekeeper, loved the physical side of farming and the husbandry of animals. But he lacked a green thumb, or, perhaps, the soil wasn’t good. One theory has advanced that his retirement from public service was less than voluntary, but, again, nothing in the record supports such an allegation. He retired with full pension rights, and there is nothing to conclude that he was anything but a well-respected man; no indication that the move to Hafeld might have had ulterior motives. Yet another factor compromised the idyll for his younger son: life handed Adolf a new challenge by his enrolment in elementary school.

From September 1895 on, Adolf and Angela were scheduled to visit the tiny Volksschule, the primary school, in the village of Fischlham, three miles away. For the first time in his life, Adolf was separated from his mother and the village children, who had been his playmates. Adolf and Angela had to walk to school and back every day, about one hour in fine weather, much longer in winter. Due to the diminutive size of the population it served, the school in Fischlham was divided into two summary classes only, one for the boys and one for the girls.

One of the teachers, Herr Mittermaier, remembered the children in general, as pupils of the school, and Adolf in particular, because he was one of his students. He could clearly remember, he said, many decades later, that both of them kept the contents of their knapsacks in “exemplary order”, and that Adolf was “mentally very much alert, obedient, but lively.” (4)

In the first year, Adolf earned the highest marks for deportment, something he was not truly known for later. In “Mein Kampf”, he remembered:

“It was during these times that the first ideas formed in my breast. All that playing around in the open, the long way to school and my companionship with the rugged boys sometimes caused my mother grief and suffering, but that did not prevent me from being the opposite of a stay-at-home boy. And while I had hardly any thoughts of a future career at this time, I definitely had no sympathy for the direction my father’s career had taken. I imagine that even my talent for speaking in public came about through the more or less savage arguments that I often had with my school buddies. I had become a little ringleader and learned quite easily and well at school, but in other respects, I became quite difficult to handle.” (5)

Indeed, this passage seems to have been written straight from the heart. If true, it might evidence that, even as a boy, he was able to relate and defend his own ideas. What all sources agree on is that he was the ringleader at play, whether it was Cowboys and Indians or Boers versus Englishmen, a boy terror with a fast mouth, and busy with mischief. To Alois Jr., Hafeld proved a rough environment. The closeness of village life led to frequent arguments with his father. Alois Sr. worked long hours every day, but the barren soil rendered most of his labours fruitless and caused him frustration that all too readily turned to anger. In addition, Klara had given birth to little Paula in the fall of 1898, and the household now comprised five children. The distress over the farm may not have much improved the father’s patience.

Since he had given up his profession, Alois was very much of a presence on the farm and in the village, looming over his family with stern and unforgiving authority. As far as physical punishments are concerned, the sources disagree. The sons both complained about the beatings the father supposedly provided, Adolf remarked, “with a hippopotamus whip.” (6) On the other hand, Adolf’s future warden and burgomaster of Leonding, Josef Mayrhofer, who knew the family well, claimed that Alois’ bark was worse than his bite. We must keep here in mind that beatings, in liberal amounts and with frequent repetition, were deemed a disciplinarian’s panacea, instilling morale, obedience and character.

Alois Jr. alleged that the punishments happened on an irregular schedule, independent of cause and effect, which, if it were true, would indicate that alcohol played a role. Sometimes, he said, there were beatings for Adolf as well, or the dog, and he alleged that, on occasion, Klara also fell victim to her husband’s grim. If such scenes truly happened, they may have had strong psychological implications for young Adolf. Alois Jr. characterized his father as follows:

“He was imperious and quick to anger from childhood onward and would not listen to anyone. My stepmother always took his part. He would get the craziest notions and get away with it. If he didn’t have his way, he got very angry. … He had no friends, took to no one and could be very heartless. He could fly into a rage over every triviality.” (7)

Yet the elder son kept his own opinions, and was in the habit of defending them, and “after fierce fights with his father, fourteen-year-old Alois Jr. left the home in Hafeld and was disinherited.” (8) The family house, however, did not remain the only place where Alois Jr. found trouble. Four years later, in the year 1900, he was arrested, convicted of theft and sentenced to five months in jail. He received another such sentence later, this time for eight months. Like his possible grandfather Johann Georg Hiedler, he became a vagrant and earned meagre wages as a waiter in various countries: from Austria to Germany, from Germany to France, and from France, in 1909, to Ireland. Dublin, however, could not hold him any longer than other towns had, and the following year, 1910, finds him in Liverpool, where he became the proprietor of a small restaurant.

It was in this town that he married the buxom Irish lass Elizabeth Dowling, who bore him a son whom he named William Patrick. In early 1924, Alois Jr. went back to Germany, albeit without his family whom he, perhaps, considered an unnecessary burden. He resettled in Hamburg, but the old Hanseatic town got the better of him: a second marriage, undertaken without a prior divorce from Elizabeth, sent him to prison again, for bigamy, six months this time.

After his half-brother Adolf’s career had taken off in 1933, Alois materialized in Berlin, where he opened a bar and restaurant on the Wittenbergplatz, near the heart of the city’s nightlife. His eventual clientele, most of them Nazis, SS or SA officers, knew exactly what his family relations were. Although it could never be determined exactly whether these excellent connections now helped or not, the customers of Café Alois believed in them and the establishment was a success. Alois survived the war and his brother, but the prominence of the family name may have got a bit too close to him, or perhaps some of his former wives were on the hunt for outstanding alimony payments: at any rate, Alois Jr. changed his name to Hans Hiller and disappeared from history, although he lived until 1956. Adolf’s younger sister Paula was a quiet and docile girl. She never appeared in the limelight, never married, and lived in obscurity until her death in 1960.

The urge to change places frequently, Alois Jr. had certainly acquired from his father. His friend August Kubizek remembered what Adolf had told him about the family’s movements:

During his [Alois Sr.] period of service in Braunau, there are recorded twelve changes of address; probably there were more. During the two years in Passau, he moved house twice. Soon after his retirement, he moved from Linz to Hafeld, from there to Lambach – first in the Leingarner Inn, then to the mill of the Schweigbach Forge, that is to say, two changes in one year – then to Leonding. When I first met Adolf he remembered seven removals and had been to five different schools. (9)

(1) (2) Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889 – 1936: Hubris, W.W. Norton & Company 2000, ISBN 0-393-32035-9 (pbk.), p. 11

(3) (8) Hamann, Brigitte, Hitler’s Vienna, 1st Ed. Oxford UP 1999, Tauris Parks 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8 (pbk.), p.8, 8

(4) (6) (7) Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1992, ISBN 0-385-42053-6 (pbk.), p. 8,9,9

(5) Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf [German Edition], Eher Verlag, Munich 1924, p.3

(9) Kubizek, August, The Young Hitler I Knew, Arcade Books 2011, ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3 (pbk.), p. 54

To Be Continued: Schooldays in Lambach, Leonding and Linz

In Austria before the War

By John Vincent Palatine

On May 29, 2019

In Adolf Hitler

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… THERE LIVED A WELL RESPECTED FAMILY

The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline.

William Armstrong

In the Year of the Lord 1889, the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday and forty-first anniversary of his reign over the vast Empire of Austria and Hungary; when he died, in 1916, he had ruled the state for sixty-eight years. The realm was huge – covering over 180,000 square miles or about 450,000 square kilometres. The emperor’s domains stretched, in the east-west axis, from Czernowitz on the Prut River in today’s Ukraine to Vorarlberg near the Swiss border, and, in the north-south axis, from the lower Elbe River near Aussig to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in southern Croatia, two-thirds down the eastern Adriatic coast.

Ethnically and thus politically, however, these territories were hopelessly divided. The racial diversity of the Imperial population included Germans in Austria, Hungary and the Sudetenland; Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia; Slovaks to their east; Poles in western Galicia and Ruthenians, Catholic Ukrainians, in the eastern part of it; Magyars in Hungary and Transylvania interspersed with some more Germans and Romanians; Slovenes, Friulians and Italians south of the Julian Alps; and finally Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrinos and Serbs in and around the Balkan mountains.

All these groups fought incessant but mostly inconclusive battles over appointments, representation and influence in the empire and its court, while a laborious civil administration struggled with the actual governance of the multitudes. The exceptionally long reign of Francis Joseph had much aided the ossification of the Imperial structures, which, given the Habsburgs’ reverence for tradition, were conservative, to say the least; pre-modern, and reactionary.

Yet on the outside things appeared fit for eternity. Stefan Zweig, one of Vienna’s famous sons, describes the peculiar atmosphere of town and country:

When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-years-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanence, and the state itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed.

Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, as assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer, for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year he would be advanced in rank, or when he would be pensioned.

Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for holidays and entertainment; and what is more, invariably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctor’s bills, for the unexpected.

Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings’ bank, as a “reserve” for the future. In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovable in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, one knew (or believed), another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical, all violence seemed impossible in an age of reason.

This feeling of security was the most eagerly sought-after possession of millions, the common ideal of life. Only the possession of this security made life seem worthwhile, and constant widening circles desired their share of this costly treasure.

At first, it was only the prosperous who enjoyed this advantage, but gradually the great masses forced their way toward it. The century of security became the golden age of insurance. One’s house was insured against fire or theft, one’s field against hail and storm, one’s person against accident or sickness. Annuities were purchased for one’s old age, and a policy was laid in a girl’s cradle for her future dowry. Finally, even the workers organized, and won standard wages and workman’s compensation. Servants saved for old-age insurance and paid in advance into a burial fund for their own interment. Only the man who could look into the future without worry could thoroughly enjoy the present. (1)

This peaceful state of bliss, however, did not necessarily embrace the whole empire; a new age has brought forth anarchists and socialists. Neither was the status of the rural poor much to write home about. Yet law and order were generally held in high regard for the safety and continuity of society they implied. Into this world of order, a son, whom she named Alois, was born, on the morning of June 7, 1837, out of wedlock, to the peasant maid Maria Anna Schicklgruber in the hamlet of Strones in the Austrian Waldviertel.

The Waldviertel, which literally translates as the “Wooden Quarter” or “Forest Quarter”, was one of the Austrian monarchy’s backwaters, a hilly “country of peasant villages and small farms, and though only some fifty miles from Vienna it has a somewhat remote and impoverished air, as if the main currents of Austrian life had passed it by.” (2) It is located slightly north-east of Linz, respectively north-west of Vienna, between the Danube River and the Czech border in the direction of Brno. It is a borderland and has seen its shares of marauding armies over the centuries. German tribes on the way to the treasures and temptations of the Roman Empire had crossed through the land which the Romans called “Noricum”, followed by the Huns, various tribes of Goths, the Hungarians and finally the Turks. It had seen armies in the Thirty-Years-War and the Napoleonic Wars; only after the Congress of Vienna a century of peace graced its gently rolling hills.

The name “Hitler”, variably spelled “Hidler”, “Hiedler”, “Hüttler”, “Hietler”, “Hytler” or “Hittler” was one of the more common names in the district. It is documented as early as 1435, when the Abbot of the Herzogenburg Monastery drew up a deed granting to Hannsen Hydler and his wife property near Raabs, on the Thaya River. (3) The etymology of the name indicates a possible derivation from the German word “Heide” [in English “heather”, relating to a meadow], of which the Waldviertel was full. All of Alois’ life occurred within a radius of one hundred miles of Linz, then as now the capital of the province of Oberösterreich, Upper Austria.

Little is known about Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandmother Maria Schicklgruber. The tiny village of Strones where she lived was far too small to be a parish of its own, and thus baby Alois had to be registered in the slightly bigger village of Döllersheim, a couple of miles to the north-west. It was generally known that the baby was born out of wedlock and therefore was, strictly speaking, “illegitimate”. Many theories have been spun and explanations offered in which this circumstance supposedly played the one or other role in Alois Hitler’s life or in that of his son Adolf, and they are all bunkum. The reality of the Waldviertel dictated that “legitimacy” was a concept the peasants simply could not afford to pay heed to, and which occasioned no advantages in their daily lives. “Illegitimacy” might have been a significant problem for the heir of a throne or the prospective owner of land, a shop or business, but not to farmhands and share croppers. It was a common occurrence, and there is not the slightest indication that Alois ever suffered from an imagined stigma attached to it. There were no empires to bestow on Alois, and his son took them regardless of a court’s permission.

Another disparaging theory was circulated in the early 1930s regarding Adolf Hitler’s parental grandfather. Alois, the rumours held, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Jewish merchant from Graz named Frankenberger or Frankenreither, who had seduced Maria, who was working as a maid in his household – in a variation of the theme, the merchant’s son was the debaucher, and his father paid for the girl’s discretion.

Such a story, if true, would naturally be a feast for Hitler’s political enemies. After a few Austrian newspapers had come up with it during the German general election campaign of 1930, the allegations resurfaced when Hitler ran for German president against Hindenburg in 1932. At length, Hitler dispatched his legal counsellor Hans Frank to investigate. The lawyer was told that the nineteen-year-old son of a Mr. Frankenberger from Graz was the culprit, whose father had allegedly paid alimonies to Fräulein Schicklgruber for fourteen years; a variance of the story had Mr. Frankenberger and his lecherous son in Linz, not Graz. There was, however, not a shred of evidence available in either town, no trace of payments, and hence the story slowly died. Research in the Austrian and Jewish records of Graz and Linz undertaken after 1945 established conclusively that no Jewish families had been allowed to settle in either town before the 1860s, twenty years after Alois’ birth. Neither were there any Frankenbergers or Frankenreiters at all, and thus the bottom fell out of the story for good.

Photograph rumoured to show Alois’ Birthplace

The first five years of Alois Schicklgruber’s life were spent in Strones with his mother, who married, in 1842, a seldom employed millworker named Johann Georg Hiedler from the nearby hamlet of Spital near Weitra. [FN1] The marriage seems not to have changed much: the couple lived in abject poverty, and after Maria died five years later of tuberculosis and Johann Georg re-entered the vagrant lifestyle, the child passed into the wardship of Johann Georg Hiedler’s brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler of Spital, House # 36. This wardship gave rise to a fair amount of village gossip: rumour control asserted that Johann Nepomuk was, in fact, the biological father of the boy.

[FN1] The name “Spital” is a common name for Austrian villages and towns, and the village of Spital in Lower Austria, which plays a role here, must not be confused with the town of Spital in Carinthia, whither, for example, historian Marlis Steinert puts Johann Nepomuk Hüttler.

Nobody knows who Alois’ father truly was, and it is possible that Maria did not know herself. In this time and place, sexual relations among farmhands were essentially unregulated, babies born out of wedlock numerous and considered welcome additions to the work force if they survived early childhood.

More interesting than idle speculation about the identity of Adolf Hitler’s grandfather is the question of why Alois’ original birth certificate underwent rewriting, tampering and forgery in the summer of 1876, when he was already thirty- nine years old. What had happened in the meantime that could explain such an act?

In 1850, at the age of thirteen, Alois ran away from home, a fact that allows an inference or two about the circumstances or happiness of his childhood. He fled to Vienna, where he quickly found employment as apprentice to a cobbler. He finished, as far as we know, the four years standard apprenticeship and became a shoemaker, but soon quit this profession and enlisted in the Austrian civil service. He passed the entrance examination, which seems quite an achievement since he had enjoyed little schooling at home, and was accepted to serve in the Customs division of the Austrian financial administration. In “Mein Kampf“, son Adolf described his father’s arrival in the Austrian capital as follows:

“As the son of a poor cottager, he [Alois] could not even in those early days bear to stay at home. Before he was thirteen, the youngster laced his tiny knapsack and fled from his homeland, the Waldviertel. Despite all the attempts of “experienced” villagers to dissuade him, he made his own way to Vienna in order to learn a trade.

This was in the fifties of the last century. It was a bitter decision to take the road and plunge into the unknown with only three Gulden for travel money. But by the time the thirteen-year-old had grown to seventeen, he had passed his apprentice’s examination [as a cobbler], but was not yet content with his lot – quite to the contrary. The long period of hardship, the endless poverty and misery he had suffered, strengthened his determination to give up the trade in order to become something “better”.

Once the village priest had seemed to the poor boy the embodiment of all humanly attainable heights, so now, in the great city, which had so powerfully widened his perspective, it was the rank of civil servant. With all the tenacity of a young man, who had grown “old” in suffering and sorrow while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old clung to his new decision – and he became a civil servant.” (4)

These words must be read with the knowledge that Adolf Hitler was on the record to regard his father with feelings closer to hate than love, but here he attempts to draw a picture of success, which was to contrast sharply to the opinions he shared in private, or at his headquarters’ dinner tables in the Second World War. More than from the laundered account of his father in “Mein Kampf” we can infer, regarding the happiness of the family Adolf grew up in, from the fact that Alois’ first son Alois Jr., Adolf’s half-brother, left this home at the same age of thirteen as his father had, never to return.

Meanwhile, the stations of Alois Schicklgruber’s rise to a somewhat respectable position in the Customs department – the highest to which he could aspire, given his limited education – followed the predictable patterns of civil service careers; that is, moving through the ranks and around the country. Originally attached as a most junior servant to the Austrian Ministry of Finance in 1855, he was relatively quickly promoted. In the year 1861 we find him as a supervisor in Saalfelden, Tyrolia, and in 1864 as an assistant in the bigger Customs office in Linz. In 1870, he was moved again, to Mariahilf, a change that was sweetened by a promotion to assistant collector. A year later he arrived in the small border town of Braunau at the Inn River, with the rank of Senior Assistant; he grew to like the little town and stayed for almost two decades. In 1875, he was promoted to Assistant Customs Inspector. His career was not spectacular per se, but it was a decent calling for a man of his origins and, apparently, that was what his family thought when they concocted a scheme to bestow upon him a dollop of enhanced respectability.

On June 6, 1876, Alois and three of his friends – Josef Romeder, who was one of Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s sons- in-law, Johann Breiteneder and Engelbert Paukh – paid a visit to the public notary Josef Penkner in the small town of Weitra, not far from Alois’ birthplace Strones. The notary was paid to prepare for Alois a “LEGALISIRUNGS-PROTOCOLL“, a protocol of legitimization for his birth. The three friends attested that Johann Georg Hiedler, he of the vagrant lifestyle (whom they had known well, they said), had attested to them at various times that he was, in fact, the biological father of Alois Schicklgruber, whom he planned to legitimize one day. The document was drawn up, the witnesses signed, but for a reason that remains unexplained, the paper featured Alois’ new family name in the form “Hitler”, not as “Hiedler” or “Hüttler”. Beweaponed with this document, the posse made its way to the little town of Döllersheim on the next morning, where they paid a visit to the local priest, Father Josef Zahnschirm, upon whom they played a “cunning peasant trick”. (5)

On the power of the notarized document, and perhaps a contribution to the church funds, Father Zahnschirm agreed to make a few changes to Alois Schicklgruber’s baptismal record. The original birth certificate featured blanks in the space for the name of the father and the field for remarks. The blanks were now filled by entering “Georg Hitler. Cat.rel., Living in Spital” as the father, and under “Remarks” that …

“The undersigned witnesses hereby confirm that Georg Hitler, who was well-known to them, acknowledged paternity of the child Alois, son of Anna Schicklgruber, and they requested that his name be entered in the baptismal register. +++ Josef Romeder, Witness, +++ Johann Breiteneder, Witness, +++ Engelbert Paukh, Witness.” (6)

Legalisierungs-Protocoll by Notary Josef Penkner (Joachimsthaler, Anton, “Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913 – 1923”, Herbig-Verlag, ISBN 3-7766-2155-9, p. 15

Speculations about this mission abound. Some private family business may have played a role; rumours tied Johann Nepomuk Hüttler, who had been so conspicuously absent in Weitra and Döllersheim, into the drama; “There was village gossip that Alois was his natural son.” (7)

The net result of the clandestine affair was that Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler. Father Zahnschirm had clearly been lied to when he was told that Johann Georg Hiedler was still alive [“Living in Spital“], but the churchman may have had his own thoughts about the procedure from the beginning, as had, apparently, the witnesses: the priest “forgot” to date and sign for the changes, and the witnesses had turned illiterate, signing with crosses, which could be explained as errors, should the need arise. The climax of the play came when the improved birth certificate was registered at the nearest Austrian chancery in Mistelbach. [FN2]

[FN2] Marlis Steinert followed up on the Austrian government’s subsequent authentication of the fraud: “A correspondence between the priest, the communal administration and the Financial Office in Braunau confirmed the legal validation of the document per matrimonium subsequens [due to Georg’s marriage to Maria Anna five years after Alois’ birth], citing a decree of the Ministry of the Interior in Vienna from September 12, 1868, in which such legitimations should be granted as far as possible.” (9)

The formerly illegitimate Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler, civil servant and owner of a gold-buttoned uniform; when he, half a year after Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s death, bought a farm for the proud sum of five thousand florins in cash; the village gossip nodding – conclusions confirmed.

Alois had gone through a number of romantic entanglements in his life, and had sampled experience in holy matrimony as well. He had married for the first time on October 1873 at thirty-six years of age, although it seems that at this time he had already fathered a child in a different relation. (8) At any rate, the marriage seems to have been built on reasons superior to love alone: the bride, Anna Glassl-Hoerer, was the daughter of a high-ranking financial officer, an inspector in the Treasury’s Bureau of Tobacco, fourteen years older than her husband and of ill health. Nobody would have been surprised had status and finances played a role in the match.

Due to the frequent changes of assignment, Alois had made it a habit to lodge in Gasthäusern, inns, for the greater part of his life, and these lodgings brought him into daily contact with waitresses, chambermaids, laundresses and tobacco girls, whether he liked it or not. Apparently he did not mind, and he did possess the most important condition to warrant female attention, a steady job and hence a steady income. By the time Anna filed for separation in 1880, perhaps tired of his infidelities, he had quite openly conducted an affair with the waitress of the Gasthaus Streif, a girl named Franziska (Fanny) Matzelsberger, for some time.

Yet the relation to Fanny did not preclude Alois, as it seems, from experiencing an urgent need for another maidservant, and he soon installed another young girl of sixteen years in his mansard under the roof of the inn; a slender, attractive girl named Klara Pölzl. The idea met with the furious opposition from Franziska, who had zero doubt about the nature of the services Klara would be asked to perform for Alois, and she succeeded in having the competition thrown out quickly. In due time Franziska bore a son to Alois Hitler, who was named Alois Junior, on January 13, 1882. When Anna, who had in the meantime obtained a legal decree of separation, died in the following year of consumption, Alois was free to marry Franziska. She soon bore Alois another child, a girl named Angela.

Alois’ Workplace – the Customs Station at the Inn River Bridge …

At this time Alois officially decided to accept the paternity of the children and had Alois Jr. and Angela legitimized. It was an outward sign of his striving for recognition and respectability, which were what counted in this deeply authoritative society. He had a gratifying career and money to spend; he earned more than, for instance, the local school principal. He was in his “best years” and loved to have his photo taken, in uniform. A question remains as far as the sympathies of his colleagues at work are concerned; one source describes him as “rigid and pedantic“, yet these would be qualities his employer might favour and may explain his success. In a letter to a cousin who had inquired about a job for his son, Alois drew the following portrait of himself and his profession:

“Don’t let him think that the ‘Finanzwach’ [Fiscal Service] is a kind of game, because he will quickly be disillusioned. First, he has to show absolute obedience to his superiors at all levels. Second, there is a good deal to learn in this occupation, all the more so if he had little previous education. Topers, debtors, card players, and others who lead immoral lives cannot enlist. Finally, one has to go out on duty in all weathers, day or night.” (10)

Characteristically, Alois’ enumeration of “immoral” lifestyles did not include dubious and perhaps illicit contacts to waitresses and chambermaids, nor illegitimate babies. But a shadow soon appeared on his private horizon; a short time after giving birth to Angela, Franziska developed tuberculosis, as Anna had, and was forced to leave Braunau to seek a cure in mountain air. Alois was suddenly left alone with two small children on the top floor of the inn, and since his career as Customs official had not prepared him for the care of toddlers, he reimported Klara as soon as Franziska had left town. Klara Pölzl was actually Johann Nepomuk Hüttler’s granddaughter, and therefore Alois’ niece, in the context of which the closeness of family relations in the Waldviertel may be observed again. One photo of Klara has survived. She was tall and slender, almost as tall as her husband, had very regular and attractive features framed by brown hair; not a beauty but what is called in France a “belle laide”, an interesting girl. The outstanding aspect of her face was certainly her voluminous turquoise eyes. By all accounts she was neat, simple, and loving. Her education was close to nil, but, then again, the sources agree that she behaved correctly in public and had no problems with the role of being the common-law wife of a Customs official. In private, she was known as a most efficient housekeeper, cook, organizer, and nurse to the children.

The community in Braunau accepted her without qualms, which is somewhat surprising: it was one of these little towns in which the neighbours take an interest in everything that is not their business. In the summer of 1884, Franziska died of consumption, as Anna had earlier, and Klara was already pregnant. Alois wanted to marry her, but now the manipulation of the birth certificate backfired: since the former Alois Schicklgruber was now Alois Hitler, he was officially Klara’s uncle and no marriage was possible under the laws of the Austrian Catholic church unless a dispensation was granted. With the aid of the local priest, Alois composed a letter to the Bishop of Linz, which has survived:

“Most Revered Episcopate!

Those who with most humble devotion have appended their signatures below have decided upon marriage. But according to the enclosed family tree, they are prevented by the canonical impediment of collateral affinity in the third degree, touching second. They therefore make the humble request that the Most Revered Episcopate will graciously secure for them a dispensation on the following grounds:

The bridegroom has been a widower since August 10th of this year, as can be observed from the enclosed death certificate, and he is the father of two minors, a boy of two and a half years (Alois) and a girl of one year and two months (Angela), and they both need the services of a nurse, all the more because he is a Customs official away from home all day and often at night and therefore in no position to supervise the education and upbringing of his children. The bride has been caring for these children ever since their mother’s death, and they are very fond of her.

Thus, it may be justifiably assumed that they will be well brought up and the marriage will be a happy one. Moreover, the bride is without means, and it is unlikely that she will ever have another opportunity to make a good marriage. For these reasons the undersigned repeat their humble petition for a gracious procurement of dispensation from the impediment of affinity.

Braunau am Inn, 27. October 1884

Alois Hitler, Bridegroom – Klara Pölzl, Bride” (11)

Enclosed was a version of the family tree, which presented Alois Hitler as the son of Johann Georg Hiedler, the vagrant, whose brother Johann Nepomuk Hüttler was the grandfather of Klara Pölzl, the bride. We will have the opportunity to encounter a letter or two written by the young Adolf, Alois’ son, in a later post, and they will sound oddly similar in diction and style to the epistle above. Alois’ petition for a dispensation reeks of the same sort of not very sublime deception that he had employed in the “improvement” of his original birth certificate; what John Toland had called the “cunning peasant trick“. The son was to employ similar tactics in his own time.

The addressee, the Bishop of Linz, hesitated, and decided, following proper bureaucratic procedure, to call upon a higher authority. A short summary of the case, including the original letter, family tree and a “testimonium paupertatis“, an instrument of declaring poverty which waived the payment of the usual fees, was forwarded to the Sacra Rota, the department of the Holy See that deals with matrimonial issues. The Vatican apparently cared as much or little about a wee bit of incest in Braunau as the peasants of the Waldviertel cared about legitimacy, and the release was granted three weeks later.

Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl were married on January 7, 1885. The ceremony took place in the morning, in a hurry, it seems: Klara complained that before noon, “my husband was already on duty again.” (12) Later in the evening, a small banquet in the company of Alois’ Customs colleagues followed at the Gasthaus Pommer.

The Gasthaus Pommer in 1934 (with Nazi Flag), in which the couple also took residence

Marriage hardly changed anything in their lives. The pair had known each other for years, and Klara was accustomed to her duties in the household. She was a simple but quiet, modest and polite woman that never put up demands on her husband, the children, or the community. She was deeply religious and attended services regularly. The family lived without any trace of scandal, even Alois’ private investigations into the lives of the local waitresses and chambermaids seemed to abate. Money was not plenty but sufficient to afford the family a proper living standard, and they played their parts in the community without fail.

If we gaze at Klara’s photograph, taken when she was about twenty-six, we look into the face of a simple but pleasant country girl. The most impressive feature of her face are indeed her luminous, expressive eyes. Robert Payne observed:

In the photograph she looks vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. She was a spirited woman, who could, if necessary, stand up to her husband. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense, but her face suggests an uncommon gentleness and tenderness, an essential goodness. She was one of these women who live for their husbands, their children, and their faith. (13)

She was to bear six children to Alois, four sons and two daughters, of which one each survived childhood. The elder children Alois Jr. and Angela were joined by Adolf in April 1889 and Paula in January 1896. Four children died young: Gustav at the age of two; Ida at the same age; Otto died in the cradle, and Edmund in his sixth year. [FN3]

[FN3] It seems that the fate of the Hitler family was no exception. A boyhood friend of Adolf, August Kubizek, described the early trials of his freshly-married parents as follows: “At first the young couple lived in the house of my mother’s parents. My father’s wages were low, the work was hard, and my mother had to give up her job when she was expecting me. Thus, I was born in rather miserable circumstances. One year later my sister Maria was born, but died at a tender age. The following year, Therese appeared; she died at the age of four. My third sister, Karoline, fell desperately ill, lingered on for some years, and died when she was eight. My mother’s grief was boundless. Throughout her life she suffered from the fear of losing me, too; for I was the only one left to her of her four children.” (14)

At this point in time and place, such a mortality rate was considered almost normal. Children were born and died by the thousands, of measles, diphtheria, pneumonia and other common childhood diseases; deadly in a time which knew not yet sulphonamides or penicillin. The family was in the care of Dr. Eduard Bloch, a general practitioner, but the science of microbiology was not yet invented and the invisible agents of death prospered unhindered.

In general, however, it was a respectable and orderly family which welcomed, at six o’clock in the evening of April 20, 1889, its newest member, Adolfus.

Announcement of Birth in the local newspaper …

(1) Zweig, Stefan Die Welt von Gestern, Gutenberg, Kap.3

(2) Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon & Schuster 1960, ISBN 978-1-4516-4259-9 (hc.), S. 7

(3) (6) (10) (11) (13) Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Praeger Publishers 1973, Lib. Con. 72- 92891 (hc.), S. 5, S. 6-7, S. 10, S. 12, S. 14

(5) (7) (12) Toland, John, Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1992, ISBN 0-385-42053-6 (pbk.), S. 4, S. 4, S. 6

(8) (9) Steinert, Marlis, Hitler, C.H. Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-37640-1 (hc.), S. 17, S. 18

(14) Kubizek, August, The Young Hitler I Knew, Arcade Books 2011, ISBN 978-1-61145-058-3 (pbk.), S. 23

The Beer Hall Putsch

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 30, 2019

In Adolf Hitler

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Illustration in the Nazi paper “Der Stürmer”

Video of the Scenery

Video with some archival material on YouTube

Video Montage of the Putsch

Post on the website War-Documentary-Info

Contemporary newspaper article links (courtesy of the Austrian National Library)

Neues 8-Uhr Blatt

Reichspost Vienna, November 9

Prager Tagblatt , November 10

As John Heineman reports, by early November 1923, the political and economic conditions in Bavaria – and much of Germany – was chaotic. In Munich, Minister-President Kahr – endowed with dictatorial powers – had declared a state of emergency and suspended the elected Bavarian Parliament. He began negotiations with a number of anti-Republican groups but seemed prepared to wait for the right moment to declare Bavarian independence and restore the monarchy.

Munich – a meeting of the NSDAP in the Bürgerbräukeller, about 1923

Having fired the enthusiasm and expectations of his followers up to fever pitch in the days after the German Day in Coburg, Hitler could not wait because he suspected the economic crisis would not last forever. With the appointment of [new Secretary of Treasury] Schacht there were signs that the national government in Berlin was getting ready to move on the hyper-inflation. Once conditions returned to normal, Hitler knew he may have lost his opportunity forever. He decided, therefore, to manipulate the situation so that Kahr and his co-conspirators, General von Lossow (Reichswehr commander of the Bavarian District) and Colonel von Seisser (head of the Bavarian Landespolizei [paramilitary State Police]) would be forced to join him. For the evening of 8 November, these three leaders had scheduled a public meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, a big Munich beer cellar, in order to protest the growth of Bolshevism in Germany and, perhaps, start their own takeover. Kahr was to speak and all the leading citizens of Munich were to be present. Hitler secretly surrounded the hall with some six hundred armed SA men, bursting in and interrupting Kahr’s speech, to announce “the beginning of a national revolution. Exiled Nazi Otto Strasser described the beginnings of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in “Hitler and I”, first published in 1940:

The conspirators [Hitler, Goering, Röhm, Gregor Strasser, Hess, Streicher, Frick and possibly Himmler], met every evening in the private rooms of the Bürgerbräu [Bürgerbräukeller], a Munich brasserie and restaurant, which also had a big hall for public meetings.
Hitler therefore decided to force their hand. The date of the putsch was originally fixed for the 10th and 11th of November, [1923]. But at the last moment, learning that von Kahr was holding a meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller at which he was to make a speech on the programme of the Bavarian Monarchists, Hitler altered the date. November 8 was solemnly fixed as the historic date of the German Revolution.
Hitler’s instinct ought to have told him that it would have been better to have left these aged servants of a decrepit regime out of it. Both Kahr, Lossow and Seisser had served under the Kaiser. In spite of incessant discussions, which dragged on for week after week, no serious steps had yet been taken by Hermann Goering. But Hitler wanted action, and with a handful of followers proposed taking the risk of compromising the great German national revolution forever.
Hitler had six hundred men. Gregor Strasser, warned late, assembled three hundred and fifty stormtroopers at Landshut and led them to Munich. General Ludendorff, who had not been kept informed of what was going on, was at Ludwigshöhe, where a motorcar was hurriedly sent to fetch him.
On the fatal day Adolf wore a frock-coat, on which he pinned his Iron Cross. He proposed bursting into the hall at the head of his men while paramilitary detachments surrounded the building, whereupon von Kahr, before even beginning his speech, would be forced to surrender to the insistence of the heavily armed putschists. ‘He cannot help joining us,’ Hitler said to Scheubner-Richter, whose mission it was to fetch General Ludendorff to Munich. ‘Once Kahr is persuaded the others will follow.’
Strong in this conviction, Adolf gravely got into the car that took him to the Bürgerbräukeller. At the entrance the young fanatic with the Iron Cross kept asking to speak to Governor Kahr, but the dense crowd refused to let him pass. He was pale and trembling, and looked like a madman. Inside the hall the meeting had already begun and von Kahr had started his speech.
Hitler hesitated, but it was too late to go back. He listened, and could hear the steps of his faithful shock-troops. ‘Clear the vestibule!’ he ordered the policeman on duty at the entrance. Impressed by the Iron Cross, the policeman obeyed. A few minutes later the stormtroopers marched in. Adolf waited for them with his eyes closed and his hands in his pockets, where there was a revolver. He felt the eyes of his young men upon him, but he had not yet decided what to do if his coup failed and the triumvirate refused to march with him.
Like a maniac he burst into the hall, where three thousand Bavarians, seated before their beer-mugs, were listening to the unctuous oratory of von Kahr. Adolf jumped on to a chair, fired his revolver at the ceiling, and shouted, his hoarse voice half-quenched with excitement:
‘The National Revolution has begun!’
http://www.georgelser.info/burgerbraukeller/4593470131

Karl Alexander von Müller, a contemporary Munich historian, was present, and wrote later:

Herr von Kahr had spoken for half an hour. Then there was movement at the entrance as if people were wanting to push their way in. Despite several warnings, the disturbance did not die
Eventually, steel helmets came into sight. From this moment on, the view from my seat was rather obscured. People stood on chairs so that I didn’t see Hitler until he had come fairly near along the main gangway; just before he turned to the platform, I saw him emerge between two armed soldiers in steel helmets who carried pistols next to their heads, pointing at the ceiling. They turned towards the platform, Hitler climbed on to a chair on my left. The hall was still restless, and then Hitler made a sign to the man on his right, who fired a shot at the ceiling. Thereupon Hitler called out (I cannot recollect the exact order of his words): “The national revolution has broken out. The hall is surrounded.” Maybe he mentioned the exact number, I am not sure. He asked the gentlemen Kahr, Lossow, Seisser to come out and guaranteed their personal freedom. The gentlemen did not move. The General State Commissioner [Kahr] had stepped back and stood opposite Hitler, looking at him calmly. Then Hitler went towards the platform. What happened I could not see exactly; I heard him talk to the gentlemen and I heard the words: Everything would be over in ten minutes if the gentlemen would go out with him. To my surprise the three gentlemen went out with him immediately….
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Weimar.html

The official Bavarian Political Police Report on the Events of 8 November 1923 then described the happenings as follows:

After the three gentlemen had entered the room, Adolf Hitler called out: “No one leaves the room alive without my permission.” At the door a member of the bodyguard walked up and down continually, holding a pistol. Then Hitler turned to Excellency von Kahr with the statement: “The [new] Reich Government has been formed, the Bavarian Government has been overthrown. Bavaria is the springboard for the Reich Government. There must be a Reich governor in Bavaria. Pöhner [the Police chief of Munich and sympathetic to the Nazis] is to become Minister-President with dictatorial powers. You will be Reich Governor. Reich Government—Hitler; national army—Ludendorff; Lossow—army minister; Seisser—police minister.
“I know this step is a difficult one for you, gentlemen, but the step must be taken, it must be made easier for the other gentlemen to make the leap. Everybody must take up the post which he is allotted. If he does not, then he has no right to exist. You must fight with me, achieve victory with me, or die with me. If things go wrong, I have four bullets in my pistol, three for my colleagues if they desert me, the last bullet for myself.” While saying this, he put the pistol which he had been holding all the time to his head. While he was speaking to Excellency von Kahr, he noticed Major Hunglinger [General Seisser’s aide] in the room and motioned with his hand for him to leave.
Kahr declared to Herr Hitler: “You can arrest me, you can have me shot, you can shoot me yourself. Whether I live or die is unimportant.” Whereupon Hitler turned to Colonel von Seisser who accused him of not keeping his promise [not to attempt a putsch.] Hitler replied: “Yes, that’s true, but I did it in the interests of the fatherland. Forgive me.”
Herr von Lossow tried to say something to the other two gentlemen. But this was prevented by a shout: “You gentlemen are not allowed to talk to one another.” Lossow then stepped back to the window, disgusted with the proceedings. While looking out between the curtains, he noticed in front of every window a group of armed men, some of whom looked into the room with their guns at the ready. Hitler, who clearly saw the unpleasant impression this made, waved them away with his hand. Excellency von Lossow asked: “What is Ludendorff’s attitude to the affair?” Hitler replied: “Ludendorff is ready and will soon be fetched.” Hitler then left the room. He got no answer during this time, either from Herr von Kahr or from the other gentlemen….
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Weimar.html

Historian von Müller continued:

The general mood—I can of course only judge from my surroundings, but I think that this represented the general feeling in the hall—was still against the whole business. One heard: “Theatrical!” “South America!” “Mexico!” That was the prevailing mood. The change came only during Hitler’s second speech when he entered about ten minutes later, went to the platform and made a short speech. It was a rhetorical masterpiece. In fact, in a few sentences it totally transformed the mood of the audience. I have rarely experienced anything like it. When he stepped on to the platform the disturbance was so great that he could not be heard, and he fired a shot. I can still see the gesture. He got the Browning out of his back pocket and I think it was on this occasion that the remark about the machine gun was made. When things did not become quiet, he shouted angrily at the audience: “If you are not quiet, I shall have a machine gun put up on the gallery.” In fact he had come in to say that his prediction of everything being over in ten minutes had not come true. But he said it in such a way that he finally went out with the permission of the audience to say to Kahr that the whole assembly would be behind him if he were to join. It was a complete reversal. One could hear it being said that the whole thing had been arranged, that it was a phoney performance. I did not share this opinion because Kahr’s attitude seemed to contradict it. Seeing him at close quarters, one got the impression of confusion, of great dismay….
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Weimar.html

Then war hero Ludendorff appeared, according to the Bavarian Political Police Report of the Meeting:

Ludendorff then entered the room in a hat and coat and, without asking any questions, with obvious excitement and with a trembling voice, declared: “Gentlemen I am just as surprised as you are. But the step has been taken; it is a question of the fatherland and the great national and Völkisch cause, and I can only advise you, go with us and do the same.” … Shortly after Ludendorff, Pöhner entered the room. Hitler, Ludendorff and Weber [leader of a paramilitary group called Freikorps Oberland] now began a process of urgent persuasion. Excellency von Kahr, in particular, was besieged on all sides. Moved by the feelings previously described, Lossow at last gave Ludendorff the consent he wanted with the dry comment, “All right.” After some hesitation. Colonel von Seisser also nodded his agreement. Then Hitler, Ludendorff, and Dr Weber, with Pöhner also, worked on Excellency von Kahr with coaxing and pleading. Lossow and Seisser were asked to take part in the coaxing, but neither replied. … Hitler could no longer go back, whatever the position of Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser might prove to be. Hitler kept bringing this out with statements like: “The deed has been done, there is no going back. It has already passed into history.”
After long urging, Kahr declared: “I am ready to take over the destiny of Bavaria as the representative of the monarchy.” Hitler insisted that this statement should be made in the hall. Herr von Kahr replied that after the way in which he had been led out of the hall he refused to go back into the hall. He wanted to avoid any public fraternizing. But Hitler insisted with the words: “You will be carried shoulder-high. You will see what jubilation will greet you: the people will kneel before you.” Kahr replied: “I can do without that.” They then went into the hall.
BAVARIAN POLITICAL POLICE REPORT

Karl Alexander von Müller reported further:

An hour after Hitler’s first appearance the three gentlemen came back into the hall with Hitler and Ludendorff. They were enthusiastically received. On the platform Kahr began to speak first without being requested to and gave the speech which was printed word for word in the papers. Ludendorff too, in my opinion, spoke without being requested to, whereas Lossow and Seisser only spoke after repeated requests—I can’t remember the words, but only the gestures—on Hitler’s part. If I am to depict the impression made by the gentlemen on the platform, I would say that Kahr was completely unmoved. His face was like a mask all evening. He was not pale or agitated; he was very serious, but spoke very composedly. I got the impression that there was a melancholy look about his eyes. But that is perhaps being subjective. Hitler on the other hand, during this scene was radiant with joy. One had the feeling that he was delighted to have succeeded in persuading Kahr to collaborate. There was in his demeanor, I would say, a kind of childlike joy, a very frank expression which I shall never forget. Excellency Ludendorff by comparison was extremely grave; when he came in he was pale with suppressed emotion. His appearance as well as his words were those of a man who knew it was a matter of life and death, probably death rather than life. I shall never forget his expression. It was such that when I heard in town on the following day the rumor that he had been killed, I said to myself: That’s what he looked like last night. Lossow’s expression was very different; there was something detached, relaxed about his whole attitude. I don’t want to make a party point but, if I am to describe it, it struck me that he made a slightly ironical fox face. A certain impenetrable smile never left his features. Seisser was pale and upset. He was the only one who gave the impression of personal agitation, of external agitation. His words were merely a variant of Lossow’s. The report in the papers of the words of these two gentlemen was not correct: it was somewhat touched up.
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Weimar.html

Yet, momentarily unbeknownst to the present public, the endeavour was already collapsing; Hitler’s triumph was premature. A few hours earlier, Ernst Röhm, the head of the Munich SA, had occupied Army headquarters in Munich where he was received with sympathy by the junior officers. But the Reichswehr’s senior officers remained loyal to the Republic, and when General Lossow returned to his headquarters following his release, he immediately ordered military reinforcements to the Bavarian capital, where they surrounded the building which Röhm had occupied. Upon his release, Kahr too revoked his agreement with Hitler, saying he had been forced to make it at gunpoint. A little after midnight, it was clear to all in the Bürgerbräukeller that there would be no March on Berlin. Would a march on Munich suffice instead?

As it is perhaps a tradition of dramatic events and last acts, a leaden dawn had greeted the day of the coup; it was cold, and scattered snowflakes fell on the sidewalks. The morning light barely had the strength to pierce the depths of the Bürgerbräukeller, in which the prospective putschists had a breakfast of stale bread and cheese, the remains of last night’s buffet.

The morning hours had brought no better plan than to march into the city centre and to appeal to the support of the masses. The clock of the church struck twelve noon, when the sun, like a milky disc, began to break through the layers of morning mist and illuminated the hesitant gathering of troops. They had lost the brass music for lack of payment and a touch of finality surrounded the meeting.

Finally, the marching order was given. The vanguard formed a wedge; somewhat hesitantly, consisting of veterans and the standard-bearers of the party’s swastika banner and the black and white colours of the Empire. In the second group marched the lead: Hitler was flanked on the left by Ludendorff and on the right by Scheubner-Richter. At their sides walked Hermann Kriebel, Ulrich Graf (Hitler’s personal bodyguard), and Hermann Göring, who contributed the fashion highlight of the procession: he wore a helmet painted with a large white swastika and a black leather coat, under which the strong contrast of his blue and gold glowing Pour Le Mérite could not be overlooked. Hitler rejected Göring’s proposal to take some of the arrested city councillors as hostages; to create martyrs for the opposition was not his intention.

Behind the point guard, three groups, four-abreast, marched side by side. On the left side, the elite, a hundred of Hitler’s bodyguards in military outfits with guns and hand grenades; the Munich SA regiment, winner of many beer halls fights in the middle, and to their right the Bund Oberland, Colonel Kriebel’s men.

Behind these paramilitary outfits, a slightly incongruous collection of men attempted to form a semblance of anti-republican unity: whether these men wore old uniforms or not, whether they brandished weapons or not or whether they were trained or not, they presented a swastika band on left arm as their unifying feature. A few infantry cadets, following the motley crowd and bringing up the rear, marched, easily distinguishable, with much more aplomb than the civilians. A short roll call revealed about two thousand men, who slowly closed their ranks and moved toward the Ludwig Bridge to cross the Isar River on their way downtown.

It was only half a mile to the river and ten minutes after they had started, the revolutionary assembly faced a platoon of State Police on the banks of the bridge. The vanguard approached slowly when the police chief in a loud voice – not to be ignored – ordered his men to load live ammunition. He had barely finished the command when a surprise attack of the SA involved both the police and the rebels in a brief struggle; the next minute saw the police line overrun and the rebels moved on north-westward towards the city centre.

The March: Over Ludwig Bridge to the Isartor to the Marienplatz and from there through Dienerstraße and Residenzstraße to the Feldherrnhalle at Odeonsplatz. The total distance is about 2.4 km.

The march led through the eastern neighbourhoods of the town, where they were welcomed with applause by many citizens and visitors, who had been mobilized by the rumours that spread like wildfire. The centipede continued to grow when idle spectators joined the train and children ran around the standard-bearers as if a circus were in town. The men made good for the loss of the brass band by singing their favourite hymns; perhaps not perfect, but with a lot of heart and perhaps a little fear.

The troops passed the Isartor, the old eastern town gate, and entered the “Valley”, the thoroughfare that led to the Marienplatz at the city centre. The Valley is always one of Munich’s most frequented streets and this day was no exception. The size of the lindworm had grown considerably and when the train reached Marienplatz, the heart of the city, it was densely populated with supporters and spectators. The crowds chanted patriotic songs and the trams of line 6 were hopelessly stuck. Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi paper “Der Stürmer“, was at the centre of the square and gave a speech.

Most captions identify the orator as Julius Streicher but doubts remain.

Suddenly the centipede hesitated; as if there was confusion about which way to turn. Colonel Kriebel, who had tactical command, was not sure what to do, but indecision ended when Ludendorff turned right into Weinstraße, which led to Odeonsplatz and Feldherrnhalle; to the same place where Heinrich Hoffmann had captured – on August 2, 1914 – a snapshot of the cheering crowd with Hitler at its centre, that celebrated the declaration of war.

Adolf Hitler at Odeonsplatz, August 2, 1914

Everybody followed the general. Kriebel later said he never thought about it twice: “If Ludendorff marches there, we go with him.” (18) Ludendorff himself could not remember a conscious decision: ” Sometimes you act in life just instinctively and do not know why…. “(19) It is less than half a mile (700 meters) from Marienplatz to Odeonsplatz. Access to the square was sealed off by police. The next sixty seconds ran in slow motion.

Who exactly then stood facing each other, on that noon of November 9, 1923, on the Odeonsplatz Square in Munich? The numbers can be found in Harold Gordon‘s “Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch”, Princeton University Press 1972, ISBN 0-691-10000-4, pages 270-272:

Putschists:

The rebels could count on a very considerable number of men from Munich and were reinforced by delegations from many parts of southern Bavaria. They also enjoyed the advantage of the support of the city’s population. However, many of the members of their organizations and trailers were hardly of direct military value. In terms of actually-present troop strengths were approximately as follows:

SA (Sturmabteilung) of the NSDAP

SA Regiment Munich – 1500 officers and men
Stoßtrupp Hitler – about 125 officers and men
SA units from southern Bavaria – about 250 – 300 men

Bund Oberland

Three weak battalions – maybe 2,000 officers and men

Reichskriegsflagge

2 infantry departments, 1 machine gun department and 1 artillery battery – about 200 officers and enlisted

Kampfbund Munich

about 2 infantry companies – about 150 officers and men

All together approximately 4000 men, but dispersed over town.

Bavarian SA troops unloading at the Bürgerbräukeller

They faced the following government forces:

(A) Bavarian Police

Blue Police – regular town police – about 250 officers and men
State Police Munich with:
the Personnel of the Bureau and Staff of the Police headquartered at the Army Museum
Central Office of the Munich Police headquarters in the Ettstrasse
First Battalion (First Section) – about 400 officers and men (quartered in the former Royal residence)
Second Battalion (Second Section) – about 400 officers and men (headquartered in the Max II Barracks, at the corner Leonrodstraße and Dachauerstraße)
Third Battalion (Third Section) – about 400 officers and men (Maximilianeum and Türkenkaserne)
About 1 motorized division (Automotive Detachment) – about 75 officers and men (Türkenkaserne)
1 tanks group with 12 obsolete tanks – about 75 officers and enlisted men (Türkenkaserne)
1 Communication Technical battalion (Türkenkaserne)
1 Battalion National Police München Country – about 400 officers and men (Max II barracks)
1 mounted reconnaissance squadron (Fight Season) – about 50 officers and men (Max II barracks)
Except for these units in the city itself, about two more regiments were available, one battalion at the police preschool Eichstätt and various smaller units scattered across the state

(B) Reichstruppen (Federal troops)

At the headquarters of Wehrkreis VII and Seventh Infantry Division (Ludwig and Schönfeld Roads):

First Battalion, Nineteenth Infantry Regiment – 300 men (Oberwiesenfeld)
Headquarters Infantry Leader VII and artillery leader VII (Ludwig and Schönfeld roads) – perhaps 100 men
Seventh Engineer Battalion – about 225 officers and men (Oberwiesenfeld, Pioneer Casern I and II)
Seventh Signal Battalion – about 150 officers and men (Oberwiesenfeld)
Seventh Motor Transport Battalion, Headquarters and First Company – about 100 officers and men
Seventh Transportation Battalion (Mounted), Headquarters and First and Second Company – about 125 officers and men
Seventh Medical Battalion
Fifth Battery of the Seventh Artillery Regiment – about 90 officers and enlisted men (Oberwiesenfeld)
Stadtkommandantur Headquarters (Army Museum) – approx. 50 men
Infantry School – about 350 officers, cadets and men (Blutenburgstraße on Mars Square) (The rest of the Seventh Division and the Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment under the command of General von Lossow would be available within 24 hours for the operation against the rebels if the trains continued to work).

From these figures, we can draw the following conclusion: by the sheer numbers, the putschists were superior, the more so since many of the army soldiers were on unarmed commands; hence of the perhaps 1500 men theoretically available against some 4,000 rebels, perhaps only 800 were ready. The infantry and pioneer schools were not even under Bavarian command but answered to Berlin.

Rebels and police, just maybe twenty feet apart, stood facing each other now.

Here a line of city police blocked the way. But the Putschists surged forward, singing, “0 Deutschland Hoch in Ehren” [‘Oh Germany high in honours’]. Looking down from her hotel room, Frau Winifred Wagner was amazed to see her idol, Hitler, marching down the narrow Residenzstrasse next to Ludendorff. Just ahead in the Odeonsplatz small groups of green-uniformed men were scrambling into a blocking position. There was only room enough in the street for eight abreast.

Hitler locked arms with Scheubner-Richter in preparation for trouble but Ludendorff touched no one, still supremely confident that no one would fire on him. Directly ahead was a cordon of state police under First Lieutenant Michael Freiherr von Godin. Faced with an oncoming mob, Godin called out, “Second Company, double-time, march!” The state police jogged forward but the Putschists did not break, standing off the enemy with levelled bayonets and pistols. Godin used his rifle to parry two bayonet thrusts, “overturning the men behind them with the rifle at high port.” All at once a shot exploded. Godin heard it zing past his head; it killed a sergeant. “For a fraction of a second, my company stood frozen. Then, before I could give an order, my people opened fire, with the effect of a salvo.”

A photomontage of Hitler coup by Heinrich Hoffmann, the Nazi Party photographer

The Putschists returned the fire and panic broke out as marchers and bystanders scrambled for safety. One of the first to fall was Scheubner¬Richter, shot in the lungs. Another was Graf, who had leapt in front of Hitler to take the half dozen bullets meant for him. In falling, the personal bodyguard clutched Hitler, yanking him down so sharply that his left arm was dislocated. On the other side, Scheubner-Richter also helped drag Hitler to the pavement. Ludendorff’s faithful servant, who had been ordered to go home, was bleeding on the asphalt. His friend Aigner, the servant of the dying Scheubner¬Richter, crawled to him. He was dead. Someone stepped over Aigner. It was General Ludendorff marching erectly, left hand in coat pocket, into the line of fire. [FN1]

[FN1] Most accounts picture Ludendorff as courageous for staying on his feet and Hitler as ignoble for dropping to the street even though Hitler’s arm dislocation indicates he was dragged down. Undoubtedly Hitler would have hit the ground on his own, since he was a seasoned front-line soldier. Robert Murphy testified that “both Ludendorff and Hitler behaved in identical manners, like the battle-hardened soldiers they were. Both fell flat to escape the hail of bullets.” Another eyewitness, a watchman, also saw Ludendorff throw himself to the ground and then find cover “behind a corpse or wounded man.” A second watchman corroborated the fact that no one was standing after the volley. (21)

As Hitler sprawled on the ground thinking he had been shot in the left side, comrades tried to shield him. Eighteen men lay dead in the streets: fourteen followers of Hitler and four state police, all, incidentally, more
or less sympathetic with National Socialism. Those in the front of the marching column alone knew what had happened. The crows jammed up behind only heard firecracker explosions ahead, then a rumour that both Hitler and Ludendorff were killed. The Putschists scrambled to the rear.

Ludendorff marched through the police cordon and into the arms of a lieutenant who placed him under arrest and escorted him to the Residenz [the former town palace of the Wittelsbachers] … Hitler painfully struggled to his feet, cradling his injured arm. He was in agony as he slowly moved away from the battleground, face pale, hair falling over his face. He was accompanied by Dr Walter Schultze, chief of the Munich SA medical corps, a towering young man. They came upon a small boy lying at the curb, bleeding profusely. Hitler wanted to carry him off but Schulze called to his wife’s cousin (a botany student named Schuster) to take the boy.

At Max Joseph Platz they finally reached Hitler’s old grey Selve 6-20, which had been loaded with medical supplies. An elderly first-aid man named Frankel got in the front seat with the driver while Hitler and the doctor got into the rear seat. Schuster stood on the running board holding the wounded boy. Hitler told the driver to head for the Bürgerbräukeller, so he could find out what was going on. But at the Marienplatz, they came under heavy machine-gun fire and had to change directions several times. They found the Ludwig Bridge blocked and turned back.

By this time the boy had regained consciousness and Schuster dismounted, so he could take the youngster home. The car continued toward the Sendlinger Torplatz. Here they encountered another burst of -fire near the old southern cemetery. Since it was impossible to get back to the beer hall, there was nothing to do but keep driving south towards Salzburg.

Göring’s display of his Pour Le Mérite decoration had not saved him, and he lay on the pavement with a bullet in his upper thigh. Frau Ilse Ballin, who had rushed from her home to help the wounded, found him bleeding profusely. With the help of her sister, she dragged the heavy burden indoors. The sisters dressed Göring’s wound and were about to summon an ambulance when he weakly asked them to help him get to a private clinic. He could not bear the indignity of the arrest. Frau Ballin, the wife of a Jewish merchant, had pity on him, and thus he escaped prison. (20)

Heinrich Himmler, holding the banner, in the group sent to conquer the Army HQ

There are, however, reasons to doubt some details of the account above, in particular, the story of the wounded boy. In the years after 1933, party hagiography had Hitler carry the boy out of danger in his own arms; an act that would certainly qualify as a miracle given his dislocated shoulder. Nobody ever offered trustworthy corroboration, and, alas, the boy was never found. Moreover, the story of the getaway by car through hails of machine-gun bullets may appeal mostly to the credulous.

The official police report also blamed the Putschists for opening fire:

The column of National Socialists about 2,000 strong, nearly all armed, moved on through the Zweibrückenstraße, across the Marienplatz towards the Theatinerstraße. Here it split up, the majority going down the Perusastraße to the Residenz, the rest going on along the Theatinerstraße.
The police stationed in the Residenz tried to cordon it off as well as the Theatinerstraße by the Preysingstraße. Numerous civilians hurried on ahead of the actual column in Residenzstraße and pushed aside the police barricade. The ceaseless shouts of “Stop! Don’t go on!” by the state police were not obeyed. Since there was the danger of a break-through here, a police section, originally in the Theatinerstraße, hurried round the Feldherrenhalle [War Memorial] to give support. They were received with fixed bayonets, guns with the safety catches off, and raised pistols. Several police officers were spat upon, and pistols with the safety catches off were stuck in their chests. The police used rubber truncheons and rifle butts and tried to push back the crowd with rifles held horizontally. Their barricade had already been broken several times. Suddenly, a National Socialist fired a pistol at a police officer from close quarters. The shot went past his head and killed Sergeant Hollweg standing behind him. Even before it was possible to give an order, the comrades of the sergeant who had been shot opened fire as the Hitler lot did, and a short gun battle ensued during which the police were also shot at from the Preysingpalais and from the house which contains the Café Rottenhofer. After no more than thirty seconds the Hitler lot fled, some back to the Maximilianstraße, some to the Odeonsplatz. General Ludendorff apparently went on towards the Odeonsplatz. There he was seen in the company of a Hitler officer by a police officer barring the Briennerstraße, who went up to General Ludendorff and said to him: ‘Excellency, I must take you into custody.’ General Ludendorff replied: ‘You have your orders. I’ll come with you.’ Both gentlemen were then accompanied into the Residenz.
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Weimar.html

Yet the consequences of Hitler’s mistakes in challenging the power of the state were immediately clear: in less than a minute, in the blink of an eye, the revolution had turned into an exodus and the proposed national campaign had collapsed – in a single volley of bullets. Nullified were four years of dreams, conspiracies and agitation. The two thousand men of the Putschist column had all but evaporated after the salvo; the flower of the rebellion sought salvation in escape.

Mopping up took the police the better part of the remaining day; they found Putschists hiding in places as peculiar as under the flour sacks of a bakery, public toilets on cemeteries, and about a dozen in the closets of a young ladies’ academy. By evening, over a hundred arrests were counted. The rear echelons of the movement, which had preferred the safety of the beer hall to the vagaries of the street, had no desire to link their fortunes to a lost cause: they meekly stacked their rifles on the floor, left the cellar, and vanished in the crowd. Röhm was informed, by one of Lossow’s aides that Hitler was dead and Ludendorff arrested. Further resistance was futile, he realized and gave up.

Memorial plaque for the four dead policemen in front of the Feldherrnhalle

What had happened, in the meantime, to the other detachments of the coup, those on special missions?

Between the Bürgerbräukeller and the city centre, Gregor Strasser’s SA unit still held the bridge over the Isar; still exchanging hostile stares with the police. The news of the fiasco on the Odeonsplatz reached them soon, informing them that Ludendorff was dead and Hitler wounded and captured. Gregor Strasser now showed some of the experience he had gained in the war. Having no ambition to become a martyr of a failed cause, he shepherded his men into a tactical retreat nimble enough that the police found no gap to attack. The column marched into the direction of the Eastern railway station, when, passing a stretch of woodland, they met a Munich SA detachment busy smashing their rifles against the trees, a pastime Strasser immediately ordered them to cease. The guns, he said, will find their use another day. When the station came into sight, they closed ranks, seized a train, and vanished.

Another absconding SA company, the one that had arrested the city councillors, had already reached the highway leading in south-easterly direction from Munich to Salzburg and the Austrian border. About halfway, at a forest close to Rosenheim, the cavalcade halted, and the prisoners were led into the woods. They must have assumed the worst, and thus were almost ecstatically grateful when they were asked to surrender their clothes rather than their lives. The Putschists climbed into the Excellencies’ festive suits and disappeared quickly, leaving the honourable city fathers to their own resources. The police eventually found them and restored them to their offices.

The situation at the Tegernsee Lake, whither the platoon of Rudolf Hess had taken Minister President von Knilling and the other hostages taken at the Bürgerbräukeller, proved disastrous. Hess had stowed the distinguished servants of the public good into a lakeside villa, which, however, lacked a telephone. Hess left to find one, to report his success back to Munich and ask for further instructions, but when he arrived back at the building he found it deserted: the hostages had persuaded their guards to take them back to Munich. Thus, Hess not only lost his hostages but the truck as well, and found himself stuck forty miles south-east of Munich.

At the Odeonsplatz, the Red Cross had meanwhile taken over and loaded the numerous wounded into ambulances. Scheubner-Richter’s faithful servant Aigner established the deaths of his employer and of his best friend, Ludendorff’s valet, and took it upon himself to inform the families. He later recalled:

“Sick in my soul and totally shattered I returned to our residence in the Widenmayerstrasse.” Frau Scheubner-Richter asked where her husband was. Aigner lied but she insisted on the truth. “I can still remember her
words, ‘That’s terrible but that is why one is an officer’s wife.'” (23)

The only man momentarily not in the picture was Putzi Hanfstängl. Just before the revolutionary column had left the beer hall, he had been dispatched to another intelligence mission: to observe and report on the tactical dispositions of police and Reichswehr around the city centre.

“Where only an hour before droves of citizens had surrounded the party speakers in the inner precincts and exulted in the commotion, now the faces of the passers-by showed irresolution. The majority of the public as
well of the police, Reichswehr, and Battle League units had thought the troop and police deployments in the city centre parts of the preparations for the “March on Berlin”, but the understanding of the sad reality now
precipitated distress and a feeling of futility.

Municipal policemen tore the proclamations of the last evening, signed by Hitler, Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, off the doors and walls of the houses or replaced them with Kahr’s more recent anti-Putsch declaration. The
weather joined in the tristesse, with intermittent showers from a leaden sky. It did not look better in the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter whither I retired. The common feelings were confusion and depression, and Rosenberg characterized the prevailing mood with the words ‘The whole story is over now.’ I took this as advice to think of what might come next, and marched home. I had barely arrived when the telephone rang, and my sister Erna informed me excitedly that ‘Sauerbruch (the famous surgeon) just called, and told me that Hitler and Ludendorff, and their men, have left the Bürgerbräu and are marching over the Ludwig Bridge into the Tal.'” (24)

Hanfstängl left the house in the direction of Brienner Strasse, which would take him to the town centre, but soon met scores of men fleeing from it. He was informed that the police had fired, that Hitler, Ludendorff and Göring were dead, and that the day had brought “finis Germaniae”. (25) He turned on his heels to go back home but met, halfway, Esser, Amann, Eckart and Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer, in an open car rushing down the road. Hanfstängl joined the posse which retired to Hoffmann’s apartment, which, they surmised, was safest from a police search. On arrival, they
began preparations to escape to Austria; each man for himself, they hoped, would be less conspicuous than a group.

Thus, it came to pass that Helene Hanfstängl did not receive a visit from her husband on that day in the family’s recently acquired dacha in Uffing, some thirty miles south of Munich, but from Hitler, her great admirer. He arrived in the escape car, having been diagnosed for the moment with a dislocated shoulder which, Dr. Schulze pointed out, was very hard to fix in a small, erratically moving car. Hitler directed the driver to Uffing.

It may be a telltale sign whither a man turns to when hurt or threatened; whither he directs his hopes of sanctuary. One might have assumed that Hitler would seek to reach Landshut or Rosenheim, places where SA units existed and where local indifference to the state police might have assisted his concealment.

But in this existential crisis he sought to find shelter with the woman he admired and respected most, and, perhaps, unattainably romanced: Helene Hanfstängl, the beautiful, intelligent and sensible socialite; a woman as far removed in personality and manners from his small bourgeois, Lower Austrian roots as could be. She was the one he had trusted with the knowledge of the personal reasons for his anti-Semitism, and he constantly showed up at the Hanfstängl’s town apartment with the flimsiest of excuses; that he was too tired to return to his apartment in the Thierschstrasse, that he had to wait for an important telephone call to reach him at Hanfstängl’s telephone or that someone was to meet him down on the street and would ring the door bell soon. For the rest of his life Helene was a persistent subject of his private conversations. An old hand once reminisced that all his life“he continued to chat about the evils of smoking, the joys of motoring, dogs, the origin of Tristan and Isolde, the beauty of Frau Hanfstängl and Jews.”

Helene in the light dress, her husband on the piano

The fugitives reached a small forest on the outskirts of the little village of Uffing, where they decided to ditch the car. They proceeded per pedes to the small Hanfstängl cottage where they arrived in the late afternoon. Frau Hanfstängl betrayed no surprise over the sudden visitation and showed at once that she was a practical woman as well as a semi-
goddess. She fed the company, assisted Dr. Schulze in provisionally fixing Hitler’s shoulder, and sent the party to bed early.

The company still felt less than rested when the morning dawned; nobody had slept well, either for pain, as in Hitler’s case, or for the tension of expecting the police to show up any minute. After breakfast Hitler asked the medic to return to Munich by train, find the Bechsteins, and ask them to send their limousine, to pick up Hitler discreetly. Dr. Schulze was asked to drive the escape car back to Munich and enlist the aid of a medical acquaintance of his, an assistant of the famous Professor Dr. Sauerbruch. If possible, he should bring him to Uffing to work on Hitler’s arm.

After the departure of the two doctors Hitler tried to reassure his hostess that her husband was safe [he had no idea where he was], then fretted about what might have happened to his comrades. If he got any sleep that night it was shattered early the next morning by the deafening tintinnabulation of bells from the nearby church. It was Sunday the eleventh. Hitler did not appear until lunch. Because of the sling [around his arm], he could not wear his coat and had draped Hanfstängl’s huge dark blue terry cloth bathrobe around him. It brought a smile to his gaunt face. He felt like a pseudo-Roman senator, he said, and he told Helene the story of how his father had ridiculed him as the “toga boy.”

As the afternoon wore on Hitler grew restless and began pacing up and down the sitting room. He became increasingly impatient concerning the Bechstein car. Why the delay? It was only a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, he fretted, before he would be traced to Uffing. At dusk, he asked Helene to close the shutters and draw the curtains, then resumed his moody pacing. (26)

Eventually, the police caught up with him. Ernst Hanfstängl later described their appearance.

First they closed in and searched the property of my mother, outside of the village, for a good hour; even the hay in the loft and the plumeaus on the beds were probed with bayonets. Meanwhile, my house was under
observation, and Hitler grew aware that flight would be impossible. (27)

The consequences Hitler drew from the presence of the police, were, if we believe Herrn Hanfstängl’s narrative, likely to guarantee a great if bloody finale. Here we need to digress for a minute. A long time ago, Hanfstängl’s Harvard music teacher, Professor Marshall, had invited his student to dinner at the St.-Botholph-Club in Boston, on the same evening
that a guest speaker, a Boston police agent, gave an address on the basic teachings of Jiu-Jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence.

Chosen to be the lecturer’s object of demonstration, the detective showed me a useful trick to disarm an attacker armed with a revolver, a move that I – years later – taught my wife. … Then, on the evening of November 11, two police trucks full of green uniformed state police — the arrest commando — stopped in front of our cottage in Uffing. When my wife hastened up the stairs to the attic where Hitler hid, she met him, armed with a gun, in the tiny antechambre. “This is the end!” he screamed. “Have these pigs arrest me? I rather be dead!” Yet before he could effect his resolution, my wife applied the Boston cop’s Jiu-Jitsu trick and – in a high arc – the revolver flew into a large flour bin, where it vanished at once. (28)

In a fragment of her diary, Frau Hanfstängl described the story as follows:

“Hitler and his companions got out and hid in the forest while the driver tried to repair the car. It turned out soon, that this would require a mechanic. The three men could not afford to be seen, since the news of the events in Munich had spread in the country like wildfire as well. They hid in the forest. Hitler thought of our house and as soon as it was dark, they went on their way. On the long, arduous march, they avoided main roads and used hidden paths. Since we have a side entrance, their arrival went unnoticed. I took them into the house, locked the door and led them to the first floor. Hitler lamented the death of his friends Ludendorff and Ulrich Graf, who, as he thought, were fallen when the first shots were fired.” [The next day] … “Shortly after 5 pm, the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law, living close by, who, before being interrupted, hastily told us that the police searched her house. ‘Now everything is lost!’ cried Hitler. With one swift movement he grabbed his revolver, which he had placed on a cabinet. I reacted immediately, grabbed his arm and took the gun. ‘How can you give up at the first setback? Think of your followers! ‘ As he sank into a chair, I hid the revolver in a container of flour. Then I took paper and pen and asked him, as long as there would be time, to write instructions for his main followers – a sheet for each should suffice.”

The goddess now scolded Hitler as if he were a schoolboy; reminding him of his responsibilities — the men, the party, and the people — and offered to take quick notes if he wished to send messages to his closest followers before the police showed up. Hitler realized his duties, thanked her sincerely, and began to dictate a short message to his men. Rosenberg would become acting leader of the NSDAP with Amann as his deputy, who should also direct the business and finance matters; together with Julius Streicher and Hermann Esser, the former two were to form a quadrivirate that was to take care of party activities until further notice. He appointed the goddess’s husband to the post of principal solicitor of contributions, uninformed that the latter was on the way to Austria. After finishing the notes and hiding them in the flour bin, Frau Hanfstängl went down to answer the door bell.

The sounds of police cars, shouting, and the barking of dogs filled the air of the quiet village. A trio of constables eventually appeared on the Hanfstängl’s doorstep and were allowed to enter. Helene guided the men upstairs to the small sitting room and opened the door, unveiling Hitler, still dressed in Hanfstängl’s bathroom attire. Without much ado, the
policemen took him into custody; so happy to have found their prey at last that they forgot to search the house. They packed their captive into a truck and left immediately for Weilheim, the county centre.

It was almost ten o’clock at night when they arrived at the local court where Hitler was formally arraigned. It was decided that probable cause existed to charge him with high treason, and that the detainee was to be taken immediately to the prison at Landsberg, a small town about forty miles west of Munich. (29)

Since it was thought entirely possible that remnants of the Putschists might try to free the prisoner, the Reichswehr was asked to provide security. They sent an armed detail to Landsberg forthwith, which had, however, not yet arrived when the police column reached the prison compound. The prison of Landsberg consisted of a medium security housing unit for thieves or fraudsters and the like, and a “fortress”, a high-security section for murderers, rapists or political prisoners. Hitler was brought to cell # 7, which was the sole one that had an anteroom for visitors and guards, and which had, until this evening, housed Count Arco-Valley, the assassin of Kurt Eisner.

Since Hitler was accustomed to little space since his days in the asylum and the Männerheim in Vienna and the small rooms he had lived in for most of the last five years in Munich, he betrayed no problems in adapting to the narrowness of his new residence. In fact, his cell was bigger and better lighted than his room in the Thierschstrasse, and the window had a view of the prison garden’s shrubs and flowerbeds. From the first night onward, Hitler found himself in the care of gaoler Franz Hemmrich, who was instructed to look after him in particular and aid him as much as was permissible, and had no other duties. In the outside world, news of the Beer Hall Putsch, as it became known, dominated the newspaper headlines for a few days. For a lack of reliable witnesses, however, most of the articles had to rely on speculation.

Next Post: Prison at Landsberg and Trial

From November 8, 1933, on the Nazis held an anniversary party at the Bürgerbräukeller

(18) (19) (20) (22) [5] (23) (26) (29) John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Anchor Books 1976, ISBN 1992 0-385-42053-6, pp. 169 – 176

(24) (25) (27) (28) Ernst Hanfstängl, Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus, Piper Verlag, München, 1970, ISBN 3-492-01833-5, pp. 5-6, 143 – 149

(Translations and © John Vincent Palatine 2015/19)

Drusilla and Caligula

By John Vincent Palatine

On July 3, 2019

In Antiquity

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The court of Caligula by Virgillo Mattoni de la Fuente, 1842-1923 ( Note: This work is also known as The Baths of Caracalla)

The historical Julia Drusilla was born on September 16, AD 16, in Abitarvium (today Koblenz, Germany) as a scion of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the second daughter and fifth child of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder to survive infancy, and died at the age of 21 on June 10, AD 38. She had two sisters, Julia Livilla and the Empress Agrippina the Younger, and three brothers, Emperor Caligula, Nero Julius Caesar, and Drusus. She was a great-granddaughter of Emperor Augustus, grand-niece of Emperor Tiberius, niece of Emperor Claudius, and aunt of Emperor Nero. (See Wiki)

YouTube Video

As we have found with many of the family, her reputation is seriously smeared by the negative picture many contemporary historians have painted of the whole clan. What seems clear is that she was her brother Caligula’s favourite, and the scandalous tongues, of which there were many in Rome, credited her with having an incestuous relationship with her emperor brother – who apparently had more than brotherly feelings for all his sisters, whom he awarded the privileges of Vestal Virgins and had coins issued in their likenesses.

**Statue of Iulia Drusilla at the Museo Gregoriano**

Whether this is true or not, we cannot say. It is possible that Caligula, who was, as we know, of a somewhat disturbed mind, attempted to emulate the pattern of his Roman lineage after the Hellenistic monarchs of the Ptolemaic dynasty where marriages between jointly ruling brothers and sisters had become generally accepted. His contempt for the Roman elite may have played a part in such a scheme. Since what happened in the royal bedchamber was not a matter of public knowledge, some observers registered that the emperor reserved the female position of honour at the imperial dinners always for Drusilla, not her sisters or his wives, which they took as a sure sign of his despotism.

She died of the one or other epidemic that frequently plagued Rome in these times. Her brother, who reportedly never left her sickbed, posthumously made her an Augusta and had the Senate enact a decree declaring her a Goddess, as Diva Drusilla, on a par with Venus (Aphrodite).

To our eyes, she lives on in the movies – as on the TV series I, Claudius, wherein she is played by Beth Morris, and, more, er …, revealingly, by Teresa Ann Savoy in the famous and notorious movie Caligula ( Link to Movie – for documentation only, please).

As can be seen on the early poster above, Maria Schneider – of Last Tango in Paris fame – was originally cast as Drusilla.

About this scandalous movie, there is a most extensive website, that delves deeply in the myths and legal troubles of the film at caligula.org, which informs in-depth and has never-before-published information and pictures galore.

Pics from caligula.org

The Age of Justinian

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 14, 2019

In Antiquity

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This is a directory and jump page for the eleven articles covering the Demise and Fall of the Roman Empire before and at the times of Justinian I, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus Augustus, c. 482 – November 14, 565), traditionally known as Justinian the Great and also Saint Justinian the Great in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Our special treat: Full Movie (with English Subtitles) of the big German 1968 production of “The Last Roman” (Kampf um Rom) with Orson Welles as Justinian, Lawrence Harvey as Cethegus and Sylvia Koscina as Theodora on YouTube:

Part I (720p)

Part II (480p)

Article 1: Barbarians at the Gates

Article 2: The End of the Legions

Article 3: Alaric and the Sack of Rome

Article 4: The Fall of the West – Vandals, Goths and Huns

Justinian’s Empire at its greatest expanse, around AD 560

Article 5: The Gothic Wars

Article 6: Theodora

Article 7: Procopius and the Secret History

Article 8: Clovis – The Rise of the Franks

Article 9: Breakup of the West after Charlemagne

Article 10: The End of Rome and the Rise of France and Germany

Article 11: The Rise and Fall of the Empire (animated GIF)

Check also: Realm of History, a page with gorgeous reconstructed pics of Constantinople.

First World War – Animated GIFs

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 13, 2019

In Disaster

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We present two lovely animated GIFs on the subject of WW I below. You can download them and adjust their speed to your taste with https://ezgif.com/speed (works best with smaller files) or http://gifmaker.org/. Click on the pics for full size view.

File One: Overview

File Two: The Western Front August 4 to September 20

History’s Most Lethal Submarine – U 35 in WW I

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 12, 2019

In Disaster

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The German U-boat U-35 cruising in the Mediterranean, April 1917

“Shocking!” was the unanimous opinion of the British Admiralty, when it became obvious, in the earl 1900s, that the development of diesel-electric propulsion would enable – sooner or later – the construction of serviceable submarines for warfare.

It was quite against the sense of fairness that guided this august body. After all, they had built, and were still building, rows and rows of expensive battleships – at a cost of a few million pounds each – which were to ensure Royal British supremacy on the oceans of the world.

Could the building of such cowardly weapons forbidden by means of an international treaty? Incomprehensibly, no volunteers among the navies of the competition could be found. It was suspected, that the mighty battleships were, due to their armour, perhaps not liable to become the prey of the ignominious new weapon, but the merchant ships, upon whose trade the British Empire depended, would be helpless victims. [FN1]

[FN1] The theory of the inviolability of the battleship to torpedoes and mines went – literally – to the bottom of the sea on October 27, 1914, less than three months into the war, when HMS Audacious was struck by a mine and capsized a few hours later.

Submarines had one excellent advantage – they could not be seen, and their guns, torpedoes and mines could sink any ship in sneak attacks. It was truly unfair. They were cheap, too, hence everybody could build them – and did.

While submarines could sink warships, these were rare cases. The two U-Boats – as German submarines were called after the German term “Unterseeboot” – most efficient at this particular task were U 9, which met the 7th Cruiser Squadron, comprising the Cressy-class armoured cruisers Bacchante, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, together with a few destroyers, and sunk Cressy, Aboukir and Hogue within a few hours in the Action of 22 September 1914. Three weeks later HMS Hawke fell prey to the same boat.

But this feat was outclassed by her sister ship U 21, which on May 25 and 27, 1915, in the opening days of the Battle of Gallipoli, managed to sink the two British pre-dreadnoughts HMS Triumph and HMS Majestic, while adding the French armoured cruiser Amiral Charner to her bag in February 1916.

Yet the more imminent threat for England was, as mentioned, the severance of her trade lines. She imported about 70% of foodstuffs and intermediate goods, upon which the people and industry depended. There was a financial consideration as well – money had to be spent for the purchase of these goods, but if the transport was sunk, so much for the balance of payments. [FN2]

[FN2] It is not generally known, that by April 1, 1917, the British Empire was bankrupt, and the only hope for her main creditors, the US, to recover their loans was to join the war and help her debtors win. American loans to the Allies were but the cost of keeping up the Imperial shop, a fact that even the Encyclopaedia Britannica makes no qualms in admitting: “The entry of the United States was the turning point in the war, because it made the eventual defeat of Germany possible. It had been foreseen in 1916 that if the United States went to war, the Allies’ military effort against Germany would be upheld by U.S. supplies and by enormous extensions of credit. These expectations were amply and decisively fulfilled. The United States’ production of armaments was to meet not only its own needs but also France’s and Great Britain’s. In this sense, the American economic contribution was decisive. By April 1, 1917, the Allies had exhausted their means of paying for essential supplies from the United States, and it was difficult to see how they could have maintained the war effort if the United States had remained neutral. American loans to the Allies worth $7,000,000,000 between 1917 and the end of the war maintained the flow of U.S. arms and food across the Atlantic.” (16)

Hence, the major task of the U-Boats was commercial raiding. In the First World War, this meant an initial advantage for the hunter for the dearth of electronic countermeasures, which would be developed only much later. Essentially, U-Boats could only be found by hydrophones, which were still rather primitive and sensitive, especially during convoy operations. The only weapon against subs were depth charges.

Unlike in WW 2 movies, the main weapon of the time was the deck gun, of medium calibre, often 88 or 105 millimetres. The reason was that the boats carried a very limited number of torpedoes only and tended to save them, hence the gun became the more attractive alternative. The most famous commander of U 35, Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, used the deck gun in 171 of his 194 sinkings.

The great tactical difference in U-Boat warfare between the two wars lay in the area of communications, whose improvements allowed Germany’s Submarine Commander Karl Dönitz in the Second War the invention of the “Rudeltaktik”, in English called “Wolfpack”. Improvements, however, worked for both sides – U-Boats could be controlled and directed much tighter by tactical command, yet the enemy could meanwhile share their own information of sightings and locations. Hence, in World War I, each boat was on her mission alone. No Wolfpack of WW II, however, came close to the success of the “one boat wolf pack” that was U 35.

Thus, we arrive at the main point of our article, the performance of U 35 in WW I. U 35 was a pre-war construction ordered in 1912 [Design, see Wiki, and FN3]. She officially entered service on November 3rd, 1914, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Waldemar Kophamel. Under his command, U 35 sunk no less than 38 ships until November 17, 1915.

The next day Captain de la Perière took over. He was to become the most successful submarine commander of history. His main area of operations was the Mediterranean Sea, and, in 14 or 15 patrols (sources differ), sank 189 merchant ships and five men-of-war for a total of 446,708 GRT. [Complete List of Sinkings and Damages caused by U 35]

[FN3] German Type U 31 submarines were double-hulled ocean-going submarines similar to Type 23 and Type 27 subs in dimensions and differed only slightly in propulsion and speed. They were considered very good high sea boats with average manoeuvrability and good surface steering.^[5] U-35 had an overall length of 64.70 m (212 ft 3 in), her pressure hull was 52.36 m (171 ft 9 in) long. The boat’s beam was 6.32 m (20 ft 9 in) (o/a), while the pressure hull measured 4.05 m (13 ft 3 in). Type 31s had a draught of 3.56 m (11 ft 8 in) with a total height of 7.68–8.04 m (25 ft 2 in–26 ft 5 in). The boats displaced a total of 971 tonnes (956 long tons); 685 t (674 long tons) when surfaced and 878 t (864 long tons) when submerged.^[5] U-35 was fitted with two Germania 6-cylinder two-stroke diesel engines with a total of 1,850 metric horsepower (1,361 kW; 1,825 bhp) for use on the surface and two Siemens-Schuckert double-acting electric motors with a total of 1,200 PS (883 kW; 1,184 shp) for underwater use. These engines powered two shafts each with a 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) propeller, which gave the boat a top surface speed of 16.4 knots (30.4 km/h; 18.9 mph), and 9.7 knots (18.0 km/h; 11.2 mph) when submerged. Cruising range was 8,790 nautical miles (16,280 km; 10,120 mi) at 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) on the surface, and 80 nmi (150 km; 92 mi) at 5 knots (9.3 km/h; 5.8 mph) under water. Diving depth was 50 m (164 ft 1 in).^[5] The U-boat was armed with four 50 cm (20 in) torpedo tubes, two fitted in the bow and two in the stern, and carried 6 torpedoes. Additionally, U-35 was equipped in 1915 with one 8.8 cm (3.5 in) Uk L/30 deck gun, which was replaced with a 10.5 cm (4.1 in) gun in 1916/17. The boat’s complement was 4 officers and 31 enlisted.^[5]

Historical Video Clips from U-35: Imperial War Museum / BackToThePastWeb

Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, her second captain, was of French Huguenot descent, of the many families that fled France after Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, ending religious tolerance in France in favour of the Catholic Church. In reaction, Frederick Wilhelm, Duke of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg, issued the Edict of Potsdam in late October 1685, encouraging the Protestants to seek refuge in Prussia, which many did and became an economic boom and elite in the (then) relatively backward country.

Frederick Wilhelm welcoming the Refugees

He strictly adhered to the Prize Rules then in effect, which makes his achievements all the more impressive. His fourteenth patrol (26 July to 20 August 1916) stands as the most successful submarine patrol of all time, in which 54 merchant ships totalling 90,350 GRT were sunk.

U-35 also sank the British gun boat HMS Primula on 29 February 1916, the French gunboat Rigel on 2 October 1916 as well as the Armed merchant cruiser La Provence.

She survived the war and was transferred to England and broken up after 1920.

The First Road Trip – A Giant Leap for Mankind

By John Vincent Palatine

On June 9, 2019

In Bourgeoisie

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The clerk at the Wiesloch city pharmacy seriously doubted the sanity of his customer, a woman in her late thirties in a dress as soiled as to make her appearance unacceptable amongst the good burghers of the town. Perhaps she was dangerous. Wiesloch was only ten miles south of Heidelberg, which had a university, and the good doctor was informed that some women had recently attempted to join the chemistry faculty. But the nature of the lady’s request was something he never had to consider before.

The “Stadt-Apotheke” became the world’s first filling station – to the right the Bertha Benz Memorial

“You want ten litres of Ligroin?”, he stammered. Then he looked at the lady’s dress and noticed the stains. Ligroin was basically petroleum, and perhaps the lady wanted to improve her scandalous appearance. “I understand, Ma’am. But for these stains half a litre will do nicely, perhaps one litre.”

The lady insisted. The apothecary, unable to imagine what one might do with ten litres of petroleum except, perhaps, burn down a forest, asked for the reason of the peculiar order. “It’s for my automobile,” the fruitcake explained, and lead the man outside. There stood one contraption of a kind the good doctor had not seen before in his life. It was ridiculous. It looked as if someone had wanted to build a horse carriage, but had forgotten most of the top structure and the horses. It looked like this:

Model III, 1888, the one used by Bertha on her historic trip …

The doctor, a good catholic like all the citizens of the town, looked suspiciously around for the presence of Satan and only very hesitantly touched the outer-wordly apparition. He felt wood, rubber and iron – hence the physical existence of the visitation could no longer be denied. He asked for an explanation, and the lady told him a story plainly out of a Jules Verne novel, of which the apothecary, it must be admitted, had read a few in his youth.

This car, the lady told him, has not been mankind’s first attempt at constructing an automobile, but earlier designs failed at the dearth of a reliable engine, until from the 1870s on, Nikolaus Otto and Gottfried Daimler succeeded in building reliable four-stroke-engines, which are, to this day, called Ottomotoren – Otto engines.

Her name was Cäcilie Bertha Benz, she said, and was the wife and unofficial (because illegal) business partner of the inventor and engineer Karl Benz. Their company, Benz & Cie., had constructed and patented the present Benz-Patent-Motorwagen, a horseless carriage with a water-cooled petroleum engine. It had been awarded the German patent number 37435, for which her husband had applied on 29 January 1886. Unfortunately, the fancy invention was ignored by the public, and although Karl improved Model I with II and III, disinterest persisted.

Replica of Model I, Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart

Karl Benz
House in Ladenburg
Bertha at 18

The Patent-Motorwagen, Model I, three wheels, tubular steel frame, rack and pinion steering, connected to a driver end tiller; wheel chained to front axle, electric ignition, differential rear end gears, mechanically operated inlet valves, water-cooled internal combustion engine, gas or petrol four-stroke horizontally mounted engine, single cylinder, bore 116 mm, stroke 160 mm, patent model: 958 cc, 0.8 hp, 16 km/h, commercial model: 1600 cc, ¾ hp, 13 km/h

The novelty in Karl Benz’ concept was that, from the beginning, the car was designed to become, one day, the world’s first “production” car, of which great numbers could be built. Many tinkerers worked on cars, but hardly anybody except Benz in such a systematic way. Horseless carriages could be, and would be built, but would they work in everyday use? They were extremely fault-prone, hence every driver had to double as mechanic, there were no roads, where could one get gasoline except in a pharmacy – which stocked only small amounts of it anyway?

Thus, on this morning of August 5, 1888, Bertha set out to show the world what her husband’s work could do. She was a practical woman and knew that people tend to covet something only when they are aware of its existence. It was a question of marketing, she realized. The car had previously never been driven more than a few hundred yards around the workshop and few people had seen it. She did not tell her husband or anyone else, did not inform authorities (why anyway – there were no such things as driving licences), but took her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old, and set out to visit her mother, who lived in Pforzheim, starting from her own house in Mannheim.

Bertha’s route, on today’s roads about 103 km (64 miles) Wiesloch is at “B”

As it was to be expected, the enterprise turned out no mean feat. She had to clean a blocked fuel line with her hair pin and use her garter as insulation for the overheating engine. The 4,5 litres of petroleum in the carburator ran out quickly, forcing her to the aforementioned fuel stop at Wiesloch, where the apothecary thus became owner and attendant of the world’s first service station. A broken chain necessitated another stop, to have it fixed by a local blacksmith. When the brakes – made of wood – began to evidence abnormal tear and wear, she visited a nearby cobbler and had leather pads fixed on it, thereby inventing the world’s first pair of brake pads. The engine was cooled by an evaporative cooling system, which was responsible for further filling-up stops.

But she persisted. She reached Pforzheim after dusk and reported home by telegram. A few days later, she made the journey back successfully. The rest, as they say, is history.

The trip was an instant success. First local, then national and finally the international press picked up the story. It became the key event in the practical invention of the automobile as means of private transport.

Leipziger Illustrated Magazine, September 1888

Check out this Mercedes-Benz Clip on YouTube and another, very cute Australian Clip

Model “Velo” (1894), Mercedes-Benz Museum, Stuttgart

In her honour, the Bertha-Benz Memorial Route was dedicated in 1988, following her tracks. Its an official tourist and theme route in Baden-Württemberg.

Russian Strategy 1890 – 1914

By John Vincent Palatine

On May 25, 2019

In The Road to War

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The Straits 1915/16 during the Battle of Gallipoli

This will be a very long post and take some time to finish, approximately until the summer of 2020. Please be welcome to bookmark it. Quotations will be listed after completion on the bottom of the text.

Part I: From the Conference of Berlin to the Russo-Japanese War (1878 – 1905)

Russia’s geopolitical issues are mostly of geographic nature, the inaccessibility of much of Siberia, the endless distances and the perennial problem of her ports – both for trade and military purposes. Before the construction of the port of Murmansk in 1915, there were only two Russian ports in the north-west: Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg (later renamed Petrograd). Arkhangelsk, however, was useless in the winter, and the usability of St. Petersburg was easily controlled by an eventual blockade of the Kattegat Strait by Germany. The Pacific ports suffered from transport handicaps – although the Trans-Siberian Railway was more or less functioning by the time of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904/05, it was a single track only and its capacity was low. There were, however, ice-free ports available in the Black Sea …

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 brought two principal changes in the strategic equilibrium of the continent; one clear and immediately visible, the other latent, circumspect, and slow in its consequences. Number One was the emergence of a new, possibly dominant, power on the continent – Wilhelmine Germany – which everybody had to take note of; Number Two was the emergence of another, possibly dominant, European power – an industrialized and modernized Russian Empire – of which few took notice.

Franco-German enmity had become a predictable factor of the new European reality; revanchism was to remain the French Right’s battle cry for the foreseeable future. That France’s desire for revenge could not be fulfilled without outside aid was also clear; both her stagnant population and relative industrial underperformance – at least if compared to Germany – illustrated her weakness. She could not endanger Germany unless in concert with Russia, but this avenue Bismarck had blocked.

If Franco-German tension was the western centre of European politics after 1871, the other two were in the East, consisting of the triangles Constantinople – St. Petersburg – Vienna and Constantinople – London – St. Petersburg. These were the centres of attention of all European powers – except perhaps for Germany, which was far away and could not hope to profit from a breakup of the Ottoman Empire. They paid mindfulness to the decay of the Turkish realm and stood ready to pick up the pieces. Triangle One defined the Balkans, the scene of Austro-Russian disputes over their future inheritance, and Triangle Two incorporated Mesopotamia and Persia, the pieces over which Russia and Great Britain expected to haggle after the demise of the Ottomans.

Bismarck was only too aware of the quandaries of the situation, and thus had provided for the”Re-Insurance Treaty“, which held Russia to neutrality in the case of a new Franco-German war regardless of origin, and thus banned the spectre of Germany having to fight a two-front war. But after his retirement in 1890, the Re-Insurance Treaty, the pièce de résistance of his foreign policy, was simply allowed to expire through the legendary stupidity of Wilhelm II, new Chancellor Leo von Caprivi and the new Secretary of State Bieberstein; the latter did not even inquire in St. Petersburg whether the Czar desired a prolongation of the compact. The Russian court, perplexed, could only interpret Berlin’s silence as a sign of inexplicable German hostility and began to look for a new ally in the West. France was ready and willing.

To discern that both the European and Asian borderlands of the Ottoman Empire were the most volatile areas of the respective international relations did not require the application of prophecy, and someone should have noticed that Russia was the attractor that figured in each possible crisis scenario, but no one did, and few care today; as Sean McMeekin notes, “as for what Russia’s leaders hoped to accomplish by going to war in 1914, most histories of the conflict have little to say, beyond vague mutterings about Serbia and Slavic honour, treaty obligations to France, and concern for Russia’s status as a great power.” (12)

It is indicative of a habitual geopolitical superficiality that even general history works of the era do not enlighten the curious layman what, for example, French, British, Australian and New Zealand troops sought at the Gallipoli Peninsula, i.e. the Dardanelles, in 1915/16. There were no Germans, nor Austrians, and the landscape was not very attractive.

To prevent a Franco-Russian rapprochement had been Bismarck’s priority, but as we had the opportunity to observe, the German Foreign Office was far too preoccupied after 1890 with internal strife and incompetence to notice the signs of the times; the failure was aggravated by the fact that the two decades after 1890 were the years in which the fateful system of alliances developed and petrified.

Early signs of trouble came from south-eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula, the critical triangle between Vienna, Constantinople and St. Petersburg. Slavic hotheads instigated local insurrections from the mid-1870s on; some were home-grown, as in Bulgaria, where, Luigi Albertini remarks, more than two hundred revolutionary committees could be counted in 1872, (13) and some were kindled by Serbian agents. Russian expansionism and Slavic ethnocentricity concerted, founded upon age-old Russo-Turkish and Austro-Slavic enmity; encouraged, perhaps, by the Russian generals’ impression that both Turks and Austrians were militarily inferior, “beatable“, so to say. Luigi Albertini sums up the Russian designs on the Turks as follows:

Russian ambitions in the Balkan Peninsula were of ancient date. [FN5] Eight wars at least she had waged on the Turks either to take their territory or to help Orthodox Slavs and Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke. In the recent Crimean War Russia had come up against Austrian hostility. Forgetful of services rendered by the Tsar in 1849, when Nicholas I had saved Francis Joseph’s throne by sending Russian troops to smother the Hungarian revolt, Austria had maintained an unfriendly neutrality during this war, and at the Congress of Paris in 1856 had helped to deprive Russia of part of Bessarabia.
Having reached the Black Sea in the eighteenth century, Russia henceforward aspired to free access to the Mediterranean. But the Straits were in Turkish possession, and entry to them was regulated by international agreements unfavourable to Russia. The Black Sea was a mare clausum [FN6] and its key was in other hands. Still, older than the Russian aspiration to the Straits was the aspiration for Constantinople. [FN7] The cross was to be raised on the Church of Santa Sophia as a symbol of the protection given by Russia to the Balkan Christians and of her aid in their liberation. (14)

[FN5] Albertini explains: “In 1833, by the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, Russia had achieved the closing of the Dardanelles to enemy fleets seeking to penetrate to the Black Sea. This clause was modified by the Treaty of London of 1840 and the Straits Convention of 1841, which denied the Straits to ships of war whether entering or leaving the Black Sea, a principle confirmed by the Treaty of Paris of 1856, which further forbade both Russia and Turkey to have warships in the Black Sea. After the denunciation of this clause by Russia in 1870, the Treaty of London had withdrawn the veto, but had for the first time admitted the principle that foreign warships might enter the Black Sea in time of peace, if the Sultan deemed it necessary for the safeguarding of the other clauses of the Treaty of Paris. Thus, Russia could not pass her Black Sea fleet into the Mediterranean, while the Sultan could admit enemy fleets into the Black Sea, a complete reversal to the disadvantage of Russia of the principle of the closed Straits.” (16) [FN6] Latin: a “closed sea” [FN7] Sean McMeekin comments that Constantinople had been called “Tsargrad” by Russians for centuries; the town from where, after successful Reconquista from the Muslims, the Tsar would reign over a “Second Rome“, a new Orthodox Christian Empire. (17)

The Balkan after the Treaty of Berlin 1878

The development of Pan-Slavism in the 1860s added to the volatility of the region, for the enthusiasts of some imaginary ethnic unity demanded the establishment of a greater Slavic confederation, which was to include “Russia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Constantinople with the Straits, a Serb-Croat-Slovene realm corresponding approximately to Yugoslavia, and in addition Greece, Romania and Hungary.” (15) It would appear thus, that Greek, Romanians and Hungarians would become involuntary Slavs, and in addition, one might argue that there were few Slavs in Constantinople who urgently expected their liberation. But Pan-Slavism found its most enthusiastic adherents in the south: neither the Poles, who longed to have their state back, which had been divided up by Russia, Austria and Prussia in the three successive divisions of the late eighteenth century, nor the Czechs, who aspired to their own state in Bohemia and Moravia, eventually together with the Slovaks a bit further east, were keen on a union with southern Slavs, for they were only too keenly aware of the ethnic and religious divisions of the Balkan.

There existed within the southern Slavs living in Austria-Hungary a quite numerous faction which would accept the recently quite liberal Habsburg reign and aspired to little more than, say, limited home rule and decent representation in the administration of the realm. The Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was essentially open to their suggestions, but the goodwill of the constructive faction came to nought because of the intransigence of the Hungarian nobility — in some respects, the Slavs were less of a problem to Austria than the Hungarians, who, by skilful negotiation, had created for themselves a very advantageous position in the Austro-Hungarian “Ausgleich“ of 1867.

Luigi Albertini summarizes the result of the bargain:

[By the Ausgleich] … the Empire was divided into two rigidly separated States; on the one hand Austria with the Hereditary Crown lands formerly belonging to the Holy Roman Empire and the later acquisitions Galicia and Dalmatia, and on the other Hungary together with Transylvania and Croatia, from which Fiume was detached and placed directly under Hungary.
Each of the two states was to have its own Constitution, Government, and Parliament. Common to both states were the Ministers for War, Foreign Affairs, and Finance, the latter in so far as he administered the revenues covering defence and diplomatic expenditure. While legislation and the budget came under the separate parliaments, their joint interests were to be dealt with by standing committees called Delegations nominated annually by the respective Parliaments. For matters concerning commerce and customs, the two governments were to conclude separate agreements every ten years.
Though the word Ausgleich means “equalization” and the compromise assured equal rights to both sides, Austria was to contribute 70% of the joint expenditure and Hungary only 30%, which, as Friedjung [Heinrich Friedjung, then Professor at the University of Vienna] observes, was equivalent to a “tribute obligation” from Austria to Hungary, of which the Hungarians were wont to boast. (18)

In his role as King of the Hungarians, Emperor Francis Joseph was bound by the resolutions of the Hungarian parliament, and thus, as the Austrian historian Viktor Bibl observed, the Magyars had the upper hand in governmental practice:

Not two sovereign Parliaments were to deal with joint business; not the King of Hungary and the Emperor were to base themselves on an agreement between the two states. Solely the Hungarian Parliament and Ministers impose their will as law on the entire Monarchy, including Austria; the King of Hungary as executor of the Hungarian national will is absolute master of Austria. (19)

And so it had come to pass that most of the southern Slavs of the Empire had come under the Hungarian thumb, from which they received little kindness. It was the small, semi-autonomous Principality of Serbia, technically a province of the Ottoman Empire, which, relying on Russian protection in the case of failure, felt elected to propel Pan-Slavic dreams toward their eventual fulfilment. After raising an insurgency against the Turkish overlords in Bosnia 1875, the Serbian ruler Prince Milan urged Constantinople to entrust his state with the governance of the errant province. When the Sultan denied the motion, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Turks on June 30, 1876. By September, they were defeated, and the Serbs asked their putative protector, Tsar Alexander II, to intercede on their behalf and to arrange an armistice. Russia eyed the possibility to have found in the Serbo-Turkish war a proper excuse to attack the Ottomans themselves, but this could not be done unless Austrian neutrality could be obtained.

Diplomatic missives were exchanged between Vienna and St. Petersburg, and despite Austrian conditions that, in Albertini’s words, were “tantamount to [Russia] fighting for the benefit of Austria-Hungary,” (20) a military convention and political agreement was signed in Budapest in early 1877, and Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on April 24. The Convention of Budapest awarded Bosnia and the Hercegovina to Austria and assured her that no greater Slavic state was to be founded in the Balkans as a result of Russia’s future endeavours.

Eventually, Russia won a confused campaign, and in March 1878 exacted from Turkey the Treaty of San Stefano. The agreement established a geographically generous, supposedly independent Bulgaria on Turkey’s doorstep, which, however, could fool no one as to its being a “Russian outpost towards Constantinople“. (21) In addition, the compact not only bestowed full independence on Serbia, Montenegro and Romania but also provided autonomy, under Austro-Russian “supervision“, to Bosnia and Hercegovina.

All that, of course, directly violated the Convention of Budapest and also was far more than Great Britain was willing to tolerate – for it turned out that Russia and Austria had clandestinely agreed to “liberate” Constantinople, which would become a “Free City“. Now an Anglo-Russian conflict threatened over the San Stefano Treaty, and Austria espied an opportunity to renegotiate her terms with Russia. For her benevolent neutrality, she now demanded not only Bosnia and the Hercegovina, again, but added parts of Montenegro and of the large Bulgarian state which the San Stefano Treaty had just created. It was all too obvious to suspect that Austria envisioned a road for herself all the way down to Salonika and the Aegean Sea; on August 6, 1878, Count Julius Andrassy, then Austria’s Foreign Minister, admitted in a letter to the King of Wuerttemberg that the possession of these lands “enables us in the event of a collapse of Turkey to be as near as possible to the scene, to safeguard our interests.” (22)

With Austria entering the race for the Straits – for a naval base in Salonika, furnished with the proper ships, could easily close the Straits independently of Turks or Russians or the British – the situation became opaque, impenetrable, while the stakes increased. Great Britain’s new Foreign Minister Lord Salisbury realized this, and, assisted by Bismarck, whose back channels in St. Petersburg had informed him about the Austro-Russian collusion, invited the European powers to a continental congress to adjudicate all pending matters, which opened in Berlin on June 13, 1878.

Final meeting at the Reich Chancellery on 13 July 1878, Bismarck between Gyula Andrássy and Pyotr Shuvalov, on the left Alajos Károlyi, Alexander Gorchakov (seated) and Benjamin Disraeli

After a lot of horse-trading and pressure brought to bear by Bismarck and Lord Beaconsfield, i.e. Benjamin Disraeli, the congress eventually entrusted Bosnia and the Hercegovina to Austrian occupation, while upholding titular Turkish suzerainty over these provinces. In addition, Austria reserved the right to intercede in the Sanjak of Novibazar, the strip of territory separating Serbia and Montenegro, if the Ottomans were unable to guarantee a competent administration of the province, which remained under their sovereignty.

The problem of the Straits, however, could not be addressed satisfactorily; for England and Russia could not find a compromise. (23) Statehood and independence were granted to Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, the latter two receiving additional territories. Russia appropriated Armenia and reoccupied Bessarabia. The island of Cyprus Great Britain had secured from Turkey on June 4, ten days before the Congress began; that she attempted to keep the acquisition secret – in vain, when the news went around the world on July 8 – was only more water on the mills of those who were wont to complain about “Perfidious Albion” and her hypocrisy. The bottom line, however, was that everybody had profited “at the expense of Turkey, to which up to 1878 had belonged Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bessarabia, Armenia, and Cyprus, and under whose sovereignty till then had stood Serbia, Montenegro and Romania.” (24)

This short description of the events giving rise to the Congress of Berlin has been chosen to serve as an impression of the manner in which European diplomacy was customarily handled; in the best case, its double and triple layers of deceit could be repaired by the efforts of reasonable and skilful men like Disraeli and Bismarck; under the aegis of lesser diplomatic talents, accidents happened galore, as may be read in detail in Luigi Albertini’s magnum opus.

We shall now attempt to concentrate the next twenty-five years or so of European power politics, each of them as complicated and deceptive as the events that led to the Congress of Berlin – and some worse – in a form that hopefully allows us to separate the wheat from the chaff. Essentially, we shall follow the interplay of the Great Powers, mindful that the rapid sociological and economic changes of the industrial age exerted limitations on governmental options than had been unknown only decades earlier – fear of socialism, for one.

The Congress of Berlin had not only addressed questions of the Balkans but many other points of interest and one of its results had been that Bismarck and Disraeli had granted France “a free hand in Tunis,” (25) for they much favoured to keep France busy in the Mediterranean instead of courting Russia. Licence for France, however, irked Italy, which felt a need to acquire new possessions; why exactly, nobody knew, for she was rather underdeveloped and would be expected to do her homework first, but she seemed to labour from a case of the aforementioned psychological desiderata of successful imperialism.

In 1880, France invaded Tunisia and established a protectorate over the region, but because at this time Gladstone and the conservatives were in power in England, far more sceptical to French acquisitions in Africa than Disraeli and Lord Salisbury had been, Italy thought she might enlist British aid for her own designs on Tunisia. But England was loath to replace a French threat to her Mediterranean position with a potentially worse Italian one and Rome got nowhere. Having arrived there, only an understanding with Germany could help, but then Bismarck was no friend of Italy, which he accused of pursuing a “jackal policy”. (26) Thus it took another eighteen months of horse-trading before, on May 20, 1882, Germany, Austria and Italy signed the First Treaty of the “Triple Alliance”, valid for five years.

Black and white photo of the signatures to the treaty of the Triple Alliance, 1882, Gustav Kálnoky, Austria-Hungary, Heinrich von Reuss, Germany, and Carlo di Robilant, Italy

The contract began with the solemn assurance that the parties “have agreed to conclude a Treaty which by its essentially conservative and defensive nature pursues only the aim of forestalling the dangers that might threaten the security of their States and the Peace of Europe.” (27) Because it was exactly such conservative, peaceful and defensive agreements that proved unable to stop the conflagration of 1914, we shall have a look at a few of its clauses, summarized by Luigi Albertini:

The High Contracting Parties mutually promised peace and friendship, pledged themselves to enter into no alliance or engagement directed against one of their States and to exchange views on political and economic questions of a general nature that might arise, [and] promised mutual support within the limits of their own interests (Article I).
Austria and Germany undertook in the case of an unprovoked attack by France to go to the help of Italy with all their forces. The same obligation was to devolve upon Italy in the case of an aggression by France on Germany without direct provocation (Article II).
If one or two of the High Contracting Parties, without direct provocation on their part, should chance to be attacked and engaged in war with two or more Great Powers not signatories of the treaty, the casus foederis would arise simultaneously for all the High Contracting Parties (Article III).
In the case that one of the three allies was forced to make war on a Great Power, not a signatory to the Treaty, which threatened its security, the two others would maintain benevolent neutrality, each reserving to itself the right, if it saw fit, to take part in such a war at the side of its ally (Article IV). (28)

The attentive reader will have readily identified two problems: the first in the clause that applies if one of the signatories is “… forced to make war …“ which entirely leaves open the question under which conditions this might be the case. Second, some scenarios were left out; for example, the contract would not apply if Austria would be attacked by Russia alone. The alliance was, of course, directed against France; Bismarck, whose opinion of the Italians had not much improved, saw the purpose of the Triple Alliance less in winning Italy but in preventing her from associating with France [and when exactly that happened in 1915, Bismarck’s voice thundered from the grave “I told you so!”]. By 1888, Romania had essentially joined the Triple Alliance, and the situation at this time is often regarded as Bismarck’s new, post-1871, continental equilibrium: France was isolated, and Bismarck himself would ensure that the interests of Russia and Austria on the Balkan would not collide. Great Britain’s interests would profit from a stabilization of the continent as well and Russia’s aspirations on the Straits were, for the moment, impeded by Romania.

After some mending of socks, the Triple Alliance was renewed on February 20, 1887, on identical terms, except for the addition of an Austro-Italian protocol that attempted to regulate the parties’ interests in the Balkan, and a German-Italian agreement in which Italy reassured herself of German assistance in the case of a clash with France in central or western North Africa. (29)

Bismarck saw room for a further improvement of the status quo if Great Britain and Italy were to come to an understanding against France, and when Franco-British relations in regard to Egypt had taken one more dive after the French Prime Minister Freycinet publicly declared “that France could not allow Egypt to pass permanently under English rule because ‘he who is master of Egypt is in large part master of the Mediterranean,'” Lord Salisbury began to make overtures to Italy. (30) Albertini remarks that he “had got to the point of half wishing for another Franco-German war to put a stop to French vexations.” (31) In the spring of 1887 Italy and Great Britain signed an agreement regarding the retention of the status quo and pledging mutual support in Africa, an understanding Austria joined in late March 1887 to the chagrin of the aggressive Hungarian faction. But it seemed not to have come to Italy’s attention that her planned occupation of Tripoli, which belonged to the Ottomans, might constitute a change of this status quo, and when the Italian Foreign Minister Crispi wrote to Salisbury to inform him of the plan which would, as he said, solely anticipate a similar French plan, Salisbury made clear that British support would not extend to such adventures. He wrote back:

“The interests of Great Britain as also those of Italy do not permit that Tripolitania should have a fate similar to that of Tunisia. We must absolutely guard against such an eventuality when it threatens us. … If Italy were to occupy Tripoli in time of peace without France having taken any aggressive measure, she would expose herself to the reproach of having revived the Near Eastern question in very disadvantageous conditions.” (32)

On the eastern side of the Triple Alliance, Austria seemed to contemplate war with Russia over Serbia and Bulgaria. Kalnoky, the new Austrian Foreign Minister, approached Bismarck with his generals’ wish to clarify the exact conditions under which the casus foederis under the Austro-German Alliance of 1879 would arise. The problem was that the Reinsurance Treaty was secret and had to remain so and hence Bismarck had to prevaricate. The Austro-German Alliance, he replied, provided for German assistance in the case of a Russian attack on Austria, but not for an Austrian attack on Russia, as he thought to have made clear to the Austrian Ambassador in Berlin in January 1886:

“If Russia attacks Austria-Hungary, Germany will come to her assistance with all her forces, but it is not possible to let Germany play the role of auxiliary army to increase Austro-Hungarian influence on the Danube. Not a member of parliament would be found to vote even a single mark for such a purpose.” (33)

In a speech to the Reichstag on January 11, 1887, Bismarck had publicly clarified, with an eye on the Hungarian hotheads that:

“Our relations with Austria-Hungary are based on the consciousness of each one of us that the whole existence of each as a Great Power is a necessity to the other in the interests of European equilibrium; but these relations do not, as they are interpreted at times in the Hungarian Parliament, rest on the principle that one of the two nations puts itself and its whole strength and policy completely at the service of the other.
This is an utter impossibility. There exist specifically Austrian interests which we cannot undertake to defend, and there are specifically German interests which Austria cannot undertake to defend. We cannot each adopt the other’s special interests.” (34)

Austria had become the problem in both the Triple Alliance – for perpetual Austro-Italian tensions – and the Dreikaiserbund, due to her frequent spats and spars with Russia. In the winged words of Norman Stone, “Austria-Hungary was trying to act the part of a great power with the resources of a second-rank one.” (35) It was a sign of the respect Bismarck commanded in all European capitals that he was able to balance the diverging interests of Germany’s allies as long as he was in office. But, as Luigi Albertini commented, “Bismarck’s resignation in March 1890 produced a sense of dismay all over Europe. His authority and prestige, the veneration which surrounded him, the fear he inspired, were beyond compare,” and observed that “the youthful sovereign who had dropped him [Wilhelm II] had no policy of his own, and a sinister influence on German foreign relations was exercised by the tortuous Holstein who, in his hatred for Bismarck, reversed all the latter’s directives.” (36)

THE REINSURANCE TREATY [PDF]

Germany’s lifeline to St. Petersburg ruptured quickly. Only three months after Bismarck’s dismissal, the Russian Ambassador Shuvalov showed up in Berlin to renew the Reinsurance Treaty for another six years but encountered disinterest bordering on hostility. Still, both Tsar and the Pan-Slavs remained sceptical of Paris, the former for its republicanism, the latter because they relied on Germany to keep Austria in check on the Balkans. Yet French perseverance began to pay off. Paris offered to float numerous Russian loans at advantageous conditions, sold weapons cheaply and endeared the Tsar by arresting a few of the more obnoxious Russian anarchist émigrés that lived in France, of the sort that had assassinated the Tsar’s father Alexander II in 1881. In August 1890, the French Chief of the General Staff Boisdeffre was invited to the Russian summer manoeuvres and there was introduced to his Russian colleague Obruchev and the Minister of War. Yet again it seems that it was Italy that unblocked the mutual suspicions between Paris and St. Petersburg when her new Prime Minister Rudini notified parliament of the 1891 renewal of the Triple Alliance “in a form which created the impression that it had been in some measure joined by England.” (37)

This was an ominous mistake, for if it were true, Russia had no choice but to entice France, Albion’s old enemy, as a counterweight, and in this age of secret treaties, one could not check whether it was true or not. Thus, Russia initiated tender diplomatic overtures to France which ended, in summer 1891, in an invitation to the French fleet to a visit at Kronstadt, Russia’s principal naval base in the Baltic, on the doorsteps of St. Petersburg, at the occasion of which the French Ambassador Laboulaye proposed that the two nations enter an agreement to further the continental peace.

A memorandum was drawn up with rather unseemly haste, and on August 27, 1891, the French government sanctioned a letter delivered by the Russian Ambassador in Paris, which stated that the Tsar had approved the following outlines:

“1. With the aim of defining and consecrating the “Entente Cordiale” which unites them, and in the desire to contribute by common accord to the maintenance of peace, which forms the object of their most sincere desires, the two Governments declare that they will concert on all questions of a nature to endanger general peace.
2. In the case that this peace were actually in peril, particularly in the case that one of the two parties were menaced by aggression, the two parties undertake to concert in advance measures to be taken immediately and simultaneously if the eventuality contemplated should actually arise.” (38)

Elementary scrutiny, however, tells us that the interests of the prospective endorsers of the agreement were far from overlapping, and the declarations of peaceful intent cannot obscure their different motivations: France hoped to enlist Russian aid without which she could not hope to overcome Germany; yet Russia’s problem was not Germany but Great Britain, that blocked her designs on the Straits and expansion toward the Caucasus and Persia. Thus, it took an additional twenty months of haggling and bickering until the Entente Cordiale was finally signed in January 1894, and the Franco- Russian pact that Bismarck had feared was a reality. Even then, the foreign policy aims of the two signatories were far from identical, and it was less the incoherent political invocations than the military agreement that became important. In the first two paragraphs, the arrangement laid out the following scenarios for outright defence or mobilization in a crisis:

“1. If France is attacked by Germany, or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia will employ all forces at her disposal to attack Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France will employ all the forces at her disposal to combat Germany.
2. In the case in which the forces of the Triple Alliance or of one of the Powers forming part of it were mobilized, France and Russia at the first announcement of the event and without need of preliminary agreement will immediately and simultaneously mobilize the whole of their forces and move them as near as possible to their frontiers.” (39)

Bismarck’s nightmare had become reality.

The operative memorandum that followed the protocol laid down the number of troops that were to be committed against Germany; France would dispatch 1.3 million men and Russia between 700,000 and 800,000. In addition, the general staffs of the nations were to meet at specified intervals to harmonize operational planning and prepare troop coordination, there would be no separate peace, and the Entente would last, in strict secrecy, as long as the Triple Alliance existed. (40)

Czar Nicholas II at Franco-Russian Manoeuvres 1901

Again, the treaty was technically defensive, but, as in the Triple Alliance, some possible scenarios made little sense or tended to provoke ill-advised complications. If, for example, Austria were to mobilize against Russia in a Balkan conflict, France would also be obliged to mobilize. Since France and Austria had no common border, this move would not only make any military sense but would lead to German mobilization, which in turn might well provoke the war that the alliance was supposed to avoid. As Luigi Albertini observed, “the French endeavoured to remedy this incongruity, but ended by resigning themselves to the consideration that, in an Austro-Russian conflict, France and Germany could not stand aside.” (41)

This was of course all too true, as 1914 would prove, and it is exactly the smart approval of the likely scenario that makes one doubt very much the honesty of the French government’s assertions that she was driven into the war of 1914 involuntary, solely because of her treaty obligations to Russia. Essentially, the Franco-Russian alliance guaranteed that revanche for 1870/71 would occur in the near future; all that remained was to find a suitable pretext and to determine a suitable date. [FN1] What was true in 1894 became more true twenty years later: on May 29, 1914, the American President Wilson’s envoy to Europe, Colonel House, wrote his master that “whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.” (42)

[FN1] The present author, however, disputes Luigi Albertini’s subsequent opinion that “it would be wrong to imagine that the Franco-Russian Alliance was concluded by the French with a view to an impending revanche or by the Russians to realize their aspirations in the Balkans and the Far East. What both sought was to end their isolation.” (44) In reality, France was not isolated any more than Great Britain, which saw no need to engage in questionable alliances then; both had extensive colonial interests that guaranteed them a major voice in global politics independent of alliances. In addition, French Republicans were much more sympathetic to liberal England than to reactionary Russia. Russia was assured of non-intervention by the powers that counted – which did not include Austria-Hungary, which could not threaten Russia on her own – and protected by her vastness that had defeated even Napoleon – as long as she did not attempt to go for Constantinople and the Straits. Yet by exposing Germany to a potentially immobilizing two-front war, she might gain the opportunity to fight and decide in her favour what Sean McMeekin called the “War of the Ottoman Succession“. (45)

Whether outright war or mobilization, neither side had illusions about the decisiveness of the prospective military measures, nor were they unaware that the defensive character of the treaty might change in time. The chauvinists of both countries expected much more from the alliance than did the Governments which concluded it. Moreover, in later years, like the Austro-German alliance, it lost its strictly defensive character to adapt itself to other ends; and the generals who negotiated the military agreement perfectly understood the consequences of the mobilizations contemplated in the agreement.

General Obruchev in the course of negotiations remarked that “to his idea, the beginning of French and Russian mobilization cannot now be regarded as a peaceful act; on the contrary, it is the most decisive act of war; i.e., would be inseparable from aggression”. Boisdeffre, likewise, said to the Tsar: “Mobilization is a declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one’s neighbour to do the same. Mobilization causes the carrying out of strategic transport and concentration. Otherwise, to allow a million men to mobilize on one’s frontiers without at once doing the same oneself is to forfeit all possibility of the following suit is to put oneself in the position of an individual with a pistol in his pocket who allows his neighbour to point a weapon at his head without reaching for his own.” To which Alexander III replied: “That is how I too understand it”. The importance and the consequences of this judgement were to come to the fore on July 25, 1914, when Russia was to be the first Power to order mobilization. (43)

Franco-Russian Manoeuvre at Chalons 1906

Now Great Britain found herself the odd man out, but her traditional equanimity, or indecisiveness, had preserved her so far from having to jeopardize her global aims by continental obligations. But she had to protect the Mediterranean lifeline that connected her to Egypt and the Near East and for this reason, was interested in opposing French influence in the western part of the Mediterranean by friendship with Italy that would bring the necessary authority to bear in Her Majesty’s name; yet, alas, her aversion to make binding commitments won the day, and Italy declined free services. But England might be left in a dubious position if, for instance, France and Russia were to cooperate in seizing Constantinople and the Straits. Such a scenario seemed possible after their alliance had become known, but Great Britain declined to join the Triple Alliance pre-emptively over this scenario, although her Prime Minister Rosebery acknowledged that “in such a case we should require the assistance of the Triple Alliance to hold France in check.” (46)

When Great Britain extended feelers to Germany over such a scenario, she was rebuffed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, from traditional friendship to Russia as well as antipathy to England made it clear that a Russian seizure of Constantinople and the Straits would, in his opinion, not constitute a casus belli for Germany; the interest of Austria could be maintained by giving her Salonika as a compensation. It was the remainder of Bismarck’s old policy of dividing the Balkans into two spheres of influence for Russia and Austria, and presiding over them as arbitrator. But Wilhelm was not Bismarck and thus the nostalgic endeavour tanked.

When tensions increased in South Africa between Boers and Britishers in 1895, Wilhelm II easily managed to upset Great Britain with his ill-advised Kruger telegram of January 3, 1896, in which he congratulated the Boer President to his accomplishments in driving out English raiders (“I express to you my sincere congratulations that you and your people, without appealing to the help of friendly powers, have succeeded, by your own energetic action against the armed bands which invaded your country as disturbers of the peace, in restoring peace and in maintaining the independence of the country against attack from without.“). A few months earlier he had demanded in a conversation with the British Military Attaché in Berlin that England “take up a clear position either with the Triple Alliance or against it“, adding that “the former alternative would require a formal undertaking such as was customary between continental Powers, i.e. sealed and signed guarantees.'” (49) The same invitation he extended in writing to the new Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in London on December 20, 1895, who, however, failed to acknowledge receipt. Given that Wilhelm knew Britain’s disinclination to formal alliances perfectly well, one is left to wonder about his state of mind.

Meanwhile, Italy’s Prime Minister Francesco Crispi complained to Bülow, then Ambassador in Rome, that “France makes war on us everywhere. Whatever may be said about the Triple Alliance being concluded to maintain peace, for us it has been the opposite. For us the Triple Alliance is war. Our position is intolerable. And I repeat, for us, this state of affairs is worse than war.” (50) There was, of course, no true war going on, except for a few ruffled feathers in Italy’s excitable nature, but Crispi’s complaint depicts the psychological afflictions of the imperial age. In reply, Chancellor Hohenlohe pointed out that the alliance was a defensive league to maintain peace, not a clique of robbers. (51) Italy’s frustration continued, although she was able to come to an agreement with France over Tunisia in late 1896.

In the Balkan, Austria continued the attempts to enlarge her domain of influence further east than Bismarck’s old division of influence spheres had suggested, chiefly driven by her State Department that was occupied by a Russophobe Hungarian camarilla; the result, increasing tensions with Russia, irritated Berlin, which made clear that it would not support an Austrian strike at Constantinople. Austria then attempted to enlist England’s aid, but, again, Salisbury replied in the name of Her Majesty’s government that “it was impossible to take any engagement involving an obligation to go to war” and Vienna got nowhere.” (52)

A change in the German government brought the replacement of Foreign Minister Marschall von Bieberstein by Bülow and the appointment of Alfred von Tirpitz to the post of Secretary for the Navy in June 1897. These substitutions would prove fatefully important, for not only were here the origins of Germany’s naval race with England but the notorious Pan-German League, founded in 1893, began to exert political influence as well.

Alike many naval officers of the time, Tirpitz had become a follower of Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval captain, whose book “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” had become a military bestseller. It argued that, as England’s example proved, it was necessary for an empire to maintain sea power, that is, a battle fleet superior to her competitors, to project global influence and protect its economic interests. Tirpitz relished the idea very much, not in the least because it would much improve the prestige of the German navy, that is, his own office, which up to then had been a small department for coastal defence. Tirpitz had Mahan’s book translated and distributed to everybody he knew.

He was anti-British, too, which put him in the emperor’s good graces; a feeling that was largely reciprocated in England. Luigi Albertini cites the “Saturday Review” of September 11, 1897, which argued that “in all parts of the earth English and Germans jostle each other. Were every German to be wiped out tomorrow, there is no English trade, no English pursuit, that would not immediately expand”, and recommended that “Germania est delenda“. (53)

Numerous Italian, Austrian and German appeals to England in the last decade or so, inviting her to the Triple Alliance, had failed to impress her much, but from 1898 on the situation reversed itself; now Whitehall sought German attention. At the same time, renewed Russian scepticism over the Entente with France led the Tsar to propose a continental alliance of all powers against “the ambition, the implacable egoism, and the avidity of England.” (54) A Bismarck might have been able to square this diplomatic circle; Wilhelm, the old Chancellor von Hohenlohe and Bülow were not.

Suddenly China appeared in the German focus. When General Obruchev arrived from St. Petersburg with some anti- England proposals in the autumn of 1897, Bülow succeeded, while stalling Obruchev’s original mission, to win the Tsar over to assist Germany in the acquisition of a combined port, trading post and coaling station on the Pacific Coast. With the Tsar’s connivance, taking advantage of the weakness of the Chinese government, German troops landed at Jiao Xian in China’s Shandong peninsula, over which they acquired a ninety-nine-year concession in March 1898 (Tsingtao). The Russians, meanwhile, had obtained their own Pacific harbour in Port Arthur, which became the principal port for their Far Eastern fleet after they had thrown out some nosy Britishers. Russian admirals had read Mahan’s book as well.

In the eyes of Her Majesty’s government, the Russian activities were quite close to poaching in England’s own back garden, for Great Britain controlled more than eighty per cent of the Chinese trade. She was not likely to allow Russian expansion – the German colony was too small to matter. In the Mediterranean, Austria-Hungary and Italy, to a degree, counteracted the spread of Russian influence, but who could aid Britannia against Russia in the Far East?

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

In the opinion of Joseph Chamberlain, head of the British Liberal Unionists and Secretary for the Colonies, it might be Germany. Unlike Salisbury, he saw dangers in England’s isolation. Already French expeditions probed the White Nile from the south and had established a base near Fashoda (today’s Kodok in Sudan). Chamberlain used Salisbury’s absence from the Foreign Office on account of a spa visit to Europe after March 25, 1989, to advance his ideas, but, not being a diplomat, it would seem that he approached his pleadings to Germany, as Luigi Albertini commented, “in the manner of a business deal.” (55) Strangely enough, after all the earlier German overtures to England, now it was Bülow who prevaricated, citing concerns over Germany’s relation to Russia, which might suffer from a flirt with her mortal enemy. Bülow summarized his position in writing to Wilhelm that we “must hold ourselves independent between the two; be the pointer on the scales, not the pendulum swinging from left to right.” (56)

When Salisbury returned to Whitehall in late April 1898, he had to find out that Chamberlain had meanwhile made his demand of an alliance with Germany public, for instance in a speech on May 13 in Birmingham. Chamberlain’s reasoning, however, failed to convince Salisbury and the issue remained open. Suddenly Wilhelm took action, when …

… on 30 May 1898, the Kaiser took the step of writing to the Tsar telling him that three times in the last few weeks England had talked of an alliance, the last time requiring the answer within a brief time limit. As the Triple Alliance, Japan, and the United States were all to be included, the alliance could only be directed against Russia.
“I beg you to tell me what you can offer and what you will do if I refuse.”
Before answering, the Kaiser wanted to know the Tsar’s proposals. Let the latter not hesitate on account of France which could enter into any combination he desired. By this indiscretion, the Kaiser offered the prospect of reviving the old Continental league against England. The Tsar, however, did not rise to the bait but answered on 3 June that a few months earlier England had made attractive proposals to him too and that he was not in a position to answer the question whether or not it was advantageous to Germany to accept these repeated English offers. (57)

At this point, the reader might be excused if the suspicion arose that any system that depended on puerile aristocrats who habitually engaged in pissing contests was doomed to end in a global war. Wilhelm and his advisors concluded that “any agreement with England would appear directed against Russia and would lessen the security of Germany to east and west, while any agreement with Russia would appear directed against England and would lessen the chance of colonial acquisitions.” (58) The compulsiveness of imperialist reasoning reared its head again; had Bismarck been in office, he would have counselled that, in the worst case, a treaty with Russia might cost a few thousand square miles of torrid African steppe, but would prevent the annihilation of the Fatherland.

In the autumn of 1898, through Lascelles, her Ambassador in Berlin, England put the quite unheard-of proposition on the table – apparently secured by Chamberlain in a cabinet vote – that the two countries could reach agreement on mutual assistance if either one were attacked by two other Powers, but Bülow again prevailed in counselling against it by writing to Wilhelm, in a variation of his old theme, that, by declining any alliance with England or Russia, “Your Majesty can be present as Arbiter Mundi at the eightieth birthday celebrations of H.M. Queen Victoria.” (59) That no one would ask notoriously unreliable Wilhelm to assume this role never entered Bülow’s mind.

Meanwhile, trouble brewed in Sudan. Lord Kitchener had massacred the followers of the Mahdi at Omdurman and hoisted the Union Jack in Khartoum. Then he embarked on Fashoda with a small party, to challenge the French under Captain Marchand who had established a camp there. No one yielded, and both British and French flags flew in Fashoda while the diplomats in Paris and London ministrated on the matter. Escalation followed, to a degree at which war seemed to become a distinct possibility, until, on November 4, 1898, the French Foreign Minister Delcassé informed London that the French troops had been ordered to leave Fashoda.

France’s giving way may have been influenced by the liberal Dreyfusard movement, which deplored the reactionary leanings of the Tsar and the Kaiser and advocated rapprochement with Albion. On the other hand, the French Right, convinced that the Dreyfus scandal was a British machination to weaken her eternal enemy, inflamed the patriots. The journalist Cassagnac wrote that “if Germany is an object of hatred, it is for a definite past which can be wiped out. … But England’s hatred against us is inextinguishable; England is the enemy of yesterday, tomorrow, and forever.” (60)

On December 11, 1898, the Tricolore was lowered at Fashoda but the crisis was not yet over. (61) To bring it to a negotiated end, Paul Cambon became the new French Ambassador at the Court of St. James, a post he would hold until 1920. Eventually, a treaty was signed that recognized England’s claims on Egypt and the Upper Nile valleys yet allowed France expansion toward the west and south. That, however, seemed to infringe an earlier Anglo-Italian agreement over the latter’s right in the Tripolitanian hinterlands and the problem was not resolved until two years later, when by mutual declaration, France signalized disinterest in Tripolitania while Italy admitted the same for Morocco. That the Italians completely managed to botch their eventual invasion in Libya twelve years later is a different story, and will be related below.

Meanwhile, in August 1898, the new Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, had proposed an international conference to discuss “the most effective means of assuring to all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace and in particular to put an end to the progressive development of existing armaments.” (62) Although rumours held, perhaps truthfully, that all that Russia wanted was a temporary slowing down of the armaments race for the purpose of rebuilding and modernizing her own artillery, (63) the conference eventually took place at The Hague, in the Netherlands, from May 18 to July 29, 1899. The first instance of discussion was a Russian proposal to freeze conscription numbers for five years, which was easily shot down by Germany and Italy. The second proposal was to introduce international arbitration to conflicts, but, again, German opposition could not be overcome until the final version of the arbitration agreement amounted to making the process voluntary. Although a few innocent formulations were eventually developed, which graced the final deposition of the conference, the occasion had not accomplished much.

Perhaps as a reaction of Wilhelm’s unyielding opposition to the conference aims, Delcassé travelled to St. Petersburg a week after its conclusion, to renegotiate, if possible, the terms of the Entente Cordiale. He was received favourably and proposed to correct the political agreement of August 27, 1891, in that now not only the maintenance of peace but also “the equilibrium among the European forces” (64) became its objective. This was agreed on, and the French government’s unofficial propagandist Pierre Renouvin, a historian by trade, had no problem to recognize that the formula about the equilibrium “is a device to make Russia take into account the question of Alsace-Lorraine, which she affects to ignore …. It is thus accurate to say that the spirit of the Franco-Russian alliance is changed. “(65) It had changed indeed, for now, it could be interpreted to cover an attack as well, and the subsequent modifications in the Military Convention took this into account. Luigi Albertini tallies them up:

The [old] military convention of 1892 did not create obligations for France in case of a war of Russia against England. But the possibility of such a war was discussed at a meeting held in July 1900 between the Russian and French Chiefs of Staff, who drew up a protocol in which it was stated that if England attacked France, Russia would create a diversion against India with 300,000 men, when the construction of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway was completed; if on the other hand, England attacked Russia, the French General Staff would concentrate 150,000 men on the Channel coasts and threaten a landing in the British Isles.
For several months these terms remained a simple proposal of the two General Staffs; after a fresh visit of Delcassé to St. Petersburg in April 1901, it was laid down in an exchange of letters between Delcassé and
Lamsdorf [the new Russian Foreign Minister] on 16-17 May that the two Governments agreed to them in case of a war “imposed on Russia and France by England alone or by England supported by the Triple Alliance”. The agreement even began to be implemented when the French Government authorized a loan to Russia of 425,000,000 gold francs destined for the construction of strategic railways, in particular, the one from Orenburg to Tashkent. (66)

There was no doubt that the two general staffs also discussed other scenarios, say, a war with Germany or Austria. Meanwhile, on the British Islands, Chamberlain resumed his efforts to bring about an Anglo-German understanding. The occasion of his renewed attempt was the aforementioned birthday celebration of Queen Victoria, where, alas, no one yet had asked Wilhelm to arbitrate anything. Apparently, there was a conference at Windsor Castle, in which Wilhelm, Bülow, Asquith and Chamberlain participated and laid out a road map. It was resolved that Chamberlain would smooth the way, which he attempted to do in a speech at Leicester on November 30, 1899. He opined that:

“I cannot conceive any point which can arise in the immediate future, which would bring ourselves and the Germans into antagonism of interests. On the contrary, I can see many things which must be a cause of anxiety to the statesmen of Europe, but in which our interests are clearly the same as the interests of Germany and in which that understanding of which I have spoken [previously] in the case of America might, if extended to Germany, do more, perhaps, than any combination of arms in order to preserve the peace of the world.
If the union between England and America is a powerful factor in the cause of peace, a new Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race will be a still more potent influence in the future of the world. I have used the word ‘alliance’, but again I desire to make it clear that to me it seems to matter little whether you have an alliance which is committed to paper, or whether you have an understanding in the minds of the statesmen of the respective countries.” (67)

That was frank, perhaps too frank, and the proposal was received in neither country on its merits. In England, the affair over the Kruger telegram was not forgotten, and the papers had a field day; in Germany, the speech caused an unprecedented storm of indignation. The influential journalist Theodor Wolff of the Berliner Tagblatt vowed that Germany “was not going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for England” (69); the Navy League fulminated that the offer was only directed at diverting money from the German fleet program to Albion’s sole benefit. Hastily, Bülow repented, and when laying before the Reichstag the Second Navy Law, he avowed that “in the coming century Germany will be either hammer or anvil,” (70) as if he had not been present at Windsor Castle.

The naval bill was truly enormous: it provided for the building of thirty-four battleships, fourteen heavy and thirty-eight light cruisers and eighty torpedo boats within sixteen years, (71) and necessitated the construction of three new harbour facilities to service all these ships. William explained to the world that he had never been to England in the first place, but if he had been, he would have been misunderstood. Not only had he never known of any English proposals, but he was also sure that, as he told the Russian Ambassador in Berlin, “‘Russia alone could paralyse English power and deal her, if need be, the mortal blow. Should the Tsar send his army against India, he [Wilhelm] would personally guarantee that nobody in Europe should move. He would mount guard along the French frontiers. … In England, they well know this. I have never concealed that in the Far East I shall never be on their side.” The astonished Ambassador asked if he were to report this conversation. “Certainly“, replied the Kaiser.” (72) It would seem that Wilhelm’s megalomania was doing well.

After Bülow and Holstein repeatedly disavowed an English alliance, the renewed, tacit advances of new Foreign Minister Lansdowne and Lord Salisbury – now Prime Minister – found no positive reply. Finally, the latter stated the long and short of his government’s refusal to enter alliances in the memorandum of May 29, 1901.

“The British Government cannot undertake to declare war, for any purpose, unless it is a purpose of which the electors of this country would approve. If the Government promised to declare war for an object which did not commend itself to public opinion, the promise would be repudiated, and the Government would be turned out.

I do not see how, in common honesty, we could invite other nations to rely upon our aid in a struggle, which must be formidable and probably supreme, when we have no means, whatever, of knowing what may be the humour of our people in circumstances which cannot be foreseen.” (73)

When Lansdowne talked to the new German Ambassador Metternich on January 19, 1902, whether, despite the basic inability of Whitehall to enter in a military treaty, other mutual problems could be resolved, the new Ambassador replied that they could not; England would have to choose between all and nothing. We may reflect here on the words of the German historian Erich Brandenburg:

“In trying, by means of carefully balanced paragraphs to escape the danger of being exploited by England and then left in the lurch, our political leaders conjured the far greater peril of driving our natural allies into the arms of our opponents and leaving ourselves isolated. Yet they constantly cherished the conviction that they had acted wisely because England must and would eventually return. The English never came back to us. They went instead to our enemies.” (74)

Anglo-German talks largely ceased, and the attention of Wilhelmstrasse turned to the important matter of the renewal of the Triple Alliance, on the calendar for summer 1902. Italy had experienced another change of government and under the aegis of the new Foreign Minister Prinetti and the influence of King Victor Emmanuel III, whose anti-Austrian and anti- Wilhelmine feelings were well-known, plus the sympathies of new Prime Minister Zanardelli for the Irredentists [FN 11], the country seemed to lean more and more on France, especially since Prinetti was a Lombard, who were traditionally friendly towards France. In one of his earliest interviews, with the “New York Herald”, Zanardelli explained that “if the treaties [FN 12] are renewed, they can have no other aim than peace. We shall have to divest them of all suspicion, which unfortunately has several times arisen, of animosity toward France. It is our duty to work in that sense, because Italy and France must remain friends.” (75)

[FN 11] The Irredentists demanded the return to Italy of all Italian-speaking provinces, essentially those remaining with Austria, i.e. Friuli, Trentino and Trieste. [FN 12] That is, including the commercial adjuncts to the Triple Alliance.

Such talk was not suited to mollify either Berlin or Vienna, and when an Italian navy squadron visited Toulon, the principal French warship base in the Mediterranean, Bülow was reported to have told his Italian mother-in-law that “Italy will have to decide soon to make her choice between matrimony and concubinage.” (76) Most surprisingly, Italy subsequently decided to reveal her agreement with France over Tripolitania, which had been concluded in the aftermath of the Fashoda affair but had been kept secret.

In Bülow’s parlance, Italy’s tried the squaring of the circle; to retain matrimony to the Triple Alliance but to lust, perhaps, for an extended French affair. Italian politicians routinely disavowed such notions but were unable to convince their allies. To these vexations was added the problem of the Pope, who sought to be given back a secular state. While the overall situation was that Italy could not really afford not to prolong the alliance, differences with Germany arose over the question of eventual changes which were advocated by Prinetti.

He envisioned three modifications. The first regarded Italy’s desire for the conquest of Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica; a new Article XI should be inserted in the treaty, in which “the allies of Italy [Austria-Hungary and Germany] declare their disinterestedness towards any action which she [Italy] might undertake at her own risk and peril in Tripolitania or in Cyrenaica.” (77) Demand number two was that the members of the alliance should guarantee the status quo in the Balkans, for if Russia were to come into possession of Constantinople and the Straits, Italy would be reduced to the level of a second rate power in the Mediterranean, “helplessly wedged in between France and Russia.” (78) The last demand was that, without a previous agreement on the commercial issues, the Alliance would not be prolonged.

Bülow prevaricated, and nothing moved until Austria proposed that, once the treaty was renewed in the original form, she would promise Italy not to interfere in “Italian action in Tripoli or in Cyrenaica, in the event that the existing status quo in this region should, as the result of particular circumstances, undergo a change, and Italy were to find herself forced to resort to such measures as her own interest might dictate.” (79)

This Prinetti appreciated, but insisted on the primary importance of the commercial treaty, a matter which Bülow, however, refused to discuss. On April 26, 1902, Bülow told Lanza, the Italian Ambassador in Berlin, that it would have to be yes or no – like he had instructed Metternich to cold-shoulder Lansdowne in London. The Italians had to give in, and, on June 28, 1902, the unchanged contract was signed, although an annex incorporated the declaration in the matter of Tripoli that Austria had promised.

Earlier in the year, an indiscretion of Prinetti had led France on the track of a secret agreement outside of the treaty itself, concluded in January 1888 between the General Staffs of Germany and Italy, which stipulated that in the case of a war of the Alliance against France and Russia, Italy was to send six army corps and three cavalry divisions to Germany’s assistance at the Rhine front. Later, the obligation was reduced to five army corps and two cavalry divisions. (80)

In 1901, this military convention had become a matter of bilateral talks, initially separate from the more political issues, and the German Military Attaché in Rome, Major von Chelius, was told at an audience with the King that His Majesty had reservations against the dispatch of so many of Italy’s best troops north, where they could not protect the Italian borders and coast. It was clear that, between the lines, Italy sought to slip out of the potentially dangerous obligation, and Chelius reported the matter to Bülow, who gave Chelius’ report to the German Chief of Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, for evaluation.

Schlieffen knew his Italians well and had to calculate whether the retention of the obligation would actually strengthen Germany or not, or might further estrange the Italians from the Alliance. They even might defect to the enemy. If they did, France could throw the approximately 150,000 men who guarded the Italian border to the Rhine Front, and Austria would have to spare troops from her eastern borders vis-a-vis Russia and send them south to guard the Italian frontier in the Alps.

Overall, Schlieffen decided that he could do without the Italians and Chelius informed Saletta, the Italian Chief of Staff, that Germany regarded the obligation as repealed. But the incident renewed doubts in the German and Austrian General Staffs whether Italy would fulfil any military obligations in the event of the casus foederis, and these doubts, as it will turn out, were all but unjustified.

Prinetti, who was a businessman and industrialist by trade, not a politician – and a diplomat much less – seems to have taken Bülow’s refusals of his proposed modifications to the heart. Albertini, a fellow Italian, commented that “having before one’s eyes the vision of the man with his outbursts, his rages, his wild utterances, one can measure the resentment that must have remained in his spirit after being obliged to bow to refusals, so intolerable to him, inflicted by Bülow and Goluchowski [Kalnoky’s successor as Austrian Foreign Minister].” These refusals played into the hands of Barrère [French
Ambassador in Rome], the tempter standing by his side, who had acquired a considerable ascendancy over the Italian Minister and took advantage of it at a favourable moment to induce Prinetti to sign an “agreement of great scope and gravity.” (81)

Barrère’s original idea was to neutralize the parts of the Triple Alliance that regarded France. “In other words,” says Albertini, “that the casus foederis should occur for Italy if Germany were attacked from two sides, i.e. by France and Russia, but not if she were attacked by France alone; in this case, Germany was to content herself with Italian neutrality.” (82) We note here that this would be a provision favouring a French offensive on Germany under exclusion of Italy, exactly what the Triple Alliance was conceived to prevent. Prinetti declined the first proposal, but on June 30, 1902, two days after the renewal of the Triple Alliance, exchanged letters with Paris in which he avowed that:

“In the case that France were to be the object of a direct or indirect aggression on the part of one or more Powers, Italy will maintain strict neutrality.
The same will happen if France, in consequence of direct provocation, should find herself compelled in defence of her honour and her security to take the initiative in the declaration of war. …
To remain faithful to the spirit of friendship which has inspired the present declaration, I am further authorized to confirm that there does not exist on the part of Italy and will not concluded by her any protocol or military international disposition such as would be in disaccord with the present declaration.” (83)

In other words, Italy invalidated the Triple Alliance unilaterally, gave it up, as far as France was concerned – without telling her allies. Pressed by Barrère to define “direct provocation“, Prinetti gave examples of casi belli that included, for example, Wilhelm I’s refusal to receive Benedetti in Bad Ems in 1870. Diplomatic slights, real or imagined, could thus become sufficient grounds for war.

The advantages for France were obvious, for she had removed a potential opponent in her pursuit of revanche against Germany, but it was less clear what Italy won in the trade, except that France now promised not to hinder Italian expansion into Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica. This was nice enough but did not change the fact that all other Powers still objected to Rome’s intentions in North Africa. Thus overall, the Franco-Italian understanding lessened, not improved, the chances of peace.

Meanwhile, in the East, a thaw seemed to have taken place in the Austro-Russian relations. In the autumn of 1902, one of the more effective Balkan conspiracies, undertaken by Bulgaria to come into the possession of Macedonia had played out, and a Bulgaro-Macedonian cohort of irregulars succeeded in cutting off northern Macedonia temporarily from the outside. It was less the activities of these bands that Austria, its northern neighbour, feared, than that Italy would use the opportunity to invade and occupy Albania, west of Macedonia, via the Adriatic Sea. To forestall such a development,
Goluchowski alerted St. Petersburg about the danger both nations faced from possible Italian interference and Austria and Russia concluded an agreement that reaffirmed both countries’ intentions in the Balkan: trilateral consultations including the Ottomans were agreed on and outside influences, i.e. Italy’s, rejected. Germany, France and Great Britain were notified of the understanding without delay and accepted it on the same day; Italian assent trundled in a day later.

On February 23, 1903, the Russian government gazette “Messenger” published a communiqué that assured the Slavic Balkan states of unyielding Russian assistance but also warned them that they …

“… must not lose sight of the fact that Russia would not sacrifice a drop of blood of her own sons nor the smallest fraction of the possessions of the Russian people if the Slav States, in defiance of the counsels of wisdom given them beforehand, were to seek, by revolutionary and violent means, to change the established order of things in the Balkan peninsula.” (84)
THe little drummer boy, p. 309

That was clear enough, one would think, but in celebration of Slavic stubbornness the Macedonian revolt not only resumed but branched out to Turkey in early 1903. A Turkish bank in Salonika was blown up by Bulgarian terrorists on April 29, 1903, and soon Austrian and Russian troops, as well as Austrian and Italian warships, resumed stations near the borders of
Bulgaria and Turkey, who might go to war any moment, for they were already calling up reservists. A concerted démarche by Austria and Russia eventually stopped the Bulgarian mobilization, but the Macedonians continued, and by August 1903 about 30,000 of their irregulars took to the field yet were beaten, in a nasty three-month campaign, by superior Turkish regulars.

At the occasion of Wilhelm II visiting Vienna on September 18 and 19, 1903, Goluchowski reiterated to Bülow Austria’s position that she would never allow an effective partition of the Balkan peninsula between her and Russia, because claiming the eastern Balkan would give Russia a common border with Turkey and might tempt her to go for Constantinople and the Straits; neither was Austria able to allow the formation of a big Slavic state on the Balkans, for the Slavic people of Austria-Hungary could not be kept from attempting to join it and the monarchy would have to resort to arms to suppress such a desire, which, in turn, might lead to war with Russia and general conflagration. For these reasons, Austria’s policy would remain to maintain the status quo on the Balkan and allow changes only in the smallest of increments. Finally, Italy was to abstain from the annexation of Albania, for this would bottle up the Habsburg realm’s entry to the Mediterranean via the Adriatic Sea and would constitute a casus belli. (85) These Austro-Italian tensions raised the question whether the Triple Alliance could be preserved at all, and if it were to break up, it should quickly be replaced by a renewed form of the Dreikaiserbund, as far as Goluchowski was concerned.

On October 4, 1903, Nicholas II, Francis Joseph and their Foreign Ministers met at Mürzsteg in the Alps to prepare suggestions for the aforementioned trilateral consultations with the Porte, i.e. a program for Turkey’s internal reforms, and the result of the meeting, the so-called “Mürzsteg Punctuation”, was officially transmitted to the Turks and the governments who had signed the underlying provisions for the arbitration of Balkan affairs in the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 on October 24,

The contents advocated government reform, especially of the police, to re-establish peace in the Turkish possessions in Europe, a redrawing of the internal borders of Macedonia was envisioned “in the direction of a more regular grouping of the various nationalities,” (86) other frontiers might be redrawn as necessary, careers in the public service should be made available to Christians and international committees would observe and, if the need arose, improve local measures. Commissions of inquiry, containing equal numbers of Christian and Muslim, were to be set up to investigate and prosecute the numerous political crimes that had been committed during the last thirty years of trouble.

All this was perfectly in the spirit of the Treaty of Berlin, except that Italy, again, felt slighted by the prominent role played by Austria and Russia in the convention; her indignation, as one would expect, only motivated Austria and Russia to improve their cooperation in regard to Turkey. This found expression in a secret agreement between Austria and Russia, signed on October 15, 1904, in St. Petersburg:

“… the two Powers have come to an agreement to observe a loyal and absolute neutrality in case one of the two parties signatory to this declaration should find itself alone and without provocation on its part in a state of war with a third Power which sought to endanger its security or the status quo; the maintenance of which constitutes the basis of their understanding, as pacific as it is conservative.
The engagement between Austria-Hungary and Russia stipulated in the above naturally does not apply to the Balkan countries whose destinies are obviously closely attached to the agreement established by the two neighbouring Empires. The said engagement is understood to remain valid as long as these two Great Powers shall pursue their policy of an understanding in the affairs of Turkey; it shall be kept secret and cannot be communicated to any other Government, except after a previous understanding between the Cabinets of
Vienna and of St. Petersburg.” (87)

The parties agreed to let Berlin know about this essentially anti-Italian agreement but, naturally, not Rome; for in the case of war with Italy, the contract would secure Austria’s back, her Russian border.

Fifteen months earlier, in June 1903, events in Serbia had permeated the headlines of the international press. King Alexander, son of King Milan – whom we have met last in his unsuccessful war against Turkey in 1876, which gave rise to the Congress of Berlin two years later – had followed his father on the throne in 1889, but in the first years of the new millennium made several decisions that estranged him from his subjects. In 1900, he “married his mistress, Draga Masin, a widow of doubtful reputation, much older than himself,” and in “1903 he suspended the Constitution granted by himself in
1901, and nominated a military Cabinet.” (88) His reign grew erratic and authoritarian, until one more conspiracy, featuring the same Dragutin Dimitrijevic who would become the organizer of the assassination of Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo 1914, succeeded in murdering the royal couple, the queen’s brother and various ministers, and installed on the throne one Peter
Karageorgevic, great-grandson of the Serbian liberation hero Karageorge, who had obtained for his country limited autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in the Napoleonic era.

The new king was readily acknowledged in both Austria and Russia, which had led contemporaries and historians alike to speculate that both governments had been aware of the Dimitrijevic plot; on the other hand, Great Britain and the Netherlands broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia over the incident. After a period of adjustment, the Pan-Slavic Radical Party dominated the government and initiated pro-Russian, anti-Austrian policies, seeking to create a Greater Serbia by liberating, and then absorbing, their fellow Slavs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Turkish provinces, but not allowing into the fold Croats and Slovenes, that is, refusing a complete Yugoslavian solution*.
What was Austria’s response to these Serbian plans? Much as the Hungarians wanted to neutralize all supposedly traitorous Slavic organizations in the realm, the more cautious Austrians were aware that suppression might only provoke insurrection. The parties were thus much at odds, which added to the political instability of the Dual Monarchy. In late 1905, the Hungarians undertook an about-face and tried to enlist, by promises of eventual recognition of their claims, the aid of the southern Slavs against Vienna, towards which they tried to present a united front. When the Slavs pledged their support but the Hungarians subsequently “forgot” their earlier assertions, the Slavs further distanced themselves from the cause of the Habsburgs.

* The “Yugoslav”, i.e. ‘Southern Slav’ concept was the idea to unify Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in a single federation, but to exclude Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and the Hercegovina.

Meanwhile, the new Serb government had reached the beginnings of a rapprochement with Bulgaria, which was met with sympathy by Italy – which counted on the negative effect this would have on Austria. Yet Russia’s opposition, which, in doubt, valued the status quo over aiding her fellow Slavs, could not be overcome until Russia’s subsequent weakening in the aftermath of the lost Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05. When Serbia’s prime minister Pasic secured a French loan and began to order weapons from France and Germany instead of the Austrian Skoda works, and Bulgaria agreed to a limited Customs Union with Serbia in June 1905, the country’s fortunes were on a high, and she went with optimism into the scheduled negotiations with Austria for a new commercial treaty in November 1905.

Yet when an indiscretion revealed the Bulgaro-Serbian customs agreement to Austria, she closed all negotiations, and the borders, and the two countries engaged in a commercial war, known as the “pig-war”* of 1907/08, before reason prevailed and a new treaty was agreed on. Yet Austro-Serbian relations remained struck with mistrust and suspicion and became one of the kindlings for the great conflagration of 1914.

*Like Hungary’s, Serbian agriculture was renowned for her pigs, who were the providers of meat for the goulashes, sausages and salami the Austro-Hungarian cuisine was famous for. Closing the border to pigs was, obviously, Austria’s way of hurting Serbia economically, but the latter eventually marketed them through Bulgaria and found different buyers.

Part II: The Russo-Japanese War and the Beginning of the Naval Race

to be continued …

History of the West

Central European History from Antiquity to the 20th Century

Page 3 of 10

Barbarians at the Gate

Children of the Lesser Men

In Austria before the War

The Beer Hall Putsch

Drusilla and Caligula

The Age of Justinian

First World War – Animated GIFs

History’s Most Lethal Submarine – U 35 in WW I

The First Road Trip – A Giant Leap for Mankind

Russian Strategy 1890 – 1914

Part I: From the Conference of Berlin to the Russo-Japanese War (1878 – 1905)

Part II: The Russo-Japanese War and the Beginning of the Naval Race

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“THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY”

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