Prussian (and later German) Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, right, with General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, left, and General Albrecht von Roon, centre.
The military had always played a key role in Prussia, and in
a Reich forged by blood and iron it was the central institution. The German
Reich was a military state, German society permeated by the military. “Human
beings,” Bismarck said “begin at the rank of lieutenant.” The Prussian army was
by far the largest of the four armies, and although the three other “contingents”
owed allegiance to the kings of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony respectively,
they all came under the kaiser’s command in time of war. Only the Bavarian army
remained independent in peacetime. The three contingents followed the Prussian
lead in organization, instruction, and weaponry. The military budget and
questions such as those of the size of the army and length of service were
settled at the federal level. The army was thus Prussian rather than German,
the Prussian minister of war, as chairman of the Bundesrat’s Military
Commission, served as a de facto federal minister. The military thus played an
essential role in strengthening Prussia’s domination over the Reich.
The military was outside the constitution, beyond
parliamentary control, answerable only to the Prussian king and kaiser with his
absolute power of command (Kommandogewalt). It was every bit as concerned with
the enemy within as it was with its enemies beyond the borders of the Reich. It
was ready to crush a revolution, break a strike, and disperse a demonstration,
and even to instigate a putsch. It was not bound to consult the civil
authorities before acting.
All matters pertaining to personnel were dealt with by the
Military Cabinet, which worked closely with the kaiser. William II was to
surround himself with a number of military cronies who formed an informal
maison militaire of considerable power and influence that served further to
strengthen his power of command. Mere civilians, who were deemed to have no
understanding of military arcana, had no place within these circles.
The Prussian minister of war had responsibility for the
budget, administration, and military justice. Inevitably there was enduring
friction between the ministry and the military cabinet. Since the latter was a direct
expression of the kaiser's power of command, the minister answerable to the
Reichstag, a number of important responsibilities were shifted from the
ministry to the military cabinet. At the same time the spiraling cost of the
military, particularly after 1898 when Germany began to build a high seas fleet,
meant that the Reichstag had a far greater say in military affairs. It held the
purse strings and could determine how the funds were allocated. The war
minister could no longer afford to hide behind the sacrosanct power of command
and had to submit to rigorous questioning by parliamentarians. This in turn
alienated the war minister from the kaiser and his entourage, who were alarmed
by the prospect of the army becoming subordinated to parliament. Any concession
to the Reichstag was taken as a sign of weakness, so that both the war minister
and the chancellor were caught between the need to appease the monarch ' s
obsession with his power of command and the necessity for a degree of
cooperation with the Reichstag. The slightest hint of a compromise with
parliament caused an immediate hardening of the military front, so that by 1914
the Reichstag was only able to make very modest gains. The army remained
arrogantly aloof, intensely hostile to parliament, a state within the state.
Although the kaiser, with his power of command, had absolute
control over the military, it was hopelessly divided and lacking in any sense
of direction. The war ministry, the general staff, the Military Cabinet, and
the maison militaire incessantly wrangled over areas of competence. This was
compounded by inter - service rivalry with the navy, which in turn was riven
with internal strife between different offices. There was no coherent military
planning, no consistency in armaments procurement, no serious preparation for a
war which most people in responsible positions felt was both inevitable and
desirable.
Nowhere was this more blatantly obvious that in the general
staff, whose carmine - striped demigods planned and plotted in splendid
isolation and consequently to disastrous effect. The war was hardly over before
the general staff began planning for a preventive war, first against France,
then also against Russia. As long as Bismarck was chancellor the preventive war
enthusiasts in the general staff were held in check. He found political
solutions to the crises of 1874/5 and 1886/7 when the general staff was raring
to go. Moltke's successor, Count Alfred von Waldersee, argued in favor of a war
against Russia, combined with a coup d'é tat against the Social Democrats,
during his tenure from 1887 to 1891. He too was frustrated, first by Bismarck
then by Caprivi.
Bismarck fought long and hard to keep the military under
political control. His successors had to deal with William II, a saber -
rattling poseur who lacked the strength of character to stand up to an increasingly
influential military. The kaiser bypassed the foreign office and relied on the
reports from the military and naval attachés, who painted a grim picture of the
bellicose intentions of Germany’s neighbors. The chancellor and the civilians
were never consulted when the general staff drew up its war plans, and were
excluded from the “War Council" of 1912.
Count Alfred von Schlieffen
Waldersee ' s successor, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, turned
Clausewitz on his head by arguing that war was far too serious a business for
politicians to have any say in its conduct. The eponymous plan on which he worked
throughout his term of office envisaged an invasion of France through neutral
Belgium and Holland. The plan was shown in its various versions to three
chancellors - Hohenlohe, Bülow, and Bethmann Hollweg - but none of these men
saw fit to examine its fateful political consequences. They felt it was
inappropriate for mere civilians to question the expertise of a man who was
widely regarded as a strategist of genius, a worthy successor to the great
Moltke. Apart from a vague plan for an offensive in the east, the
Ostaufmarschplan , which was never seriously considered and was dropped
entirely in 1913, the German army had only one war plan: an attack on France
that was almost bound to involve Britain, because of the invasion of neutral Belgium,
compounded by Germany ' s naval ambitions. The proposal to invade neutral
Holland was later dropped by Schlieffen's successor, the younger Moltke.
It was not only the civilians who were excluded from
discussions about the details of military planning. Germany's ally Austria -
Hungary was kept completely in the dark. It was only in 1909 during the Bosnian
crisis that hints were dropped that they were planning an offensive in the
west. At the same time Moltke promised his Austrian counterpart, Conrad von Hötzendorf,
that Germany would stand by Austria under any circumstances should it become
involved in a war in the Balkans. The chief of the general staff was here
clearly exceeding his remit, and was making a political commitment of
incalculable consequence. The defensive Dual Alliance of 1879 was thus
converted into a blank check for Austria to attack Serbia, even at the risk of
Russian intervention, at which point Germany would join in by attacking France
through Belgium. Britain would then probably be involved and Europe plunged
into a terrible war the length and outcome of which many experts were hesitant
to predict.
The army never consulted the navy, which in turn cooked up a
series of harebrained plans which a number of naval strategists felt were bound
to fail. Neither branch of the military bothered to contemplate the consequence
of failing to break the British blockade. A number of far - sighted soldiers
thought that the Schlieffen Plan was at best a highly risky gamble. The
military Cassandras who warned that the war was likely to be very lengthy were
ignored. No preparations were made for such an eventuality.
The military was determined to remain outside the
constitution by insisting that the power of command was sacrosanct. It
separated itself from civilians by the exclusivity of its officer corps, its
code of honor, and its separate code of law. This was to lead to a series of
clashes with the civilians: over the reform of military law, over the size and
social composition of the army, and over its relations with the civil
authorities. Every such confrontation put the role of the military in question,
thereby whittling away at its exclusive rights. As the foundations of the
military monarchy were gradually undermined the fronts began to harden and the
temptation to risk a war in the hope of overcoming these tensions became ever
harder to resist.
In the 1860s two - thirds of the Prussian officer corps was
aristocratic. In the general staff and the smarter regiments the proportion was
far higher. As the army expanded, the percentage of aristocrats naturally
declined, thus precipitating a lengthy debate as to whether further expansion
would change the whole character of the army, water it down, and render it
unreliable in the event of domestic unrest and revolution. Was “character “more
important than “brains “? Could an army with a high percentage of liberal
bourgeois officers and Social Democratic proletarian other ranks maintain law
and order at home and pull off another Sedan? The Schlieffen Plan called for a
mass army and the plan had no chance of success without one; but the larger the
army the greater the importance of the Reichstag, thereby blurring the sharp
division between civil and military. General Keim’s Army League, with its
raucous populist clamor for substantial army increases, thus was viewed with
horror by the kaiser’s military entourage. That the Navy League, Admiral
Tirpitz’s child that took on a willful life of its own, had a similar
plebiscitary moment was lost on the kaiser, with his obsession with
battleships.
The distinction between aristocratic and bourgeois officers
has often been exaggerated, and the distinction between technically minded
modernizing bourgeois and conservative traditionalist aristocrat is
inadmissible. The aristocracy, which still made up more than half the officers
of the rank of colonel and above in the Prussian army in 1913, set the tone.
Officers were selected not by competitive examination, but by regimental
commanders. They picked men of like mind and background. Only the sons of
“respectable” bourgeois with sound views were selected. Pay was so wretched
that a lieutenant in the more highly regarded regiments needed a private
income. Jews were excluded. As in the British army the tradesman’s entrance was
tightly shut. Bourgeois officers aped the ways of their aristocratic brothers -
in - arms and subscribed to a common code of honor, resolutely refusing to be
outdone in overbearing arrogance and contempt for mere civilians with their
vulgar materialism. The appalling young subalterns who were so brilliantly and
savagely caricatured in the satirical magazine Simplizissimus were
unfortunately all too common. The naval officer corps was slightly less
exclusive, but here too the aristocracy was over - represented. For all the
increasing importance of technical skills and training, both officer corps
remained a caste rather than a profession. But it was a caste that was widely
admired and emulated in a process of “double militarism " whereby civilian
society panegyrized military virtues, relished the prospect of war,
enthusiastically supported the Army and Navy Leagues and forced its children
into miniature military uniforms. The special status of the military and its
widespread acceptance was a serious impediment to the modernization of the
political system and the development of civil society.
