Central Powers' note on responsibility for the war

On 11 January 1917 the German Foreign Office handed the representatives of the neutral states in Berlin a note in which Germany responded to the Entente’s rejection of its peace offer. The same day the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, published a similar note in Vienna. He gave it to the press first, and it was left at the American embassy only shortly before midnight. The United States ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, sent the French text of the German note to Washington on 12 January. Both notes were addressed not to the enemy but to the neutrals. The form in which the Entente had rejected the proposal “excludes any thought of a reply”, Berlin wrote, but the Imperial government wished to set out its view of the situation for the neutrals.

After the refusal

The joint note in which ten Entente states called the offer of 12 December a manoeuvre of war rather than a proposal for peace was handed over by Paris on 30 December 1916. The Austro-Hungarian government received it through the United States on 5 January. The same day Kaiser Wilhelm II signed an order to the army and navy, published the following day. In it he announced that the war would go on and that before God and humanity the enemy governments bore the entire responsibility for the further sacrifices. “In righteous indignation at the enemy’s arrogant crime, in the will to defend our holiest possessions and to secure a happy future for the fatherland, you will become as steel,” he wrote. “Our enemies did not want the understanding that I offered them. With God’s help our arms will force it upon them.” On 6 January the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, Charles I, issued a similar order to the army and fleet, and two days later Sultan Mehmed V did the same in a proclamation to the armed forces. The notes of 11 January were the diplomatic complement to these proclamations.

The German note

The Imperial government wrote that the Central Powers had no reason to return to disputes over the outbreak of the world war. Judgement on the “monstrous responsibility” for it belonged to history, which would not overlook the British policy of encirclement, the French thirst for revenge, Russian designs on Constantinople, or the provocations of Serbia, the Sarajevo assassination and the Russian general mobilisation, which had meant war with Germany. Germany and her allies had taken up arms in defence of their freedom and existence, and they had achieved that aim. Their enemies, on the other hand, were moving ever further from their plans, which according to their own statesmen included the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine and several Prussian provinces, the humiliation and diminution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the partition of Turkey and the mutilation of Bulgaria.

Germany protested “most emphatically” against her proposal being called a manoeuvre of war. She was convinced that a just peace, acceptable to all the belligerents, was possible and could be achieved through an immediate oral exchange of views. She had, after all, announced that she would disclose her terms as soon as negotiations began, and her enemies had not even tried to test this. Instead they had declared that peace was impossible without the restoration of violated rights, recognition of the principle of nationality and the free existence of small states. The world would not believe such demands, Berlin wrote, when it remembered the fate of the Irish, the loss of freedom and independence by the Boer republics, the conquest of North Africa by Britain, France and Italy, the oppression of foreign nationalities in Russia and, finally, the violence done to Greece, unexampled in history.

The note devoted most space to international law. It was the enemy, it said, who had trampled on law and torn up treaties since the beginning of the war. In the first weeks of the war Britain had repudiated the Declaration of London, although her delegates had recognised it as consistent with the law of nations, and had then violated the Declaration of Paris in the gravest manner. Her arbitrary conduct had created a state of lawlessness at sea. The attempt to starve Germany and the pressure on neutral states stood in glaring contradiction to the law of nations and the laws of humanity. To this were added the use of coloured troops, which according to Berlin undermined the prestige of the white race in the colonies, the inhuman treatment of prisoners, especially in Africa and Russia, and the deportation of civilians from East Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia and Bukovina.

A separate passage concerned Belgium, because the Entente note had ended precisely with the Belgian question. The Imperial government claimed that Belgium had not always maintained her neutrality towards Britain and had come to understandings with her and with France on military matters. Germany had twice assured the Belgians that she was not entering as an enemy, and had offered a guarantee of the integrity of their territory and independence, together with compensation for damage caused by the passage of troops. According to the note, the British government had decided as early as 1887 not to oppose such a passage on those terms. Belgium had refused, so responsibility for her fate fell on her government and on the powers that had led her to do so. Berlin once again rejected the accusations concerning the occupation as slanders. The note ended by stating that the Central Powers had genuinely tried to open the way to an understanding and their enemies had closed it. On them fell the entire responsibility for further bloodshed. The four allied powers, calmly convinced of the justice of their cause, would fight on until they had won a peace that would secure for their peoples honour, existence and free development.

The Austro-Hungarian note

Czernin wrote more briefly but in the same spirit. The enemy’s reply, he said, avoided any discussion of ways to end the war and confined itself to events before the war, the alleged military strength of the Entente and the supposed motives of the offer. The monarchy did not intend to return to disputes over the causes of the war, but as regards the ultimatum to Serbia it had given sufficient proof of patience in the years before the war, until the “shameful assassination at Sarajevo” had ruled out further leniency. Austria-Hungary and her allies had never sought conquest, whereas their enemies wanted the destruction and plunder of the monarchy, the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, the partition of Turkey and the diminution of Bulgaria. Among the examples of Entente hypocrisy Czernin listed the fate of the Irish and the Finns, the Boer republics, North Africa and Greece. Before God and humanity the Austro-Hungarian government disclaimed responsibility for the continuation of the war.

Preparing the ground for submarine warfare

The notes were written in the days when the most important decision of that winter was being taken in Germany. On 9 January, at headquarters in Pless, the Kaiser, at the urging of the Chief of the Admiralty Staff, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, and of the Supreme Command, agreed to unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February. The Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, ceased to oppose it. The long argument about British “lawlessness” at sea and the attempt to starve Germany therefore had a practical purpose. The German government used the same argument three weeks later when it announced to the United States that from 1 February it would counter the enemy’s “unlawful measures” by force and sink ships in zones around Britain, France and Italy.

Reception

The notes of 11 January answered the refusal of 30 December, not the Entente’s reply to President Woodrow Wilson’s note, which Briand had handed to the Americans the day before and which the Allies intended to publish only on 12 January. Some contemporary accounts nevertheless linked them, because both appeared in the newspapers almost simultaneously. The Scottish writer John Buchan, in his history of the war, called the German note “a mixture of bad logic and bad history”. On 12 January Wilhelm II, having by then read the Entente’s note to Wilson, issued a proclamation to the German people: “Our enemies have thrown off the mask.” In Germany, as the American press reported, the Entente’s refusal and the Kaiser’s proclamations united public opinion in the will to fight to the end. The door to negotiations remained closed.