Czernin resigns

On 14 April 1918 Count Ottokar Czernin resigned as foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, and Emperor Charles I accepted the resignation at once. A British chronology of the war and the press of the time give 15 April, when the news went round the world, and according to some Austrian accounts the minister was formally dismissed on 16 April. Czernin’s fall was the direct result of the Sixtus affair. The minister had unleashed it himself with his speech of 2 April, and the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, responded by revealing the emperor’s secret letter of 1917.

After the letter was published, Czernin decided to save above all himself and the alliance with Germany. He claimed he had not known the contents of the letter, and on 12 April he persuaded the emperor to give his written word of honour that he had written only one letter to Sixtus, that the prince had had no right to show it to the French government, and that the sentence about Alsace-Lorraine had been forged. On the basis of this statement the ministry issued a communiqué saying that Paris had used a falsified text. According to the notes of Empress Zita and of the court circle, Czernin went further. On 13 and 14 April he is said to have urged Charles to withdraw temporarily from government on account of an alleged illness and to hand it over to a regent, Archduke Eugen, and even to have threatened that the Germans would march into Austria if the whole truth came out. Some historians regard these accounts as partisan, but agree that the minister did not want to take responsibility for the monarch’s policy, while at the same time keeping Berlin informed of the course of the crisis through the German embassy.

The decision came that day before noon in Vienna, at a conference of the emperor with the joint ministers and the prime ministers of Austria and Hungary. During a break Czernin once again pressed Charles, and when the emperor firmly refused, he resigned. According to Zita’s account the emperor accepted at once. On 19 April Czernin took leave of the monarch at an audience and received a high decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Stephen with diamonds, after which he went to rest at Abbazia on the Adriatic. The German-Austrian press, which not long before had praised him as the “minister of peace”, received his fall with disbelief. The minister’s departure did not, however, end the crisis of confidence between Vienna and Berlin, and the monarchy emerged from it even more dependent on Germany.

Czernin had directed the monarchy’s diplomacy since December 1916, for less than a year and a half. He took office as an advocate of a quick peace, because he was convinced that the Habsburg state would not survive a long war. Yet he did not dare break with Berlin, and he agreed to the unrestricted submarine warfare that brought the United States into the war. The peak of his career came in the first months of 1918. At Brest-Litovsk he signed the peace with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was to give starving Austria Ukrainian grain, and the treaty with Soviet Russia. In March he negotiated the preliminary peace with Romania at Buftea. He did not remain minister long enough to sign the final treaty with Romania. For the “bread peace” he paid with the outrage of the Poles, when it turned out that it had granted Ukraine the Chełm Land. Two days later he was succeeded by Baron István Burián, who had already directed the monarchy’s diplomacy in 1915–1916.