German peace offer to Belgium

On 15 September 1918, just as the world was learning the contents of the Austro-Hungarian peace note, unofficial news reached the press of the Entente countries that Germany had made Belgium a concrete peace proposal and that the Belgian government had firmly rejected it. Berlin denied the report. A British chronology of the war records under this date a “definite peace offer” by the German government to Belgium. In reality the proposal came neither on that day nor through official channels. It was a private, though Berlin-approved, correspondence from several weeks earlier, and on 15 September it simply became an open secret.

The intermediary was the Bavarian Count Hans Veit zu Toerring-Jettenbach, brother-in-law of King Albert I: his wife Sophie was the sister of Elisabeth, Queen of the Belgians. As early as the autumn of 1915 and the winter of 1916 he had met the king’s envoy, Professor Émile Waxweiler, in Switzerland, but the German terms were then unacceptable to the Belgians. In the spring of 1918 Toerring made contact with the Belgian minister in Bern, Fernand Peltzer. Later he wrote him a long letter in which he declared that after talks with Chancellor Georg von Hertling and State Secretary Paul von Hintze he could set out the intentions of the Reich government, although formally he held no authority whatever.

According to the summary that the American minister to the Belgian government, Brand Whitlock, sent from Le Havre on 9 September, Germany promised after the war to restore Belgium’s full political and economic independence, to make no claims to its territory in Europe or in Africa, and to leave it the choice between a return to neutrality and complete freedom of alliances. In return Belgium was to intercede with the Allies for the return of the German colonies, to maintain the pre-war commercial treaty with Germany for several years after the war, to settle the Flemish question so as to satisfy “the circles concerned”, and to grant an amnesty to the Flemish activists who had collaborated with the occupier. This was how Berlin explained the words of Hertling, who had recently called Belgium a “pledge” for future negotiations, which abroad had been taken as a sign that Germany meant to keep it. The letter said not a word about reparations for the destruction.

The foreign minister, Paul Hymans, who had headed Belgian diplomacy since January, asked the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan for their opinion before replying. He himself judged that the declarations on Belgian independence were a step forward but had been hedged with conditions: the demand for an amnesty for the activists was interference in the country’s internal affairs, and the old commercial treaty with its most-favoured-nation clause would hamper Belgium’s trade with the Allies. Nor did it meet the demands the Belgian government had set out in its reply to the papal peace note. On 11 September Secretary of State Robert Lansing replied briefly that the American government did not consider Toerring’s letter worthy of favourable consideration.

According to some chronicles of the war, the Belgian government formally rejected the proposal on 19 September. In Berlin itself no great hopes were placed in this channel: according to German sources, Hintze had warned Toerring in a letter of 23 August that talks with the Belgian government had no real basis. The episode nevertheless showed that after the defeats of the summer Germany was ready quietly to give up its plans for the permanent subordination of Belgium, something it had still been unwilling to declare clearly in 1917. For the Allies, who demanded the unconditional restoration of Belgium and reparations, such half-measures no longer mattered.