Hertling and Czernin reply to Wilson

On 24 January 1918 the leaders of both Central Powers publicly replied to the speech of Lloyd George of 5 January and to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 8 January. In Berlin the Reich Chancellor Georg von Hertling, who had headed the government since November, spoke before the main committee of the Reichstag. In Vienna the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, addressed the foreign affairs committee of the Austrian Delegation, that is, the representatives of the Austrian parliament for the common affairs of the monarchy. Both went through Wilson’s points one by one and, according to information that reached the Americans, had agreed their speeches in advance. In tone, however, they differed greatly.

Hertling

The chancellor began with Brest-Litovsk. The negotiations with Russia had resumed and were going slowly and with difficulty, but with the Ukrainians successfully. The deadline the Central Powers had given the Entente to join the negotiations had passed on 4 January without a reply. Germany therefore had a free hand in separate negotiations with Russia and was no longer bound towards the Entente by the Russian proposals for a general peace. Instead of a reply, two speeches had come. Lloyd George, Hertling conceded, had changed his tone and did not want the destruction of Germany, but he still treated it as the culprit of every crime, and amid such feelings it was hard to find a serious will for peace. The chancellor therefore recalled the history before the war: the defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary, the encirclement of Germany through the policy of King Edward VII, the Franco-Russian alliance, the French billions for Russian strategic railways in the Kingdom of Poland. Of Alsace and Lorraine he said that they were lands mostly purely German, which France had torn away over the centuries, and that their recovery in 1871 had been not a conquest but a “disannexation”. As proof he cited a letter of 1870 from the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle to The Times, saying that no nation had ever had so bad a neighbour as Germany had in France.

He then turned to Wilson, whose tone he also judged to have changed. Germany could agree to open diplomacy, as the public negotiations at Brest proved. The freedom of the seas was its own demand, but to secure it Britain’s fortresses on the sea routes, such as Gibraltar, Malta, Hong Kong, Aden and the Falklands, would have to be abolished. On the points about trade and armaments agreement could be reached without difficulty. On colonies, let Wilson first talk to his ally Britain, as the greatest colonial empire; Germany, for its part, would demand a new division of the world’s colonial possessions. The questions of evacuating Russian territory concerned only Russia and the four allied powers, since the Entente had not joined the negotiations. The forcible annexation of Belgium had never been an aim of German policy, but the Belgian question belonged to the totality of issues to be decided by negotiation, and Germany would not discuss it separately until its opponents recognised the territorial integrity of the Central Powers. He called the occupied departments of France a “valuable pawn”. Germany would agree their evacuation with France, but there could be no question of giving up any part of the territory of the Reich.

The chancellor left the Italian, Austrian and Balkan points to Vienna, and called the integrity of Turkey a vital interest of Germany. Of Poland he said briefly that the Entente had never stood up for the Polish cause, and that its settlement must be left to Germany, Austria-Hungary and Poland. He spoke sympathetically of the idea of a league of nations. The speeches of Lloyd George and Wilson contained principles that Germany could accept, but where concrete matters were concerned, “only a victor speaks like that to the vanquished”. Germany’s military position had never been so favourable. Let the Entente put forward new proposals, and Germany would consider them seriously. A lasting peace was not possible, however, without recognition of the integrity of the Reich.

Czernin

Czernin spoke in a different spirit. A few days earlier Austria had been paralysed by a great strike in which workers demanded bread and peace, and the government, to end it, had promised the Social Democrats to improve supplies and to work for peace. The minister gave assurances that he wanted from Russia “not a foot of land and not a penny”, and that the basis of the negotiations was a peace without annexations or indemnities. He warned the advocates of peace at any price, however, that if the Russians demanded land or indemnities from the monarchy, he would carry on the war or resign. He argued that the negotiations would not collapse, although matters were complicated by the fact that the Central Powers were dealing with several new Russian governments, and that Petrograd would not recognise Ukraine’s right to separate negotiations. The second difficulty was Germany’s dispute with the Bolsheviks over the self-determination of Courland and Lithuania, which in his view could be resolved by compromise.

He devoted much space to Poland. Austria-Hungary, he said, wanted nothing from Poland. Its people were to choose their own fate, freely and without pressure, and the form of that choice mattered less as long as it faithfully reflected the will of the population. The monarchy wanted only a voluntary union. The Polish question must not delay the conclusion of peace by a single day. Czernin had wanted representatives of the Polish government at Brest, because he regarded Poland as an independent state, but the Petrograd government had not recognised it as representing the country, and the point had been dropped to avoid a conflict.

He called Wilson’s message a peace offer to the whole world, in which he found a “considerable approach” to the Austro-Hungarian position. He made two reservations. The monarchy would defend the possessions of its allies, including Belgium and Turkey, as its own, and it would not accept advice on how to govern itself. Austria had a parliament elected by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage, “the most democratic in the world”, and it alone, together with the other constitutional bodies, decided its internal affairs. He accepted open diplomacy with the reservation that treaties were business that could not always be negotiated in front of the public. He supported the freedom of the seas in full, provided it did not infringe Turkish sovereignty over the Straits. He regarded the points on trade and disarmament as part of his own creed. He refused, however, to make one-sided concessions to Italy, Serbia, Romania and Montenegro as long as his opponents wanted to fight to victory, and recalled that before the war Italy could have gained much without firing a shot. Of the thirteenth point he said that it was an “open secret” that the monarchy supported the idea of an independent Polish state comprising the lands inhabited by an indisputably Polish population, and that on this matter it would be easy to reach an understanding with Wilson. Nor did he oppose a league of nations. In conclusion he suggested that since Austria-Hungary and the United States had the fewest conflicting interests, an exchange of views between them might open the way to talks between all the states.

Reception

The British press regarded Hertling’s speech as the voice of Hindenburg and as an attempt to draw each of the opponents into separate negotiations. Czernin’s milder tone was noticed, but in its content people saw the same hand from Berlin. In Germany the Social Democratic Vorwärts accused the chancellor of having strengthened the enemy’s mistrust with his words on Poland and Belgium, and in the Reichstag committee he was criticised by Philipp Scheidemann. The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung regretted that Hertling had not clearly closed the road to annexations, but read in both speeches that the road to peace was open. A report spread from Vienna that the President had known Czernin’s text before the speech, which caused consternation in London, and on 29 January Secretary of State Robert Lansing had it denied in the Allied capitals. Wilson replied to both politicians on 11 February in another address to Congress. He judged Czernin’s tone to be much friendlier than Hertling’s.