Hintze becomes foreign secretary

On 9 July 1918 Germany got a new head of diplomacy. The Foreign Secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, who had signed the peace treaties with Soviet Russia and Romania at Brest and Bucharest, lost his post. His successor was Rear Admiral Paul von Hintze, until then minister to Norway. This is the date of the change given by the biographies of both politicians in the Neue Deutsche Biographie and by German studies. Some sources treat 8 July as the start of Hintze’s term, because on that day the Kaiser told Kühlmann that he had to go.

The verdict at Spa

Kühlmann sealed his own fate. On 24 June he told the Reichstag that the war could not be ended by military decisions alone. The right and the Pan-German press saw this as defeatism, and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, who had wanted to be rid of the Foreign Secretary for months, finally had their pretext. It did not help that the next day Kühlmann explained his speech, and that Chancellor Georg von Hertling tried to soften its message.

At the beginning of July the Kaiser, the Chancellor and the Supreme Army Command conferred at headquarters in Spa. On 2 and 3 July they confirmed the Reich’s far-reaching war aims, both in the west and in the east. According to historians, Kühlmann’s departure had already been decided in a conversation between Hindenburg and Ludendorff and Hertling. On 8 July Wilhelm II, yielding to the generals, received the Foreign Secretary and informed him of his dismissal. According to some historians, the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor, Friedrich von Payer, warned of the serious domestic consequences of this decision, but were unable to stop it. The Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote in 1922 that after two weeks of argument over the meaning of a single sentence, Kühlmann resigned “at the wish of Ludendorff”.

An admiral in diplomacy

Paul von Hintze was born in 1864 at Schwedt on the Oder into the family of a tobacco manufacturer. From 1882 he served in the navy. In 1898, in Philippine waters, he smoothed over a conflict with the American admiral George Dewey, and in 1903–1911 he was in St Petersburg, first as naval attaché and then as the Kaiser’s personal military plenipotentiary to Tsar Nicholas II. Wilhelm II valued his reports and liked to use him, bypassing the embassy. In 1911 Hintze transferred with the rank of rear admiral to the diplomatic service. He was minister in Mexico during the revolution, from 1914 in Peking, where for three years he kept China out of the war until in March 1917 it broke off relations with Germany, and then in Norway.

According to his biography in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the Kaiser appointed him on the initiative of his Civil Cabinet, because he was acceptable to Ludendorff. He was regarded as a conservative and a man of the Supreme Army Command, and had neither a base in the Reichstag nor experience of domestic politics. The appointment was made without regard to the majority parties, which a year earlier had passed the peace resolution and were demanding greater influence over the government. Kühlmann’s departure meant that the last influential advocate of a compromise peace had gone from the government, and the generals had gained further proof that they could bring down ministers.

First tasks

The new Foreign Secretary took office at a difficult moment. Three days earlier the ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach had been killed in Moscow, and on the Western Front Ludendorff was completing preparations for another offensive near Reims. Hintze, however, surprised those who saw him as the executor of the generals’ will. In his policy towards Russia he kept to Kühlmann’s line: he was in favour of cooperation with the Bolsheviks and against armed intervention. At the end of September, when the generals concluded that the war was lost and demanded an armistice, it was to a large extent Hintze who persuaded the Kaiser at Spa to agree to a parliamentary government. He held office for less than three months.