Michaelis becomes Reich Chancellor

On 14 July 1917 Emperor Wilhelm II signed two orders. The first dismissed Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Reich Chancellor, Prime Minister of Prussia and Prussian Foreign Minister, “at his own request” and with the pension due to him. The second appointed as his successor Georg Michaelis, Under-Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Finance and Prussian Commissioner for Food. The decision had already been taken on the evening of 13 July, when the Emperor accepted Bethmann’s resignation. Michaelis took up office on 15 July. At the head of the Reich government now stood an almost unknown official, the first chancellor in the history of the Empire without a noble title. His predecessor had led the government for exactly eight years, since 14 July 1909.

The July crisis

In the summer of 1917 war-weariness was growing in Germany. The admirals had promised that unrestricted submarine warfare would force Britain to make peace within five or six months; in the meantime the British held on and the United States entered the war. Food was short, and July was, as Michaelis himself later admitted, the hardest month since the beginning of the war. The Social Democrats, competing since April with the breakaway Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, demanded a peace without annexations and equal suffrage in Prussia, where the three-class system, which favoured the richest, was still in force. In his Easter message of 7 April the Emperor had promised reform only after the war and had said nothing about equal votes.

The avalanche was set off on 6 July by Matthias Erzberger, a deputy of the Catholic Centre Party. At a sitting of the Reichstag’s main committee he argued that the submarine war would not bring victory and called on parliament to declare itself for a peace of understanding. That same day the leaders of the Social Democrats, the Centre and the liberal Progressive People’s Party, and at first the National Liberals as well, formed an inter-party committee, which began drafting a peace resolution. The Chief of the General Staff, Paul von Hindenburg, and the First Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff, who had directed the army for almost a year, appeared in Berlin. On 7 July the Emperor received them, but according to Helfferich the conversation concerned only military matters, and the generals returned to headquarters that same evening.

Bethmann Hollweg staked everything on reform. On 9 July, at a crown council, six of the eleven Prussian ministers supported equal suffrage, and the Chancellor announced that he would resign if the Crown decided otherwise. On the evening of 11 July the Emperor signed an order that the bill for a new electoral law for the Prussian House of Representatives should be based on equal suffrage and introduced early enough for the next elections to be held under the new rules. The order was published the next morning. It was a concession the Social Democrats had fought for over decades, but it no longer saved the Chancellor.

For the military were playing against Bethmann. Officers from the Supreme Army Command, among them Colonel Max Bauer, told deputies that Hindenburg and Ludendorff could no longer work with the Chancellor. Erzberger and the National Liberal leader Gustav Stresemann persuaded their parliamentary groups that Bethmann was an obstacle to peace. On the morning of 12 July the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Wilhelm, long hostile to the Chancellor, received six deputies one after another and asked them whether Bethmann should stay. The Conservative Kuno von Westarp, Stresemann, Erich Mertin of the Free Conservatives and Erzberger came out for his departure, and only the liberal Friedrich von Payer and the Social Democrat Eduard David for his remaining. In the afternoon Hindenburg and Ludendorff asked the Emperor by telegram to dismiss them should the Chancellor stay. “Your Imperial Majesty has decided to keep in office the director of this policy. (…) I can no longer serve Your Imperial Majesty in my post,” Ludendorff wrote.

The Emperor could not afford to lose the two most popular men in Germany. On the evening of 12 July Bethmann again asked to be relieved, and at dawn on 13 July he sent the Emperor a written request for his dismissal, without waiting for the generals to arrive in Berlin. Hindenburg and Ludendorff spent the afternoon in talks with the leaders of the parliamentary groups in the General Staff building. In the evening, at Bellevue Palace, the Emperor accepted the Chancellor’s resignation and chose his successor.

Who Michaelis was

Georg Michaelis was born on 8 September 1857 in Haynau, today’s Chojnów in Lower Silesia, the son of a judge. He studied law in Breslau, Leipzig and Würzburg, and from 1885 to 1889 taught constitutional and administrative law in Tokyo. He then made a career in the Prussian administration, in Trier, Arnsberg, Liegnitz and Breslau. He was a deeply devout Pietist and shunned social amusements. In 1909 he became Under-Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Finance. During the war he headed the Reich Grain Office, which distributed grain and flour, and in 1917 he became Prussian Commissioner for Food. He had visited headquarters several times, where his energetic and decisive manner made a good impression on the staff officers.

It is still not known exactly who suggested his name to the Emperor. Wilhelm II did not want the former chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, and the Bavarian Prime Minister Georg von Hertling declined. The Vice-Chancellor, Karl Helfferich, recalled that Bethmann himself was as astonished by the choice of successor as he was, and all that is certain is that the Emperor wanted someone the Supreme Army Command would accept, so as to avoid further friction. Historians, among them Ernst Rudolf Huber and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, regard Michaelis plainly as the candidate of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. According to Wehler, Ludendorff did not want to put forward a general, so as not to create the impression of a military dictatorship. The British historian Michael Balfour put it this way: anyone more radical than Bethmann would have been unacceptable to the command, anyone more reactionary to the Reichstag, so the only way out was to choose a nonentity.

Nobody asked parliament’s opinion. The majority deputies who had helped to bring Bethmann down learned of the appointment as a fait accompli. The liberal Vossische Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt and the Social Democratic Vorwärts pointed out that the new chancellor had accepted office without first talking to the party leaders. On the evening of 13 July Helfferich told the head of the Emperor’s Civil Cabinet, Rudolf von Valentini, that Michaelis would not last until Christmas. In one of his first conversations with deputies the new chancellor himself confessed that, as an ordinary contemporary, he had until then only run alongside the wagon of high politics and followed it as a newspaper reader. It was meant as modesty, but his opponents took the words as an admission of inexperience.

Bethmann Hollweg’s eight years

Bethmann Hollweg took office in 1909 as a man of compromise, who tried to ease tensions with Britain and to manoeuvre between right and left. In July 1914 he backed Austria-Hungary against Serbia, and on 4 August he admitted in the Reichstag that the invasion of Belgium was a wrong. During the war he resisted demands for great annexations, although he too formulated far-reaching war aims. He long resisted the advocates of unrestricted submarine warfare; in December 1916 he announced the peace offer of the Central Powers, and in January 1917, after it was rejected, he gave way to the admirals and generals. During his chancellorship the Act of 5 November was also proclaimed, announcing the creation of a Kingdom of Poland. The right hated him as a “democrat”, the left held it against him that he was too weak with the military. The Crown Prince reportedly called the day of his fall the most beautiful of his life.

The Emperor took leave of him with a letter published on 16 July. Wilhelm II wrote that it was “with a heavy heart” that he granted his request, recalled that for eight years Bethmann had held the highest offices of the Reich and of Prussia, and thanked him for his counsel and help at a time when decisions had to be taken on the existence and future of the fatherland. Bethmann left for his estate at Hohenfinow in Brandenburg. He wrote to a friend that he was going without bitterness, but with pain at the spectacle Germany was presenting to the listening enemy.

The new chancellor’s first days

Michaelis immediately had to deal with the peace resolution. Hindenburg and Ludendorff demanded changes to its text, but on the morning of 14 July the Social Democratic Vorwärts published it in breach of the agreement with the government. Michaelis wanted to replace the resolution with a declaration of his own, but the Social Democrats would not give way, and that same day the new chancellor decided that he had to accept it. All the Reich secretaries of state placed their offices at his disposal, and nearly half the Prussian ministers left, so Michaelis had largely to build his government anew. He first appeared in the Reichstag on 19 July. He held office for little more than three months: on 1 November 1917 he was replaced by Hertling.