Reichstag peace resolution

On 19 July 1917 the German Reichstag adopted by roll-call vote the peace resolution. In it parliament declared that it strove for “a peace of understanding and the lasting reconciliation of peoples”, and that forced acquisitions of territory were incompatible with such a peace. After the vote the President of the Reichstag announced the provisional result: of 347 ballots cast, 214 deputies were in favour, 116 against and 17 abstained. In the final count, given among others by the then Vice-Chancellor Karl Helfferich, the figures were slightly different: 212 for and 126 against. The resolution was supported by the Social Democrats, the Catholic Centre and the liberal Progressive People’s Party, and opposed by the Conservatives, the National Liberals and the Independent Social Democrats. For the first time since the beginning of the war a majority of the Reichstag had spoken out on its own initiative on the question of war and peace, which the constitution of the Reich left to the Emperor and the government.

What the resolution said

The text opened with a reference to the speech from the throne of 4 August 1914: “As on 4 August 1914, so on the threshold of the fourth year of the war the word of the speech from the throne holds good for the German people: ‘We are not driven by lust of conquest’”. Germany had taken up arms to defend its freedom, its independence and the integrity of its territory. With a peace of understanding, the text went on, “forced acquisitions of territory and political, economic or financial oppression are incompatible”. The Reichstag rejected plans for economic exclusion and enmity between peoples after the war, demanded that the freedom of the seas be secured, and announced that it would support the creation of international juridical organisations. The second part read like a warning: as long as the enemy governments refused such a peace and threatened Germany with conquest, the German people would stand together “as one man” and fight until its right to life and development was secured. “In its unity the German people is invincible” – the resolution ended with thanks to the soldiers.

The text was deliberately vague. It did not contain the socialist formula “without annexations or indemnities” proclaimed in Russia by the Petrograd Soviet, and it excluded only “forced” acquisitions. Nor did it mention Belgium. The Independent Social Democrats pointed out that such wording left a loophole for annexing land under the guise of voluntary agreements. Matthias Erzberger himself, the principal author of the resolution, later maintained that Germany could, for example, obtain the Longwy-Briey iron-ore basin through an exchange of territory satisfactory to both sides.

How it came about

The resolution was the fruit of a crisis that began on 6 July. At a session of the Reichstag’s main committee Erzberger, until recently a supporter of annexations, argued that unrestricted submarine warfare would not force Britain to make peace, and that Germany was growing weaker with every month, so peace had to be made now, by negotiation. On the same day the leaders of the Social Democrats, the Centre and the Progressives, and initially the National Liberals too, formed an inter-party committee to agree on a common text. Erzberger was concerned with more than foreign policy. Under pressure from the Independents, who had left the party in April, the Social Democrats found it increasingly hard to justify to their voters their votes for war credits, and without their votes the government could not count on new credits. The resolution was also meant to show Germany’s allies, above all Austria-Hungary, where Emperor Karl I was looking for a way out of the war, that Germany was ready for peace. At the end of June the nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, had discussed a possible papal mediation in Berlin with the Chancellor and the Secretary of State Arthur Zimmermann.

The National Liberals withdrew from the work because they disagreed with the content of the resolution. The text was ready on 12 July. In the evening the Emperor passed it on by telephone to Paul von Hindenburg, who replied that the Supreme Command feared a weakening of the army’s fighting power and could not take responsibility for it. The crisis meanwhile swallowed up Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who resigned on 13 July under pressure from the high command and some of the deputies. That day the generals received the party leaders in Berlin and demanded changes, but on the morning of 14 July the Social Democratic Vorwärts published the text of the resolution. The new Chancellor, Georg Michaelis, still tried to replace it with a declaration of his own, but the Social Democrats did not give way and Michaelis concluded that he had to accept it.

The debate of 19 July

The session opened with the reading of the imperial orders dismissing Bethmann and appointing his successor. Then Georg Michaelis spoke for the first time. He defended the thesis that Germany had been forced into the war, and defended the submarine war, which in his view was destroying enemy tonnage as expected. He also read out a telegram from Hindenburg reporting that German divisions had that day attacked the Russians east of Złoczów and broken through their positions. He then turned to the aims of peace. Germany would not wage war a day longer for violent conquests if an honourable peace could be had. The territory of the Reich was, however, inviolable, and the peace must “secure the frontiers of the Reich for all time” and, by way of understanding and compromise, guarantee its conditions of existence on the Continent and overseas. “These aims can be attained within the limits of your resolution, as I understand it,” he said. He added that Germany could not offer peace a second time, because the hand once held out had grasped at nothing.

On behalf of the three majority parties the resolution was moved by the leader of the Centre, Konstantin Fehrenbach. The Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann spoke of the “intrigues” of which Bethmann Hollweg had fallen victim. The Conservative Kuno von Westarp declared that his party regretted this step most emphatically, because the foreign press was already showing that the resolution only strengthened the enemy’s spirit. Peace, he said, would be secured only by complete victory, and the frontiers of the Reich must be better protected for all time, so that East Prussia would not suffer a second Russian invasion. The leader of the Independents, Hugo Haase, attacked from the other side: parliament had been completely bypassed in the choice of chancellor, and Michaelis was “the confidential agent of Hindenburg and Ludendorff”. The Independents moved a resolution of their own, for a peace without annexations or indemnities, but the Reichstag rejected it without debate.

Representatives of the national minorities also stated their positions. On behalf of the Polish Circle Władysław Seyda (PL) recalled the March declaration in which the Poles, who “despite their division between states” retained a sense of national community, had opposed the annexation of peoples to foreign states against their will. The resolution was close to the Poles “in its peaceful tendency”, but did not fully correspond to these principles, so the Circle would abstain. According to Helfferich it was the Poles who made up most of those abstaining. The Danish deputy from North Schleswig, Hans Peter Hanssen, supported the resolution in the belief that the national demands of the Danes would be fulfilled after the war.

On the same day the Reichstag passed a new war credit at its second reading. The third reading took place the next day, 20 July, and the credit was passed with the votes of all parties except the Independent Social Democrats.

Echoes

The Social Democratic papers proclaimed the resolution a peace programme and the beginning of a new era of understanding with the enemy. The liberal Vossische Zeitung called 19 July a “black day”. The right made no secret of its indignation, and in September opponents of the resolution founded the German Fatherland Party with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz at its head. Michaelis himself wrote a few days later, according to an often-quoted letter to the Crown Prince, that by his interpretation he had taken from the resolution what was most dangerous in it, and that with it any peace could be made.

In the Entente countries no one treated the resolution as an offer. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, in a speech at the Queen’s Hall in London on 21 July, the Belgian national day, called Michaelis’s speech a skilful speech facing every way. The words about securing the frontiers, he said, were the formula that had taken Alsace and Lorraine from France and that threatened Belgium, which the Chancellor had not mentioned at all. Lloyd George saw in it “a sham independence for Belgium, a sham democracy for Germany and a sham peace for Europe”. On 26 July the House of Commons rejected by 148 votes to 19 Ramsay MacDonald’s motion to recognise the Reichstag resolution as an expression of the principles for which Britain was fighting. Pope Benedict XV soon came forward with a peace appeal of his own, dated 1 August.

The resolution did not bring the end of the war closer, but it changed German politics for good. The parties that had passed it had held a majority in the Reichstag since the elections of 1912, and now for the first time they began to act together and coordinate their steps. After the war the Social Democrats, the Centre and the successors of the Progressives formed the so-called Weimar Coalition, on which the first German republic rested. The far right, by contrast, saw the resolution as the first step towards the “stab in the back” dealt to the army.