Wilson's third note

On 23 October 1918 Secretary of State Robert Lansing handed the Swiss chargé d’affaires President Woodrow Wilson’s third reply to Germany. It was a response to the German note of 20 October, in which Berlin accepted the conditions set on 14 October and forbade submarines to attack passenger ships. The president stated that, having received the solemn assurance that the German government accepted his peace terms unreservedly, and that this position was expressed by ministers speaking for the majority of the Reichstag and the people, and not by those who had hitherto directed German policy and conducted the war, he could not decline to take up the question of an armistice with the governments alongside which the United States was fighting.

An armistice for the victors

Wilson therefore sent the whole correspondence with Berlin to the Allies. He proposed that, if they were ready to make peace on his terms, their military advisers together with the American ones should draw up armistice terms, provided they considered an armistice possible from the military point of view. The terms were to protect fully the interests of the peoples concerned and to give the associated governments unrestricted power to enforce the peace to which Germany had agreed. The president stressed that he could support only an armistice that would make it impossible for Germany to renew hostilities. Acceptance of such terms would be the best proof that Germany truly accepted the principles with which everything had begun. The armistice that the German army had asked for a few weeks earlier in the hope of a respite was becoming, in practice, a capitulation.

“Not peace negotiations, but surrender”

The second part of the note struck the hardest. Wilson wrote that the constitutional changes described by Foreign Secretary Wilhelm Solf seemed significant, but it was not evident that the principle of a government responsible to the people had been fully put into effect, nor that there were guarantees of its permanence. The German people had no means of commanding the acquiescence of the military authorities to the popular will, the power of the King of Prussia to control the policy of the Empire remained unimpaired, and the determining initiative still lay with those who had hitherto been “the masters of Germany”. The nations of the world, the president wrote, did not and could not trust their word. The United States could make peace only with veritable representatives of the German people. “If it must deal with the military masters and the monarchical autocrats of Germany now, or if it is likely to have to deal with them later (…), it must demand, not peace negotiations, but surrender.”

The word abdication was not used, but in Berlin the allusion to Emperor Wilhelm II was understood. According to the documents of the Reich government, in the following days his abdication and the renunciation of rights by the crown prince were considered ever more often, in the hope that a voluntary step would ease the negotiations.

The Supreme Army Command rebels

The soldiers took the note as an insult. On 24 October Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg issued an order to the army in which he called its terms unacceptable to soldiers and called for a fight to the finish. The order was withdrawn the next evening after objections from the command of one of the armies, but in some places it reportedly reached as far as battalion staffs. On 25 October Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff argued in Berlin before the vice-chancellor that the talks had to be broken off and the nation called to arms, because the army stood undefeated on enemy soil. The government, however, sided with negotiations, and the next day the emperor accepted Ludendorff’s resignation, while keeping Hindenburg.

Meanwhile the Reichstag was completing its reforms. On 22 October Chancellor Max von Baden defended his peace policy there, and on 25 and 26 October the deputies of the majority voted through constitutional amendments that made the chancellor dependent on the confidence of parliament and placed the military authorities under civilian control. They came into force on 28 October. On 27 October Solf sent a short reply to Washington. The German government took note of the president’s note and pointed to the profound changes in the constitution of the Empire. Peace negotiations, it said, were being conducted by a people’s government in whose hands lay, in fact and in constitutional law, the power to make decisions, and to which the military authorities were also subject. Germany now awaited proposals for an armistice, “the first step towards a just peace”.

That same day Emperor Charles I informed Wilhelm II that within twenty-four hours Austria-Hungary would ask for a separate peace and an immediate armistice. The exchange of notes with Washington had come to an end. By the end of October the terms of the armistice were already being settled in Paris by representatives of the Allies and Colonel Edward House, and on 5 November Lansing informed Berlin that for the armistice terms Germany must apply to Marshal Ferdinand Foch.