Zimmermann resigns

On 5 August 1917 the German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, formally took leave of his office. That day the ambassador in Constantinople, Richard von Kühlmann, was appointed as his successor. Some sources, among them the English Wikipedia, give 6 August. The appointment was announced together with other changes in the government of the new chancellor, Georg Michaelis, who had taken office in mid-July after the fall of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Zimmermann’s departure was not unexpected, however. He had already tendered his resignation in mid-July and since then had only been waiting for a successor. The British chronology of the war records his resignation under 15 July.

The weight of the telegram

Zimmermann had directed German diplomacy since 22 November 1916. As the first commoner in the post, he had started with a good reputation among the deputies, but eight months later his position was badly weakened. The vice-chancellor, Karl Helfferich, listed three reasons in his memoirs. The first was the optimism with which Zimmermann had brushed aside the danger of war with the United States when Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare. The second was the ill-fated offer of an alliance to Mexico, the Zimmermann Telegram, which the British had intercepted and decoded and which Zimmermann himself publicly acknowledged as genuine. Its publication helped President Wilson persuade Americans to go to war, and on 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany. The third was an affair in Norway: in June 1917 in Christiania, today’s Oslo, a courier with a German diplomatic passport who had brought explosives was arrested, and a whole store of bombs intended for sabotage came to light. According to Helfferich, the courier had acted without the Foreign Office’s knowledge, but the disgrace fell on the office.

When the attack on the government began in the Reichstag’s main committee in early July, Zimmermann was one of three men who had to fend it off, alongside Helfferich and the State Secretary of the Navy, Eduard von Capelle. According to American reports from those days, the Centre deputy Matthias Erzberger, who on 6 July argued that submarine warfare would not bring victory, also sharply criticised the inept diplomacy that had drawn America into the war against Germany. The publicist Maximilian Harden, whose weekly Die Zukunft was closed down on 11 July, mocked German efforts for peace with Russia, which abroad only brought to mind Zimmermann’s proposals to Mexico.

Three weeks of waiting

After Bethmann’s fall all the state secretaries of the Reich placed their offices at the new chancellor’s disposal. Michaelis promised closer cooperation with parliament and the appointment to high posts of men who enjoyed the confidence of the big parties. Zimmermann, burdened by the telegram affair and the failure of the policy towards America, had no place in this arrangement. The available sources do not give the exact date of his request to resign, but on 16 July Helfferich was already writing of the Foreign Office as “falling vacant through Zimmermann’s resignation”, and the press in neutral and Entente countries reported his departure as a fact.

Finding a successor proved difficult. The press named the minister in Copenhagen, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, as a candidate, and the American monthly Current History in its July review of events even reported that he had already taken office. According to his biographers, Brockdorff-Rantzau declined because he did not believe he could conduct a policy independent of the military. On 16 July the Kaiser had Helfferich asked whether he would take over the Foreign Office. After some thought the vice-chancellor declined: he considered that, since Michaelis had accepted the Reichstag peace resolution, he himself would have no support in parliament or the press. When news of his possible appointment leaked to the deputies, a press campaign was launched against Helfferich. It was then that Kühlmann’s candidacy came to the fore. Throughout this time Zimmermann formally remained in office.

The successor

Richard von Kühlmann was born in 1873 in Constantinople. From 1908 to 1914 he was counsellor of the embassy in London, where he took part in negotiations with the British on the future division of African colonies and on the Baghdad Railway, and warned that the naval arms race would destroy the chances of an understanding with Britain. During the war he was minister at The Hague, and from the autumn of 1916 ambassador in Constantinople. He was considered a skilful diplomat and a supporter of a peace reached through negotiation rather than by force of arms alone. In the months that followed he was to lead the German delegation in the peace talks with Bolshevik Russia at Brest, and in the summer of 1918 to seek ways of opening secret talks with the British. In June 1918 he told the Reichstag that the war could not be ended by military means alone, and under pressure from the Supreme Army Command he had to resign in July.

After his departure

Zimmermann’s tenure lasted less than nine months, but it saw decisions of enormous consequence: unrestricted submarine warfare, the entry of the United States into the war and the agreement to let Lenin travel through Germany to Russia. It was Zimmermann who in March 1917 wrote to the Supreme Army Command that Germany had an interest in seeing the radical wing gain the upper hand in Russia. Zimmermann never returned to high politics. He died in Berlin on 6 June 1940, and his name passed into history above all because of the dispatch that he wrote himself and whose authenticity he himself confirmed.