I,
[N the early summer of 1941, the American capital was tense with the expectation of worsening war news. Though England had held out against a German aerial onslaught through the turn of the year, the Wehrmacht had now turned on the Soviet Union. Breathtaking victories threatened to bring the Nazi regime to complete control of the Continent while American opinion was still heavily in favor of keeping the conflict at more than arm's length. David Brinkley, then a young news reporter and later one of America's premier television journalists, recounted a curious apparition in Washington at the time. In a memoir appearing nearly fifty years later, he recalled a short, thick-featured man with a bull neck bulging over the collar of a German military uniform fairly ablaze in ribbons and medals. This figure in jackboots haunted newsstands, peering through a monocle at the daily foreign and domestic press. Feverishly he bought up copies of newsprint for dispatch to Berlin. The comic-opera character, reddish hair in a Prussian brush cut, was Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher, the German military attache. The only sensible report this officer ever sent home, Brinkley maintained, was about some rocket experiments in 1936 by a then-obscure American scientist named Robert Goddard.1
For more than eight years, between April 1933 and December 1941, this officer served two ranking ambassadors and a charge d'affaires acting for Nazi Germany in Washington. Hardly the stereotypical Prussian of Brinkley's recollection, von Boetticher was indeed short of stature and a bit jug eared but never wore cropped hair, even as a junior officer, and never in his life affected a monocle.2
As military attache, he assiduously represented his nation and its military establishment in times of increasingly intractable political relations before the American entry into World War II. Surviving German diplomatic and military records of the time preserve many of his reports. Seized and published after the war, these reproduced a selection of his wide-ranging summaries that betrayed an overriding faith in the political influence of American General Staff officers and the strength of American isolationist sentiment against "Jewish" politicians. There was too an apparently disdainful underestimation of the American military-industrial capability before the war. A peripheral figure, von Boetticher was accused of misjudging the productive potential of the United States and misleading Hitler with overly optimistic reports. What he actually told German authorities in Berlin is strikingly different from what his detractors later claimed.
Judging from his early career, von Boetticher was a man of ability. He was the cultured product of a classical, humanistic tutelage and the technically brilliant German military educational system. The son of a bourgeois father, he entered the exalted caste of German General Staff officers before his thirtieth birthday. His livelihood as a professional soldier survived the German defeat in World War I, and he earned a reputation in the truncated Weimar military establishment as an advisor in several international conferences after the guns went silent.
The future attache had a cosmopolitan background. His family's history in the nineteenth century ranged over two continents and three nationalities. The Boetticher name was known by that time in two widely separate areas in Europe, the German Rhineland and the Baltic area known as the Kurland, a peninsula forming the eastern shore of the Gulf of Riga. Friedrich's father descended from the Kurland branch. The maternal lineage originated in Hull, the English Yorkshire seaport on the Humber River, and the Boyes trading family centered in that city.3 This side of the family genealogy produced one unusual aspect of von Boetticher's background that contributed to his value in diplomatic missions.
Thomas Phillips Boyes, shown in one family history as a wholesaler, was the commercial representative of the Hull firm in Hamburg. Used to keeping close records of events and accounts, he noted in his Bible the whirlwind courtship and marriage of his eighteen-year-old daughter, Anne Caroline, to Hermann Anton
Wippermann, whose father owned one of the larger German trading houses in the city. Betrothed on October 8, 1848, the couple married only twenty days later. By 1857, Wippermann, then the thirty-one-year-old father of a son and a daughter, decided on a new venture in the United States, where the Boyes family had holdings in the American West. He settled in what is today Davenport, Iowa, and on October 4, 1859, Anne Caroline bore a second daughter, Agathe Isabella Victoria, an American citizen by the accident of her birth in what was still an American frontier territory.
Hermann Wippermann's troubles mounted, though, and he failed in Iowa. Shortly after the arrival of his last child, his wife returned to Hamburg while he struggled with his fate. In February 1860, he wrote a tearful letter home relating how he had pawned the watch his father had given him; this resulted in the dispatch of an undisclosed sum, enough to repay his debts and even rent a small farm that he worked with a single helper. By December of that year, he was miserable with the absence of his family. He poured out his woe in another letter saying, "I hate this country from the depths of my soul, it is a country where Mammon rules, a land of swindles. . . where flowers do not smell and women do not love."4 Family sources offer no hint of Wippermann's involvement with another woman, but in 1863, he managed to get home, broken in spirit and in health, and died of tuberculosis that December. His wife outlived him by not quite two years. She died in August 1865 at a family home in Hamm in the Ruhr, leaving three children in the care of her father, whose Bible kept the record of it all. In his advancing years, Thomas Boyes transplanted these youngsters to Dresden, where he had bought a new estate just before his daughter's death. There he found a private school headed by a Fraulein Leonhardi for six-year-old Isabella, as she was known.
On October 4, 1880, her twenty-first birthday, Isabella Wipper-mann married Walther Boetticher, a physician. Aside from his medical practice, he pursued the classics and local historical research. In 1902, he produced a five-part study of his local area, which earned him an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau and a patent of nobility that added the von before the family name. Dr. von Boetticher imparted this pursuit of historical study to the first of his children, Friedrich, born October 14, 1881, while the medical practice centered in the village of Berthelsdorf bei Herrenhut, near Dresden. By the turn of the century, the doctor had three more children, and fortune clearly favored him. The second son went into the German Colonial Office, the third into law. The remaining child, Hildegard, was Friedrich's particular favorite. Successful and respected, typically representative of the German Mittelstand, their father eventually acquired an estate, die Lossnitz, overlooking the Elbe River at Oberlossnitz, just outside the city.5
Friedrich's education was classical. From his American-born and British-bred mother he acquired an ability in English that left him equally fluent in two languages; he later took up French and spoke that with near-native fluency as well.6 He finished formal schooling at the gymnasium in nearby Bautzen, where he showed the beginnings of a fine literary style. He wrote unceasingly, and from the earliest years of his military life, he kept extensive journals and notebooks. Longhand copies of German classical poetry and even such English-language classics as T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "Definition of Culture" survive as evidence of his linguistic pursuits and his eclectic tastes.7 On April 1, 1900, at the age of nineteen, after briefly considering a call to the ministry, he left the family estate to join the 28th Saxon Field Artillery Regiment at Pirna, the start of a military career spanning forty-five years.8
Von Boetticher began auspiciously. The artillery specialty was an evolving but primary combat arm when he joined the Saxon Army as a Fahnenjunker9 in 1900. Ballistics was an esoteric science before the introduction of aircraft and motorization to military formations. At the time, Prussian military opinion was also divided into rival factions, the cavalry still arguing the merits of thundering charges by densely packed horse. Artillery, on the rise in importance and numbers, was split between field gun battalions and heavier fortress batteries; field (and horse) artillery debated whether the field guns should accompany the infantry or remain in semiconcealed positions in order to be effective against an enemy. In many quarters of the infantry, the aristocratic leadership disdained the support of the other arms, preferring to slug it out on "honorable" terms in frontal assaults.10 Promoted to lieutenant in August 1901, von Boetticher transferred to the 64th Saxon Field Artillery Regiment on October 1, remaining there until his posting to the Prussian Kriegsakademie (War Academy) nine years later. In the interim, he continued service with the regiment, earning credit for his successful relations with a group of Chemnitz reservists known for their "red" politics. In one of his last accomplishments with the unit, he managed a two-week training stint in command of these men without incident.11 Von Boetticher's recollection of this episode in reminiscences more than fifty years later does not fully convey the attitudes of the German Army of the time toward social democracy. The fears that the army's isolated and aloof position would be undermined by the necessity to recruit manpower presumed tainted with the bacillus of working-class revolutionary ardor were always at the fore. The Wilhelmine Army instinctively combated reforming urges, Reichstag parliamentarianism, and any challenge to its cherished position as a major—and untouchable— pillar of the state. Not only did the army actively oppose outside political proposals for change, but its recruit training programs also prohibited suspect literature, songs, and speech.12 Regimental routine was employed to convey accepted attitudes and inspire loyalty to the semifeudal military system and the kaiser at its head. That the army was an educator of youth and a means of transmitting civic value and national esprit was part of its antisocialist mission; convictions about the notion of military elites serving as formative influences within national life manifested themselves again in von Boetticher's later service in Washington.
As a twenty-six-year-old senior lieutenant, von Boetticher had become regimental adjutant when his commanding officer advised him in the fall of 1907 to take the examination for the Kriegs-akademie, a preserve once dominated by Prussian aristocrats. Von Boetticher disappointed his colonel by revealing that he had something else in mind before considering the next step in a career.13
On November 14, 1907, von Boetticher married Olga von Wirs-ing in a definite coup, for his bride was above his social station. Her father was a retired officer of the 106th Infantry Regiment. The von Wirsing name was also of the established German nobility with a family seat in Stuttgart (Wurttemburg), while von Boetticher's ennobled status was only five years old at this time. On her mother's side, Olga von Wirsing descended from the von Valois, a Huguenot family.14 Their wedding took place in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig; the couple spent three days in the Austrian capital.15 Despite Friedrich's idyllic description of the beginnings of his marriage, this was a life of duty and unquestioning service for the wife of a German officer.16 Von Boetticher always wrote and spoke of her with an exaggerated courtesy that seemed almost required and rote for men of his calling and caste. Of his three children, two daughters and a son, he was the proud father, though life for his son would bring its eventual adversity.
Shortly after his promotion to senior lieutenant on May 22, 1909, von Boetticher stood the examination for the Kriegsakademie. Between the turn of the century and 1914, an average of 800 men attempted the test each year; only 20 percent, about 160 candidates, were accepted.17 When he began the three-year curriculum in October 1910, the prestigious institution was still heavily influenced by the spirit of the narrow if technocratically gifted Alfred von Schlief-fen. As Prussian chief of staff for nearly a decade, this rigid soldier redirected the strategic attention of German war planning from east to west and had produced a grand scheme for annihilating the French Army in a modern-day Cannae, a decisive battle of encir-clement.18 Forcibly retired in January 1906 for his role in the first Moroccan crisis of the previous year, von Schlieffen was still the grand old man to the young generation of general staffers, and von Boetticher revered him. The school's curriculum enforced rigorous, independent study guided by a picked faculty of the best military minds, meant in these circumstances to be role models to their students. The school was regarded, even among the other great powers in the world at the time, as the best training facility of its kind, and academy graduates assumed the aspect of demigods in a German society that deferred almost instinctively to military rank and uniforms.19
Von Boetticher's performance at the War Academy foretold his next step. Graduates ordinarily went off to field units and military assignments deliberately chosen to get them away from their original specialties and broaden their points of view. Promoted to captain on October 1, 1913, von Boetticher received what can only be seen as a prize billet. His posting to the Great General Staff itself was fateful on several levels. On February 1, 1914, he joined the Railway Directorate of the Staff, at the center of war contingency planning and administration for the railroad net so vital to von Schlieffen's plan. As a relatively junior officer, von Boetticher was caught up in the refinements of a machine without which there could have been no such grand scheme. He plunged into the intricacies of bulk railroad logistics and timetables.
More immediate for his future was his close association at this point with the chief of the Railway Directorate since 1912, then-Lt. Col. Wilhelm Groener. Groener was a man on the rise, though the son of a mere noncommissioned officer from Wurttemburg. Von Boetticher shared his status of protege to this man with several others, who later achieved prominence for good or ill, among them Kurt von Schleicher and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord.20 He had resolved one problem of advancement for junior officers in many military establishments. In coming to the notice of Groener at a crucial point in his career, von Boetticher also acquired for himself a mentor. Colloquially known in the American army as a godfather, this is a senior officer who takes an interest in the careers of talented juniors whom he identifies and sponsors.21 In the elite German General Staff (as in armies elsewhere), senior officers encouraged potential in the same way. Younger men caught the reflected aura of higher-ranking men, and the senior officers found their own reputations enhanced by the achievements of their picked successors. Though the mentoring system has obvious uses, overplaying it can also lead to the rise of warring factions within any entrenched bureaucracy. Groener's favor would influence von Boetticher's career.
Barely six months after von Boetticher joined the Railroad Directorate, war struck. Following the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Germany gave assurances to Austria in the latter's ultimatum to Serbia. As the two hostile alliances dominating European politics squared off against each other, von Boetticher spent days and nights in the War Ministry. If the mobilization plans left the great iron safe that stood within view of his desk, war was imminent.
Events took heed only of emotion then. On Friday evening, July 31, 1914, tight-lipped officers left the building, each carrying a briefcase stuffed with the detailed orders of march for each of the German field armies.22 Groener appeared suddenly at the Railroad Directorate that night, collected the supply of his favorite cigars from his own office, and quietly presented them to von Boetticher. He would not enjoy another one, he said, until Germany was victori-ous.23 Outside the War Ministry, roistering crowds sang in patriotic euphoria as the nation rushed to war.24
With somber efficiency, the Imperial German Army mobilized. The declaration of war gave Groener the new sobriquet of Chief of Field Railways within the General Headquarters that now took the field. The subtle change in name signified that he ceased being a planning functionary and had taken over an operating command to execute the rail movement plans for the expected war on two fronts. The entire top echelon of the Railway Directorate, including Captain von Boetticher, now transferred to the new field command according to plan. Groener's writ extended literally to individual train stations in the smallest German towns. He controlled a network that appropriated German locomotives and cars from their peacetime schedules and sent them with the entrained active army to assigned debarkation points at the eastern and western frontiers. The marvelous, clockwork precision concealed for the moment the plan's basic flaws: diplomacy surrendered to the demands of railroad timetables, and the tempo of the great plan left no possibility for a peace initiative even at this late hour. The entire scheme further depended for success on a deliberate violation of a neutral neighbor, since von Schlieffen and his successors perceived that the broad plain in the middle of Belgium made it the only feasible avenue for the immense flanking maneuver against the French Army. Even as the advance elements arrived at their destinations, the plans integrated the transport of all the mobilized reserve units from their depots in the German interior to the fronts.25
Groener entrusted his protege with a series of detached assignments in the mobilization and through the first year of the war, leaving him to exercise independent judgment and responsibility. On August 12, 1914, the thirty-two-year-old von Boetticher commanded the military train carrying the High Command of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke to the western German border to direct the encirclement of the French capital. A few days before Christmas, Groener dispatched him east to the German headquarters in Posen on the Russian front as a rail liaison officer under Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Given the complexities of supplying German armies during the battles around the Masurian Lakes in January 1915, Groener's choice reflected his confidence in von Boetticher, who proved equal to these assignments.26 On May 18, 1915, he arrived at the headquarters of General Kommando XXVII as the Bahnbeauftragter, or railroad deputy, a general staff officer's billet. By midyear, he was back at Dadizeele, the Belgian location of Groener's command in the west.
In the late summer of 1915, a year of stalemate from the English Channel to the Swiss border in the west had already reduced the war to fruitless bloodletting. Frontal infantry assaults followed artillery preparations in attempts to carry fixed positions. The rapid victory that was the object of Great Staff planning had eluded the
German leadership. On the Russian front, some maneuver was still possible in the grand spaces that characterized that war theater. Maneuver alone could not substitute for decision over Russia, however tactically successful, and Germany sought new initiatives for decision in the east, one that would remove Russia from the war. While all this transpired, new developments in the Balkans absorbed von Boetticher and added to his accomplishments for much of the rest of the conflict.
Inept Austrian attempts at the war's outset to humble Serbia produced only routs for the Habsburg armies. German forces now joined their ally for the next try. By late September 1915, combined Austrian and German forces massed on the Sava and Danube Rivers for another determined thrust south. A nervous Greek government begged the western Allies for some show of support in the region, and Allied landings began at the Hellenic port of Salonika at the head of the Aegean Sea. Sensing a windfall in an impending German victory, the less-than-gifted Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, a blood relative of the German kaiser, bargained for tracts of Serbian territory as the price for his own entry into the war on Germany's side. On October 12, 1915, he sent two field armies—more than
300,000 men—into the Serbian rear as the Germans crossed the Sava; the combined forces routed the Serbs, who withdrew what they could through Albanian ports.27
The quick victory did little to relieve the impasse on the German western front, but with Bulgaria now allied to the Central Powers, a new, unencumbered route opened to another, more distant German ally. The Danube, navigable along 1,200 miles from the German city of Ulm to the Black Sea port of Varna, became a cheap and unobstructed logistical highway for military supply destined for Turkish forces directed by a German military legend, Gen. Liman von Sanders. Groener established in the Bulgarian capital a command known as the Plenipotentiary General Staff Officer in Sofia (Bevollmdchtigte Gen-eralstabsoffizier in Sofia), reporting directly to himself as chief of field railways. In late October 1915, von Boetticher joined Maj. Karl von Stockhausen, another veteran of the Field Railways Directorate, in Sofia as second in command.28 This organization regulated the entire bulk logistics flow by water on the Danube and all the associated rail traffic feeding the river ports. The Sofia central office controlled all the freight cars in seven subordinate harbors along the river and in two Black Sea ports; it saw to the regular delivery of materiel to Turkish transfer commissions that were moving the goods to their army. In addition, the command supplied Bulgarian military formations and was responsible for all strictly military rail transport inside Bulgaria. With an area of operations extending from depots in Germany to the harbor of Constantinople itself, the widespread network never operated with more than seventy German officers.29 On March 5, 1917, with von Stockhausen's transfer to the Russian front, von Boetticher assumed command and ran the net for more than a year.
What von Boetticher managed in Sofia cannot be underestimated, but by 1918 the area had become a backwater. The last major operation von Stockhausen and von Boetticher supplied in the region was the stroke by Field Marshal August von Mackensen against Rumania in the late summer of 1916 following that country's opportunistic declaration of war against Austria-Hungary. With the front stabilized again to the advantage of the Central Powers by the autumn of the year, the Russian cause began its fitful dissolution. But for a young captain in 1918, a military career could only suffer if he did not see some real action. That entailed somehow getting to the Western Front.
In the Wilhelmine Reich, the Great Prussian Staff controlled all German military operations in wartime, but the forces employed in the field still comprised units raised and equipped by the four larger individual German states: Prussia, Wurttemburg, Bavaria, and Saxony. Each at this time still retained its own officers' rolls and promotion lists and conferred its own distinctive military decorations. With the dawn of 1918, von Boetticher began appeals to the personnel office of his native Saxon Army for a transfer to a combat division. By early February, he had obtained a promise that his wishes would be represented at the Saxon War Ministry.30 Even as von Boetticher successfully conspired at his own participation in larger events, the German High Command initiated the last battle for a decision in the stalemated west on March 21, 1918.
Von Boetticher reported to his first combat command in the west during the mass transfers of German soldiery from the east through the spring and summer of 1918. With a unit from his home principality for the first time in eight years, he became the "first General Staff officer," or I-a (eins-ah, the combined chief of staff and operations officer for the unit) in German military jargon, of the 241st Saxon Infantry Division on June 23.31 This Saxon division apparently escaped the declining troop morale common to German frontline units in the west at this time, because it was a veteran of fighting in the east.32 Once in the west, the division rapidly lost combat effectiveness in the last grinding act of the war in France.33 With the failure of Ludendorff's great spring offensive, German initiative was gone forever. In the desperate defensive battles that followed for German arms through the summer, American troops poured into Europe at a rate of 250,000 a month, making the Allied armies irresistible. The first General Staff officer of the 241st could only plan withdrawals, especially in the slow and bloody pullout around Soissons in July. Here the division had two of its three regiments badly cut up. It was thereafter relegated to the army reserve and saw action against American forces in the sector east of the Meuse River between November 5 and the Armistice six days later.34 His performance during the summer battles nevertheless won von Boetticher the St. Heinrichs Orden, the oldest Saxon decoration for valor.35
Germany could not stem the Allied tide in the west, and other fronts began rapidly caving in. On September 15, the Austrian government sued for peace, the Turkish Army on the Palestine front broke on the eighteenth, and the Bulgarians collapsed on the twenty-fifth. On Sunday, September 29, 1918, the German High Command, deeply struck at the deterioration of its field armies, met at the Hotel Britannique in Spa, the Belgian town that served as the German headquarters in the west. First Quartermaster General Ludendorff in particular, despite his later denials, had already decided that an immediate armistice was imperative to avoid complete military collapse. Germany was alone and incapable of fighting on, loath as its leadership was to admit it.36 The generals consulting at Spa had soon to contend as well with the influence of the American president, whose Fourteen Point program loomed large in the German mind as the basis for peace offers and subsequent talks. WoodrowWilson's diplomatic shadow continued to lengthen as the American contribution to the Allies grew. He insisted repeatedly through the end of October on dealing with a new German leadership not connected with the direction of the war or in any way representative of traditional German militarism. Not only Ludendorff's continued service but also the kaiser's presence itself jeopardized German chances for a cease-fire. The war was lost and conditions attaching to a prospective armistice now required a fundamental change in the German system of government, too.37
In the wings at this moment was Wilhelm Groener. Groener's achievement as military railroad czar earlier in the war had led to another assignment running successive aspects of the so-called Hindenburg Program. In May 1915, he had organized continuing imports of bulk food from Rumania to supplement dwindling German stocks, all diminished by the Allied naval blockade of the country.38 In October 1916, after the German failure to reduce the French fortress of Verdun, the new German Supreme Command under Ludendorff and Hindenburg nominated Groener head of the War Office, a newly established central function that was to manage not just food deliveries, but the whole disparate German war effort at home.39 Groener had bested a series of dirty jobs, a fact that alienated many of his officer-colleagues the more. His, too, was Germany's highest military decoration, the Pour le Merite, not for combat leadership, but for his masterly management of the field railways supporting German arms on all fronts.
Groener's pragmatic management of often impossible choices brought him into close contact with the Social Democratic leadership of the time; his acquiescence to workers' needs for living wages and adequate working conditions had him balancing the conflicting tensions of the German war economy, the front, and the agendas of the radical independent socialists and communists in the factories. Groener had kept the lid on this corrosive mix by threatening dire consequences for any strike in the factories, but also by meting out fair treatment for German workers. Within a year, the Supreme Command proved itself incapable of leaving Groener to his own proven devices, with his colleague Ludendorff now decidedly cool toward him and openly distrusting the leftward drift of the war-industrial programs in the Reich. One of Lu-dendorff's minions engineered a bureaucratic spat that resulted in Groener's relief and his dispatch first to a divisional command in the west and then to a position as chief of staff at Kharkov for the German Army occupying the Ukraine.40
With the failures of the spring offensive and the operations into late summer to retrieve the situation in the west, combined in the fall with the High Command's meddling in responses to the Allies over peace terms, Hindenburg and Ludendorff both handed the kaiser resignations in a stormy scene on October 26. The increasingly besieged emperor accepted only Ludendorff's, whose replacement as first quartermaster general was eventually Groener.
Returning now from Kiev to the west through Berlin, the former field railway chief grasped fully the hopelessness of the German cause at the front and the discontents of the working classes at home. With his detailed proficiency in the logistics of wholesale rail transport, Groener would now, among other things, have to engineer mass German troop withdrawals to positions behind the Rhine.41 His varied wartime experience prepared him little for the self-delusion and indecision among cabinet officials and the remaining High Command, continuously backpedaling in their earlier resolve for an armistice once they learned of Allied conditions. The kaiser, at the Spa headquarters since October 30, added to the uncertain atmosphere in the pressure mounting for his own abdication as the emperor of Germany; the Allies would not deal with his person or tolerate his presence in armistice and peace negotiations at hand.
Groener became central to the ensuing German drama of defeat and survival. On November 4, while he was in Berlin consulting with Prince Max of Baden, revolution broke across Germany. Naval units at Kiel mutinied at the order for a suicidal foray against the blockading British fleet. Three days later, radicals in Munich proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet modeled on the workers' and peasants' local organizations in Russia. With these events crowding the German leadership, Groener addressed a meeting of thirty-nine senior German generals called to Spa on the eighth. None of these field army commanders could guarantee the reliability of his own unit if called upon to quash the revolution; in the communications unit serving the Supreme Headquarters itself, the enlisted signal troops had established a revolutionary council.42 Groener, finally, in Hin-denburg's withdrawn presence, added his voice to those advocating abdication, revealing to the vacillating kaiser that there was no hope of his leading the German Army in France back over the Rhine to crush the revolution at home. Wilhelm now agreed only to desert the emperor's throne, but to remain as King of Prussia. On the ninth, events in Berlin overtook the absent Wilhelm when his complete abdication from all offices was prematurely announced to a milling crowd in front of the Reichstag building.43 The exhausted chancellor, Prince Max, had resigned. A tailor's son, Friedrich Ebert, became the first Social Democratic chancellor of Germany and the head of a republic that replaced the Hohenzollern monarchy as the ruling system in the nation.
In the midst of this, Groener seized an opportunity. Late that same evening, he telephoned Ebert in Berlin. The two agreed to a measured quid pro quo. Groener offered the new republican government the army's backing in return for the government's support of the army during the forthcoming withdrawals in the west. Ebert guaranteed continued bulk supply deliveries from Germany for the troops still in the field, the maintenance of order, and an anti-Bolshevik political stance in which the government would rely on the army as the guarantor of the power of the state. These conditions would also serve Groener's primary aims of preserving the reputation of the army by marching it home under the control of its officers and salvaging above all the General Staff from the wreckage of the empire. Ebert, dealing with the familiar Groener, entered readily into this forced alliance, because his Majority Social Democrats faced loud opposition and claims by more left-leaning Independent Socialists and communist radicals. He cabled his complete agreement to Spa the next day. Both men got what they needed from the arrangement, but Groener's bargain with a Social Democrat incurred the suspicion of a large part of the German population convinced that the monarchy had been betrayed, something that would dog him in due time.44 From this point until his retirement from the army in September 1919, Groener influenced heavily the play of German military policy and its linkages with the German moderate political left in the turbulent postwar years.45
Groener saw his own and the German Army's association with other delicate developments gratifyingly limited when a civilian politician rather than a German officer dealt with the Allies on the cease-fire. German Center Party leader Matthias Erzberger had led German Catholics from an enthusiastic acceptance of the war and even the High Command's dictatorship to a formal resolution for peace in the Reichstag in 1917.46 Erzberger, named the government member of an armistice commission that had been formed within the supreme command at Spa, now assumed leadership of the commission because of the common belief that the Allies would deal only with a civilian.47 At noon on November 7, he led a small delegation to a meeting at the front lines to seek armistice terms from the Allied Supreme Commander, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch. French forces were nearly as exhausted as the German, but the British Army was somewhat on the mend by late 1918, and Foch knew he was negotiating from strength with more than a million fresh American troops on the Western Front. After a harrowing trip, Erzberger eventually arrived on November 8, accompanied by Gen. Detlev von Winterfeldt, the German military attache in Paris before the war, and German naval Captain Ernst Vanselow, at the railway car serving as Foch's headquarters in the forest of Compiegne, near Rethondes. There, after some pregnant delay, Foch produced a ready set of conditions under which the Allies would agree to an end of combat within seventy-two hours.48 To prevent any reopening of hostilities, the Allies required a wholesale delivery of war materiel, and the recipients of the document could already sense the punitive ring in the preconditions to what was supposed to be an armistice between equal combatants. Germany was understandably called upon not only to give up territory occupied during the four and a half years of war, but, as an additional means of preventing further offensive operations, to hand over immediately 5,000 large-caliber field pieces and 30,000 machine guns. Clause 12 in the document opened the question of reparations for damages and the restitution of sequestered national properties that presaged bitter dispute through the years ahead. Clauses relating to the occupation of the Rhineland and the creation of neutral zones there struck the military members of the Erzberger delegation as so harsh that they read over them with tears in their eyes.49
The scope of the demands in the final document far exceeded the mere surrender of military hardware to stop the fighting. Another requirement drew Maj. Friedrich von Boetticher into the confrontation over the terms requiring delivery of large quantities of rail stocks to the Allied and Associated Powers, mainly to France. Clause 7 specifically called for the surrender of 5,000 locomotives and 150,000 rail cars within thirty-one days. All rail equipment and operating personnel in Alsace-Lorraine were to be handed over within the same thirty-one days, and all similar rail materiel in the Rhineland, scheduled for occupation by the Allies, was to be left in place and maintained until Allied troops arrived. Five thousand trucks were also to be forfeited in thirty-six days, the term of the original armistice. Further, all coal and signal equipment necessary to run the trains were to be in good order.50
Already posted to the Army Supreme Command at Spa on October 14, 1918, von Boetticher answered Groener's summons on November 10, the day after the kaiser was dispatched to exile in Holland. Connected immediately by telegraph to Spa and Berlin when
They received the armistice conditions, the Erzberger delegation cabled the list of armistice demands to Spa. Groener ordered his protege from the former Field Railway Directorate to Erzberger at Rethondes to advise him on the rail and transport issues raised there. Von Boetticher set out that same evening across the battle lines in rain and fog. French military patrols repeatedly stopped his car and threatened to take him prisoner. His fluent French let him talk his way through the roadblocks, but with these delays and the gathering tension, he arrived exhausted at Rethondes. Erzberger's signature was already several hours old on the armistice document.51
The delegation that Erzberger led to effect the cease-fire became the nucleus of what took formal existence on November 12 as the German Armistice Commission, or WAKO (the German acronym for Waffenstillstandskommission). Situated in Spa, this element grew continuously with the addition of other military and civilian technicians whose advice was indispensable in Germany's compliance with the terms. The WAKO was until the following spring the only designated entity through which the Allied and Associated Powers dealt with the defeated Germany.
In his continuing role at Erzberger's side, von Boetticher's close association with the events of the time unfolded. In December 1918, he began filling out the German commission's Subcommittee for Transport Affairs (Unterausschuss fur Transportwesen). Comprising eventually four military men and twelve civilians, von Boetticher's subcommittee existed to handle the specifics of Clause 7 on railroad equipment and to negotiate whatever amelioration of the stipulations could be wrung from the Allies. Von Boetticher in the latter case presented the argument, ultimately agreed to by the Allied side, that the 3,500 locomotives and 85,000 cars the Germans had left in place on the western front as they withdrew would count toward the total amount of materiel due.52 The remainder of the locomotives and cars would have to come from domestic German stocks. For the subcommittee, this acquiescence by the Allies engendered some hope of staving off a threatened economic collapse that would accompany the abrupt surrender a large part of the railcar inventory needed to move German goods at home, but this hope soon evaporated.
On the Allied side, German attempts to schedule deliveries so as to diminish their domestic impact had the character of deliberately subverting the intent of armistice and the commission's purpose. An
American observer at the scene noted that once the immediate shock of defeat had worn off, the German delegation showed some cockiness, and its members were now inclined to argue over the delivery of goods as required. More than that, the Germans made considerable issue over the hostile receptions that met German trainmen when they rolled into Allied territory.53 The French especially used this sign of German intransigence to increase their demands continuously. The qualifying phrase, "in good condition," describing the materiel in the armistice document's language, also became a device to extract only the best stock from German inventories. Though von Boetticher showed himself "adroit," in Erzberger's words, at resisting these demands,54 a second extension of the armistice ran out without complete German fulfillment of the terms, and the Allies, largely at French insistence, demanded more than
58,000 agricultural implements of all descriptions as a penalty.55
The sessions at Spa ended on June 4, 1919, with von Boetticher's subcommission having delivered 4,554 locomotives and 143,828 rail cars,56 the bulk of the deliveries coming toward the end of March. Von Boetticher's reputation for technical excellence had grown with the enormity of his task, and his subcommittee changed rapidly from a lower-level executive agency into a planning body. Matthias Erzberger, as it turned out, relied on von Boetticher for services other than an adroit deflection of Allied demands.
Between Erzberger and the German political right of the time, an unbridgeable gulf had opened by reason of his presumed abject surrender of German lifeblood. Already suspect in some quarters for his leadership of the Center Party in its belated doubts about the prospects of success in the war and for his too-ready espousal of the League of Nations idea, Erzberger fell out as well with the only other formal German contact with the Allies in these days, Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau.
Without experience in diplomacy and with no talent to draw from among his Socialist Party ranks, Ebert chose this stiff aristocrat-professional, now a grudging democrat, as his foreign minister. In this capacity, Brockdorff-Rantzau was head of the German Peace Commission, or FRIKO (for Friedenskommission), at Paris after May 1919. His views on Germany's next course of action frequently opposed Erzberger's. He further expected normal diplomatic courtesies and protocol from the Allies; the Allies saw the FRIKO as the German agency authorized only to accept the peace conditions, not negotiate them. Between WAKO and FRIKO, open and bitter rivalry soon reigned, and the opportunity for treachery abounded.57
In each body, factions argued over the strategy governing negotiations, and emotions ran high. While the peace treaty evolved in draft form in Paris, rumors, plans, suggestions, and speculation filled the German press and official quarters. Clandestine reports or letters from commission members, secretaries, servants, and military officers at the scene swelled the torrent of passion in Germany's crucial hour. On the WAKO staff at Spa as the General Staff representative, one Maj. Theodore Dusterberg, later a national leader of the Stahlhelm, the German veterans' association, sent Groener reports critical of Erzberger's strategy discussions and comments reflecting his own attitude on the necessity for fulfilling armistice terms. Not specifically meant for Brockdorff-Rantzau, these reports had more currency among Erzberger's enemies and undoubtedly came to the attention of the FRIKO staff as well. Erzberger, who had stormy clashes with Brockdorff-Rantzau about the informers on their respective staffs, sent Dusterberg packing upon the discovery of this disloyalty.58
Von Boetticher served Erzberger loyally at Spa. Erzberger managed WAKO affairs from a separate Berlin branch office,59 and von Boetticher continuously informed him of developments in which Germans remained face-to-face with Allied officials. From Spa and later from Versailles, von Boetticher reported on political and personal matters of interest, adding his own interpretations.60 Probably motivated by General Groener's approval of Erzberger's role and his own full understanding of Germany's inability to reopen the war, von Boetticher nevertheless was placed at some risk by associating with a man murdered by a right-wing vengeance squad in August 1921.61
Because of his abiding association with Groener, von Boet-ticher's own analyses of events before the signing of the peace treaty reached a wider audience than Erzberger and his immediate circle. In a memorandum dated at Spa on March 25, 1919,62 the same day von Boetticher signed over a massive delivery of equipment to the Allies, he elucidated principles to guide the German approach toward the peace treaty. "Thoughts on the Approaching Peace Negotiations" made a strong impression on Groener, and he repeated its general theses to Brockdorff-Rantzau in a conference with the new foreign minister and FRIKO head on April 4, 1919.63
Von Boetticher dwelt here on long - and short-term strategies in laying out his proposals. For the immediate future, Germany had to resist the fundamental basis for the enforced peace. He argued that the enemy's aim in the war—to reduce German will by arms—had failed. Despite the currents of Bolshevism, the "evangelism of new teachings coming from the east," the German people, he insisted, found new internal strength. Since the German will to self-affirmation (Selbstbehauptung) remained unbroken, the state remained intact; hence, ". . . We do not approach the negotiation table to confront a Diktat, but as a co-equal partner in the play of the forces of the world."64
The analysis went on to explore in depth the spiritual aspects of the peace for Germany. Von Boetticher sought to combat anything that would erode the moral basis for the continuation of the nation whose uniform he wore. The worst threat to German sovereignty in his view was the imputation of war guilt. If the future of the nation hung on its collective faith in its own rights and the belief in its cause, the Allied assertion of sole German war guilt was a direct assault on this faith, a blow designed to induce doubts among Germans and to "rob their thoughts of their convincing force."65 Von Boetticher's tactic was not merely to adopt a defensive stance on the question, but to take the initiative. Mere exculpatory statements about an equal share of blame among all the combatants would serve to unite the enemy more in renewed and sustained accusation. The point was to attack those areas of compromise among the Allies themselves in the proposed treaty, which would in turn reopen disagreements within their ranks, dividing them and confounding their efforts to destroy the German nation.
As spellbinding a plan as von Boetticher spun here, and indicative as it was of his misreading of Allied resolve to enforce the peace at this stage, he was more sweeping in a long-term strategy. In his view, one nation in the world held the key to German recov-ery—the United States of America. Though he saw in the United States some of the moral force he spoke of in his own nation, von Boetticher's cynicism was also evident in that he regarded Wilson's program and the League of Nations as an outgrowth of American missionary imperialism and a "healthy egotism." America was now a first-ranking power, he maintained, a force that had grown from a daughter of England to a rival to British power and commerce. In the Pacific, the Japanese represented a varying threat to the United States; hence, the recommendation for a world body that could attenuate the influence of those two powers in spheres of American interest. The German course of action was then clear. Since the American political star was in the ascendant, Germany should be first to join the American-sponsored League, but as nothing less than a sovereign equal, and "then we can hope to win time for the reconstruction of our state, then we can hope to enter into close relationships with the Union [sic], the state from which no conflicting interests of any decisive kind separate us."66
If von Boetticher rightly confessed in this document to basing his analysis on some optimistic premises, his avowal of the United States was rooted in Germany's direst need, not in any attachment to American ideal or principle. A cultivation of American goodwill was for Germany an obvious expedient, but the methodical assessment of conditions of the moment prompting a German western orientation showed von Boetticher in the exercise of strategic thinking typical of the German Great Staff officer. Conditions would soon change; so would von Boetticher's assessment of German strategy.
The Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert, whom von Boetticher had occasion to advise on military matters,67 had also to make the choice between east and west. Among the most pressing needs was food. To pressure the defeated Germans more, the Allied wartime naval blockade remained in place to constrict German imports while the treaty was forged. Despite unsettled conditions, some bulk Russian food shipments continued to reach central Europe after the Bolshevik upheaval in Russia in November 1918. The revolution's excesses deepened the aversion of the moderate German Majority Social Democrats toward the new Soviet government in 1919. With mass starvation confronting Germans at home, "the paltry two trainloads from Moscow were weighed against the prospect of trans-Atlantic abundance."68 Yet the American savior of the moment would, within a year, abandon Europe to its ills. Some elements of the Foreign Office staff but, more especially, the Reichswehr, the reduced German army under General Hans von Seeckt, looked eastward for friendship in international affairs and even for more ambitious military rearmament.
By now, von Boetticher was already situated in the very center of the evolving postwar German military command and staff structure. Relieved at the WAKO in late August, on September 1, 1919, he went home to the second section of the still functioning Great German General Staff, already doomed in the deliberations at Paris. A month later, October 1, he was in the operations section of a renamed element now known as the Reichswehr.69 From this vantage, he continued his analyses of the confused events of early 1920, which led him to new conclusions about Germany's future.
In the wake of the failed Kapp Putsch, a botched right-wing coup attempt in late-winter Berlin, von Boetticher penned a memorandum on March 23, 1920, appraising "Germany's next political tasks."70 Almost a year to the day after he described for Groener a German alignment with the United States, he had to deal with entirely new conditions. The American Senate had rejected Wilson's plea for an American participation in the League of Nations, leaving the League the embodiment of a local European security arrangement relying on the British Navy and the French Army. In eastern Europe, an imprudent attack by the new Polish state on the Soviet Union had collapsed, and rebounding Russian columns now menaced Warsaw. These Russian successes enlarged the attraction of the revolutionary idea among some Germans, yet armed resistance to it was not feasible or wise: it would be militarily hopeless and further divide loyalties at home. The former entente, on the other hand, feared Russian advances as the triumph of Bolshevism over the capitalist system, a threat to British dominions overseas, and a counter to French designs for splintering Europe. This anxiety von Boet-ticher hoped to use. Awaiting the outcome of the Russian operation in Poland, Germany should publicly announce that it would live in peace with Russia. This would serve notice on the Allies that any incursion into German territory to exact demands would drive Germany into the arms of the Soviet Union. Further, he wrote in this perceptive piece, the Allies would need the Germans to offset the Russians, and would have to loosen the terms of the peace to meet the unwelcome challenge from the east. If the tempo of affairs did not yet permit Germany this free a hand in countering the Allies by using the Soviet threat, von Boetticher had predicted accurately the orientation of Germany by 1922.71
In this season of hard choices for German authorities, von Boet-ticher's career might have stood in some jeopardy, too. For the new Reichswehr, the peace treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, required the reduction of the German officer corps from its wartime peak of
24,000 to 4,000 men by March 31 of the next year.72 Heated debate arose as to which officers to favor as leaders of the 100,000-man police-army permitted by the treaty: the Frontkampfer (front-line combat commanders) or the Generalstabler (General Staff officers). Many of the front-line officers were now in the ranks of the various Freikorps, whole or remnant German army units that had set themselves to battling German left-wing paramilitary groups, armed rioters, and the Bolshevik menace generally. These elements were particularly active in the east. For Groener, von Seeckt, and now-Reich President Ebert, himself a labor leader, the choice was a stiff one. If Ebert's socialist convictions would not allow the Freikorps element to guide the new German armed forces, von Seeckt also implicitly distrusted the rowdy brawlers who flocked to their ranks, recognizing that they were not the diligent, studious, and brilliantly trained staff men needed to administer and patiently train the new Reichswehr.73 Groener planned to rely solely on the General Staff cadre and to make of the most promising young captains and majors mobile administrators attached to no specific geographic command.74 When Hans von Seeckt arrived as chief of the army command, in effect the commander of the Reichswehr, in March 1920 after the Kapp Putsch, the issue was irrevocably resolved in favor of the General Staff officers.75 Von Boetticher's place in this august company was cemented by his own proven competence, but most tellingly by Groener's continued patronage. His future seemed less threatened than that of many of his brethren. For the next years, he was at the heart of the effort to keep intact a German military capability, however limited.
World History
