Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

116. Telegram (in cipher) to Trotha, Berlin, 8 December 1904, in ibid., Bl. 48. The disputes over the content of the telegram are documented in Bl. 14–20. Exact numbers of the dead are difficult to establish, since the estimates of the Herero population before the conflict vary from 35, 000to 80, 000. A headcount in the colony in 1905 produced a total of 24, 000 Herero inhabitants. It is thought that several thousand escaped across the borders and did not return. The rest, perhaps as few as 6, 000, perhaps as many as 45, 000 or 50, 000, were dead. Some had been killed in fighting, shot as they approached German encampments to surrender, or captured and executed after formulaic trials by military field tribunals; thousands more – men, women and children – had died of thirst, hunger or disease while searching for water in the desert areas into which they had been displaced. Casualties on the German side were 1, 282 – the majority from illnesses contracted during the campaign. On the Herero war, see esp. Jan Bart Gewald, Towards Redemption. A Socio-political History of the Herero of Namibia between 1890 and 1923 (Leiden, 1996); Horst Drechsler, Südwestafrika unter deutscher Kolonialherrschaft: Der Kampf der Herero und Nama gegen den deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin [GDR], 1966); Helmut Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule 1894–1914, trans. Hugh Ridley (London, 1971); Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds.), Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin, 2003), esp. the essays by Zimmerer, Zeller and Caspar W. Erichsen.

117. Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, Bethmann Hollweg als Reichskanzler, 1908–1914. Studien zu Möglichkeiten und Grenzen seiner innerpolitischen Machtstellung (Düsseldorf, 1957), pp. 103–29; David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913. Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London, 1982), pp. 87–105, 118–19, 148–9; Konrad Jarausch, Enigmatic Chancellor. Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (Madison, WI, 1966), p. 101; Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II (2 vols., Chapel Hill, NC, 1989 and 1996), vol. 2, Emperor and Exile: 1900–1941, pp. 189–92.

118. Johannes Burkhardt, ‘Kriegsgrund Geschichte? 1870, 1813, 1756 – historische Argumente und Orientierungen bei Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in id. et al. (eds.), Lange und Kurze Wege, pp. 9–86, here pp. 19, 36, 37, 56, 57, 60–61, 63.

119. Kossert, Masuren, p. 241.

120. Benjamin Ziemann, Front und Heimat. Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern 1914–1923 (Essen, 1997), pp. 265–74.

121. Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), pp. 31–3; the reference to ‘shadow governments’ is from Crown Prince Rupprecht von Bayern, In Treue fest. Mein Kriegstagebuch (3 vols., Munich, 1929), vol. 1, p. 457, cited in ibid., p. 32.

122. For a narrative overview of the partnership, see John Lee, The Warlords. Hindenburg and Ludendorff (London, 2005).

123. Cited from a speech by the industrialist Duisberg in Treutler to Bethmann Hollweg, 6 February 1916, GStA Berlin-Dahlem, HA I, Rep. 92, Valentini, No. 2. On the Hindenburg cult, see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 74; Matthew Stibbe, ‘Vampire of the Continent. German Anglophobia during the First World War, 1914–1918’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex (1997), p. 100.

124. Lansing to Oederlin, Washington, 14 October 1918, in US Department of State (ed.), Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (suppl. I, vol. 1, 1918), p. 359.

125. Cecil, Wilhelm II, vol. 2, p. 286.

126. Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa, speech to Landtag of 5 December 1917, cited in Croon, ‘Die Anfänge des Parlamentarisierung’, p. 124.

127. Toews, Hegelianism, p. 62.

128. Hermann Beck, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia. Conservatives, Bureaucracy and the Social Question, 1815–1870 (Providence, RI, 1993), pp. 93–100.

129. On Wagener and Gerlach, see Hans-Julius Schoeps, Das andere Preussen. Konservative Gestalten und Probleme im Zeitalter Friedrich Wilhelms IV. (3rd edn, Berlin, 1966), pp. 203–28.

130. On the links between Stein and Schmoller, see Giles Pope, ‘The Political Ideas of Lorenz Stein and their Influence on Rudolf Gneist and Gustav Schmoller’, D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1985); Karl Heinz Metz, ‘Preussen als Modell einer Idee der Sozialpolitik. Das soziale Königtum’, in Bahners and Roellecke (eds.), Preussische Stile, pp. 355–63, here p. 358.

131. James J. Sheehan, The Career of Lujo Brentano: A Study of Liberalism and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 1966), pp. 48–52, 80–84.

132. Erik Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864–1894 (Oxford, 2003), esp. pp. 108–18.