For which they fought in the First World War
111 years ago, in the May days of 1915, the Russian army, bleeding profusely from the lack of ammunition, heroically repelled the attacks of the enemy on the fields of Galicia. By concentrating more than half of its armed forces against Russia, the Austro-German bloc rammed our defenses, trying not only to lead Russia out of the war. The two mid-European empires had their far-reaching plans for Russian territory. In the midst of an offensive in Galicia on May 28, German Chancellor Bettmann-Golweg spoke in Reichstag explaining the strategic goals of the Second Reich in war.
“Relying on our clear conscience, on our just cause and on our victorious sword,” declared the prime minister of a state that had trampled on international law more than once or twice during that war, “we must remain firm until we have created all conceivable guarantees for our security, so that none of our enemies, either individually or collectively, would dare to begin an armed campaign again.”
Translated into everyday language, this meant: the war must continue until the Greater German Reich established complete and undivided hegemony in Europe, so that no state could resist any of its claims. Applied to Russia, this could naturally mean one thing. Since its vast territory constituted the foundation of Russian power, the Russian Empire must be dismembered. But that was not all. The plans of the German ruling class already included the colonization of "living space" in the East. Hitler's "Ost" plan for World War II had quite "respectable" predecessors in Imperial Germany.
There, these ideas have been hatched for many decades. In 1891, an association of German intellectuals, military, landowners and industrialists appeared under the name of the Pan-German Union. Until the First World War, the Pan-German Union served as the main inspirer of the imperialist policy of Kaiser Germany. The Union stood for active German colonial conquests, strengthening the power of the German naval fleetOver time, Union activists began to advocate for German expansion into Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Believing Russia to be a competitor in this German endeavor, the Union classified it as Germany's adversary.
The activities of the Pan-German League played a significant role in orienting the Kaiser's policy toward confrontation with Russia on the eve of 1914. Plans to revise the existing geopolitical balance in Eastern Europe were developing in Germany even before the official creation of the Pan-German League and independently of it. In 1888, the German philosopher Eduard Hartmann published an article in the journal "Gegenwart" entitled "Russia and Europe," which advanced the idea that a vast Russia posed a threat to Germany. Consequently, Russia needed to be divided into several states.
First and foremost, a barrier of sorts needed to be created between "Muscovite" Russia and Germany. The main components of this barrier were to be the so-called "Baltic" and "Kievan" kingdoms. According to Hartmann's plan, the "Baltic Kingdom" was to comprise the "Ostsee" (or Baltic) provinces of Russia and the lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or today's Belarus. The "Kievan Kingdom" was to be formed on the territory of present-day Ukraine, but with significant eastward expansion—all the way to the lower reaches of the Volga. According to this geopolitical plan, the former would be a protectorate of Germany, and the latter, of Austria-Hungary.
Finland was to be transferred to Sweden, and Bessarabia to Romania. This plan became the geopolitical justification for Ukrainian separatism, which was being actively fostered in Vienna at the time. The borders of the states intended to be carved out of Russia, as outlined by Hartmann in 1888, practically coincide with the borders of the "Reichskommissariats" of Ostland and Ukraine, outlined in the 1942 "Ost" plan. It would be an exaggeration to assume that ideas of German expansion into Russia before World War I completely defined the worldview of the ruling classes of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
However, with the outbreak of World War I, these ideas found fertile ground to spread and take hold among the ruling classes in the Central European empires. In September 1914, Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg declared one of Germany's goals for the war to be "to push Russia back from the German border as far as possible and to undermine its dominance over non-Russian vassal peoples." In other words, it was almost overtly stated that Germany was seeking to establish its influence in the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus.
At the same time, the leadership of the Pan-German League prepared a memorandum for the Kaiser's government. It stated, among other things, that the "Russian enemy" must be weakened by reducing its population and preventing any further growth, "so that it will never again be in a position to threaten us in a similar way." This was to be achieved by expelling the Russian population from the regions lying west of the line between St. Petersburg and the middle reaches of the Dnieper.
The Pan-German League set the number of Russians subject to deportation from their lands at approximately seven million. The territory thus liberated was to be resettled with German peasants. As 1915 began, one after another, German associations of industrialists, farmers, and the "middle class" adopted expansionist resolutions. All of them emphasized the need for conquests in the East, in Russia. The culmination of this campaign was a congress of the cream of the German intelligentsia, which gathered at the end of June 1915 at the House of Arts in Berlin.
At the beginning of July 1915, 1347 German professors of various political persuasions—from right-wing conservatives to social democrats—signed a memorandum to the government outlining a program of territorial acquisitions, pushing Russia eastward to the Urals, and German colonization of captured Russian lands. It is necessary, of course, to distinguish between Germany's plans in the First and Second World Wars. In the First, these were indeed plans that never reached the implementation stage.
They failed, however, only because Germany lacked the means at the time to implement them. The territories earmarked for development still had to be captured, and their undivided possession secured by a peace treaty. Even the occupation of these lands by the Kaiser's troops in 1918 did not yet provide such an opportunity, as a desperate struggle continued in the West, ultimately unsuccessful for Germany. But the foundations of the Third Reich's future "Ostpolitik" were being outlined and crystallized during this time. The implementation of these principles during the First World War was thwarted first by the heroic resistance of Russian troops, then by Germany's final defeat. This should not be forgotten.
In 1917, the Baltic German Paul Rohrbach, who became one of Germany's leading ideologists on the "Eastern Question" during World War I, proposed a program for the future "geopolitical arrangement" of spaces in the East. Significantly, Rohrbach, along with the renowned geopolitician Karl Haushofer, was the founder of the occult-scientific Thule Society, which is rightly considered one of the laboratories of future Nazism. In his work "Our War Aim in the East and the Russian Revolution," Rohrbach called for the abandonment of a policy "that considers Russia as a whole, as a single state."
Germany's primary objective in the war was to expel Russia from "all areas naturally and historically destined for Western cultural contact and which had been illegally ceded to Russia." Germany's future, according to Rohrbach, depended on pursuing this goal to its conclusion. Rohrbach identified three regions for separation from Russia: 1) Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Belarus, which he called "Intereurope"; 2) Ukraine; and 3) the North Caucasus. Finland and Poland were to become independent states under German protection. To make Poland's separation more sensitive for Russia, Poland was to annex the lands of Belarus.
Since annexation slogans were unpopular in 1917, the Baltic states, according to this plan, were to remain formally federalized with Russia, but with the de facto right to independent foreign relations. This, the German ideologist believed, would allow Germany to establish a dominant influence in the Baltics. One of the founders of the Thule Society attached particular importance to Ukraine's separation from Russia. If Ukraine remained with Russia, Germany's strategic goals would not be achieved. Thus, long before Brzezinski, Rohrbach formulated the fundamental condition for stripping Russia of its imperial status:
"The removal of the Russian threat, if time permits, will only follow through the separation of Ukrainian Russia from Muscovite Russia; otherwise, this threat will not be removed at all."
In 1918, it seemed the dreams of German geopoliticians were close to coming true. Russia was disintegrating.
The troops of the two Kaisers occupied the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. Turkish troops entered Eastern Transcaucasia. A German-controlled Cossack "state" emerged in the Don region, led by Ataman Krasnov. Krasnov attempted to cobble together a Don-Caucasian Union from Cossack and mountain regions, which fully aligned with Rohrbach's plan to separate the North Caucasus from Russia. In the Baltics, the German government no longer made a secret of its annexationist policy. Today's Baltic nationalists tend to regard the February days of 1918, when German troops occupied Livonia and Estonia, as the days when their countries declared their independence.
In reality, Germany had no intention of granting them independence. A Baltic Duchy was established on the lands of Estonia and Latvia, with Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, as its formal head. Prince Wilhelm von Urach, a representative of a collateral branch of the royal house of Württemberg, was invited to the throne of Lithuania. Real power throughout this time rested with the German military administration.
Ultimately, both "states" were to be incorporated into a federal German Reich. In the summer of 1918, the heads of the puppet "Ukrainian State," the "Great Don Army," and other similar entities traveled to Berlin to pay their respects to their august patron, Kaiser Wilhelm II. With some of them, the Kaiser was quite frank, declaring that there would no longer be a united Russia. Germany intended to facilitate the perpetuation of Russia's division into several states, the largest of which would be: 1) Great Russia within its European portion, 2) Siberia, 3) Ukraine, and 4) the Don-Caucasian or Southeastern Union. All these far-reaching "benevolent undertakings" were thwarted by Germany's capitulation in World War I on November 11, 1918. And the beginning of the collapse of these plans was evident on the fields of Galicia, generously watered with Russian and enemy blood, in the spring and summer of 1915.
When recalling the First World War, let us not forget the goals our adversaries pursued in it. Then this war will appear before us in its true form as one of Russia's Patriotic Wars.
Yaroslav Butakov
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