Abstract
Colonel Walter Nicolai was head of IIIb, the section of the German General Staff responsible for military intelligence and several other issues, during the First World War. Nicolai published his recollections after the war in two books in 1920 and 1925, respectively, which were translated into several other languages and gave some at least the impression that he was an intelligence mastermind. This reputation had disastrous consequences for him. In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, Nicolai was a long-retired colonel without any important office. Nevertheless, he was arrested by the NKVD in his house in Nordhausen and taken to Moscow to be interrogated. Here he was still believed to be a highly influential person in the world of international espionage. Nicolai suffered a stroke and died in Russian captivity in 1947. He was 73 years old.
The last years of his life explain why his private papers are located in Moscow at the Centre for Historical and Documentary Collections or, as German historians mostly call it, the Sonderarchiv (Special Archive), which hosts German documents captured at the end of the Second World War. Nicolai's papers are of considerable size: they comprise 90 volumes of material. Editing them and making them available for historical research has been a long-term project and one to be welcomed. A team of specialists from the Germany Army's historical office (the ZMSBw in Potsdam) has now published the result.
Editing Nicolai's papers was a significant editorial challenge. The sheer size of the material prevented any attempt to publish the papers in their entirety. The editors made a pragmatic decision and have published a typescript which Nicolai had prepared himself. This is a strange manuscript. It is the first version of a mélange of Nicolai's papers from the time of the war, his war letters, and later reflections. Sometime after the war, probably in the 1930s or early 1940s, Nicolai used his own papers to prepare this memoir, or, more precisely, a documentation of his work during the First World War.
The decision to edit this typescript was practical and practicable, but it has several unavoidable disadvantages. The manuscript (there are in fact two typescripts in the Moscow archive which differ in various details) was clearly a post–1918 product. It includes material which is most probably authentic, such as extracts from his wartime letters to his wife which are also in Moscow. There are also many supporting ‘attachments’ and a ‘diary’—the authenticity of which is highly questionable. In it Nicolai frequently comments on and explains events, indicating that he put this manuscript together many years after the war, maybe even in the early 1940s. In doing so he made astonishing mistakes, like predating the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to 24 June 1914.
Choosing to edit this typescript instead of trying to use only unquestionably ‘authentic’ sources was both justifiable and necessary. The attempt to edit such sources would have been a herculean task and, as the editors write, ‘the death of the text’ (p. 69). More precisely, it would have been the death of the entire project. This edition therefore offers a mix of original and later sources and cannot give any assurance about what was written when, only probabilities. Thus the editors suggest that the frequent anti-Semitic comments in the text were only partially authentic observations from the time of the First World War, and were also partially a homage to the 1930s Zeitgeist when Nikolai tried, with some success, to start a second career, aligning himself with National Socialism, Walter Frank, and the Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des Neuen Deutschland (State Institute for the History of the New Germany). The source is therefore highly problematic, and the editors do not hide the problems. Rather, they lay them out clearly and honestly. To this reviewer, their choices were unavoidable if the edition was to be possible at all, and that this important source has been made available now is to be welcomed.
The book offers important insights into life inside the German General Staff during the First World War and especially into the world views of its most important members. Nicolai was a very close collaborator of the various chiefs of staff and gives short sketches of Moltke, Falkenhayn, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and of the Kaiser. These pen portraits help us to understand the working atmosphere and also the ‘nature’ of these individuals. Especially important is the portrait of Ludendorff, who is described with admiration and understanding, though Nicolai was not at all uncritical of him. Occasionally the source is even entertaining. At one point Nicolai describes Hindenburg exploding with anger because Nicolai made him meet foreign visitors far too often – in this case a group of Danish officers. Hindenburg complained loudly that he was not ‘the big rhinoceros’ that everybody had to see and banged his fist on the table, knocking over a photograph of his wife – only to call Nicolai the same evening like a bashful schoolboy to apologise for his outburst (p. 459).
In describing Nicolai's work and ambitions during the First World War, the editors allow us to understand his priorities. And this is probably the most important insight these papers deliver: the head of IIIB's views on the war, objectives, and German military intelligence. This last point is not as straightforward as it seems. Nicolai was not only responsible for ‘intelligence’ in the usual sense of the word, but for much more, including counter-espionage (Leitung der Spionage-Abwehr), domestic politics (Angelegenheiten der inneren Politik), press and information (Presse und Aufklärung), and also personnel and human resources, as well as foreign military attachés. Nicolai complained at one point that IIIb was, in reality, ‘the waste paper basket’ of the General Staff and had to deal with everything other sections did not take on. This was a very important point: because of the composition of IIIb, German military intelligence during the First World War had a bizarre structure, and its increasingly overburdened director had surprising priorities. As early as the 1920s, reviewers of Nikolai's books complained that they learned almost nothing about German military intelligence and how it influenced strategic decision making. This gets no better in the present edition. It becomes very clear that Nicolai was a very busy man during the war, that he was assertive, and that he worked hard with zeal and engagement. But military intelligence as such was not at the centre of his attention. The longer the war lasted, the more he handed these questions over to subordinates. In his eyes, collecting military intelligence was a well-established mechanism and a routine business. For him, it was a structure that worked by itself, forwarding information from the various Nachrichtenoffiziere (intelligence officers) from the frontline units to the centre. This business was done by others, such as Major Friedrich Gempp, who later wrote a very detailed multi-volume analysis of German military intelligence during the First World War (the ‘Gempp Report’) which is located in the German Military Archive in Freiburg.
Of course Nicolai, as head of IIIb, was also busy with ‘espionage’ in the strictest sense of the word: one of his actions was to employ Mata Hari, another was his involvement in Lenin's famous voyage through Germany – though he admitted in his papers that in spring 1917 he knew practically nothing about Lenin and his political views. But Nicolai's main attention was not on these questions, which he mentions only occasionally. His central concern, to which he dedicated most of his efforts, was that Imperial Germany had to fight a relentless enemy and could only survive if internally united. Faced with what he saw as a lack of clear energetic leadership from the politicians and the Kaiser, he regarded preserving internal unity as his main task and focused his efforts on the press and propaganda. Therefore we learn very little about intelligence and decision making, about IIIb and its links to the Operationsabteilung, and about how intelligence was used in Germany for military planning.
To give two examples: not much is said about Verdun in 1916 and the crucial question of what the German General Staff knew about French losses, nor is much said about the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917. The latter question, despite being one which arguably decided the war, is not discussed at any length here. It could be argued that Nicolai was not responsible for naval matters. But the problem was a different one: Nicolai simply did not have the time for nor interest in it. This edition does not include an episode from another part of Nicolai's papers which is a striking example of his hair-raising myopia regarding strategic questions. Returning in 1916 from his appointment as military attaché in the United States, Franz von Papen offered to organise a campaign against submarine enthusiasts with the aim of opening the eyes of the German people to this danger and keeping the United States out of the war. Nicolai declined the offer because he considered Papen to be too ‘Americanized’ in his views. Therefore it may come as no surprise to the reader that, for Nicolai, Germany's military collapse in autumn 1918 was indeed a great shock. Up to the last moment he had believed in and propagated an optimistic outlook on Germany's military situation.
Nicolai was a very active man, but dangerously inept in his role as head of military intelligence because of his intellectual limitations. A pattern becomes clear: Nicolai was an energetic and choleric officer. His main interest was press and propaganda, dealing with internal politics. He was incredibly arrogant towards politicians (as his behaviour towards Friedrich von Payer, the Vice Chancellor, shows) and journalists, especially Jewish ones such as Heinrich Simon from the Frankfurter Zeitung. He tried to galvanise German public opinion to unite and fight against the enemy. But he lost sight of developments in other countries to a frightening extent, or, more likely, he never had the ability or interest to understand them. Worse than that, at some point it became clear that he did not want to be liked and understood abroad, refusing to embrace ideas and moderate aims such as those of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt which were popular in neutral countries. Instead he wanted to force foreigners to take the Germans ‘as they really are’ (‘Dies muss uns erkennen und nehmen lernen, wie wir sind’) and suggested successfully to Hindenburg and Ludendorff to write to the Chancellor in this sense (p. 504). This edition then gives not so much an idea of German ‘intelligence’ during the First World War, but more of an interesting insight into German General Staff work during the conflict. It offers a very good understanding as to how the ‘stab in the back’ idea was generated during the war with complaints about the lack of support from within German society. Perhaps here too the source was manipulated by the 1930s editing, but it is more likely that what we see here is a moving transition of ideas from a wartime mentality into later propaganda, characterised by an obsession with inner unity against a relentless enemy, the desire to conclude a victorious peace, and the inability to understand the bigger strategic picture and the limits of German strength.
The Nicolai papers are an important source. This does not mean that they are a pleasant or easy read. The material is fragmented and detailed, the writing style is poor, and the protagonist and his views are not of a character a modern reader could find sympathetic. Regardless, this edition offers interesting insights for any scholar working on the German General Staff during the First World War.