Theobald Theodor Friedrich Alfred von Bethmann Hollweg was a German politician who was Chancellor of the German Empire from 1909 to 1917. He oversaw the German entry into World War I and played a key role during its first three years. He was replaced as chancellor in July 1917 due in large part to opposition to his moderate policies by leaders in the military.
Georg Michaelis was the chancellor of the German Empire for a few months in 1917. He was the first chancellor not of noble birth to hold the office. With an economic background in business, Michaelis' main achievement was to encourage the ruling classes to open peace talks with Russia. Contemplating that the end of the war was near, he encouraged infrastructure development to facilitate recovery at war's end through the media of Mitteleuropa. A somewhat humourless character, known for process engineering, Michaelis was faced with insurmountable problems of logistics and supply in his brief period as chancellor.
Ottokar Theobald Otto Maria Graf Czernin von und zu Chudenitz was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and politician during the time of World War I, notably serving as Foreign Minister from 1916 to 1918.
The July Crisis was a series of interrelated diplomatic and military escalations among the major powers of Europe in the summer of 1914, which led to the outbreak of World War I. The crisis began on 28 June 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. A complex web of alliances, coupled with the miscalculations of numerous political and military leaders, resulted in an outbreak of hostilities amongst most of the major European nations by early August 1914.
The Reichstag Peace Resolution passed by the Reichstag of the German Empire on 19 July 1917 was an attempt to seek a negotiated peace treaty to end World War I. The resolution called for no annexations, no indemnities, freedom of the seas, and international arbitration. Although it was rejected by the conservative parties, the German High Command, and the Allied powers and thus had no effect on the progress of the war, it brought the moderate parties that supported the resolution into a group that would shape much of the Weimar Republic's politics.
The 9 January 1917 Crown Council meeting, presided over by German Emperor Wilhelm II, decided on the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Imperial German Navy during the First World War. The policy had been proposed by the German military in 1916 but was opposed by the civilian government under Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg who feared it would alienate neutral powers, including the United States.
The Hoyos Mission describes Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold's dispatch of his promising 38-year-old private secretary, Alexander Hoyos, to meet with his German counterparts. This secret mission was intended to provide Austro-Hungarian policy-makers with information on the Reich's intentions shortly after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the Imperial and Royal Kronprinz, in Sarajevo. On 5 July 1914, a week after the assassination attempt that claimed the lives of the heir to the throne and his wife, the Austro-Hungarian government sought to officially secure the Reich's support for the actions it wished to take against Serbia in response to the attack. Indeed, the initiatives of the Kingdom of Serbia, victorious in the two Balkan wars, prompted Austro-Hungarian officials to adopt a firm stance in the international crisis opened by the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir.
The Bellevue Conference of September 11, 1917, was a council of the German Imperial Crown convened in Berlin, at Bellevue Palace, under the chairmanship of Wilhelm II. This meeting of civilians and military personnel was convened by German Emperor Wilhelm II to determine the Imperial Reich's new war aims policy, in a context marked by the February Revolution and the publication of Pope Benedict XV's note on August 1, 1917; the question of the fate of Belgium, then almost totally occupied by the Reich, quickly focused the participants' attention. Finally, this meeting also had to define the terms of the German response to the papal note, calling on the belligerents to put an end to armed confrontation.
The Berlin Conference of March 31, 1917, was a German governmental meeting designed to define a new direction for the Imperial Reich's war aims in Eastern Europe. Called by the Chancellor of the Reich, this meeting brought together members of the civilian government and officials of the Oberste Heeresleitung to establish the principles that should guide Reich policy in response to the political changes occurring in Russia, which had recently undergone the definitive fall of the monarchy. As a major driving force behind the Central Powers the Reich recognized the need for a clear and objective plan moving forward. For the Reich, the Russian Revolution presented a possibility to impose severe peace terms on Russia and approve extreme initiatives.
The Berlin Conference of August 14, 1917, was a German–Austro-Hungarian diplomatic meeting to define the policy of the Central Powers following the publication of the Papal Note of August 1, 1917. Since April of the previous year, the Reich government members sought to impose unrealistic war aims and to require their Austro-Hungarian counterparts, who were governing a monarchy drained by the prolonged conflict, to share the European conquests of the Central Powers. The objective was to bring the dual monarchy under strict German control.
The Kreuznach Conference on August 9, 1917, was a German government conference that aimed to draft the Reich Government's response to the proposals made on August 1, 1917, by Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Ottokar Czernin for negotiating an honorable way out of the conflict. Additionally, the conference served as the primary meeting between the new Imperial Chancellor, Georg Michaelis, and the two main leaders of the German High Command, Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg. At this meeting, the military tried to impose the war aims they set for the conflict on the members of the civilian government, based on the minutes of the April 23, 1917 conference.
During World War I, a conference took place between the German emperor Wilhelm II and the Austro-Hungarian monarch Charles I in Spa on 12 May 1918. At his meeting, Charles I and his minister Stephan Burián von Rajecz were forced to accept the political and economic subjection of Austria-Hungary to the German Empire in the form of a treaty. Formally concluded on an equal footing between the signatory powers, the agreements reached at Spa in fact endorsed the pre-eminence of Germany and guaranteed its supremacy, while the Austro-Hungarians were forced into a situation of political, economic and military dependence. However, the Spa agreement, which made the dual monarchy subject to an "Austro-German Zollverein", failed to put an end to rivalries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, or to political disagreements over the end of the conflict or the future of occupied Poland. At the meeting on May 12, German and Austro-Hungarian negotiators agreed to set up technical commissions to put into practice the economic and commercial provisions of the agreement in principle between the emperors. The subsequent Salzburg negotiations, however, fell apart in October with the imminent defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The Berlin Conference held on December 6 and 7, 1917 was a council of the German Imperial Crown summoned to the Imperial Chancellery by Emperor Wilhelm II to ratify the conditions on which the members of the Quadruple Alliance, or Central Powers would be prepared to accept an armistice with the Council of People's Commissars in power in Russia after the October Revolution.
The Salzburg negotiations were bilateral diplomatic talks designed to precisely and rigorously define the practical details of the economic rapprochement between the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the German Reich. These talks began on July 9, 1918, in Salzburg, an Austrian city close to the German–Austro-Hungarian border, and were intended above all to implement the decisions of principle imposed on Emperor Charles I and his ministers by Emperor Wilhelm II and his advisors at their meeting in Spa on May 12, 1918. Continued throughout the summer, these negotiations were suspended on October 19, 1918, when, without having informed the German negotiators, the Foreign Minister of the Dual Monarchy, Stephan Burián von Rajecz, ordered the Austro-Hungarian delegation to interrupt its participation in the talks, which had been rendered pointless by the development of the situation marked by the inevitability of the military defeat of the Reich and the Dual Monarchy.
The Berlin Conference of March 26–27, 1917 was the second governmental meeting between Arthur Zimmermann and Ottokar Czernin, the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministers, under the chairmanship of Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. The meeting was intended to define the war aims of the Imperial Reich and the Dual Monarchy, and to prepare for the first official meeting between German Emperor Wilhelm II and the new Emperor-King Charles I. At a time when changes in political personnel were taking place in the Dual Monarchy, which was becoming increasingly exhausted by the protracted conflict, this meeting was the first sign of disagreement between the two allies over the conditions for ending the conflict.
The Berlin Conference, held from November 2 to 6, 1917, consisted of a series of meetings between German and Prussian ministers, followed by meetings between German and Austro-Hungarian representatives. The conference was held in Berlin just a few days before the outbreak of the October Revolution. At the same time, the antagonisms between Chancellor Georg Michaelis, supported by State Secretary Richard von Kühlmann, on the one hand, and the military, mainly the Dioscuri, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, on the other, reached a climax, prompting the military to call for the Chancellor's resignation, formalizing their disagreements over the program for internal reform of the Reich. These differences between political and military leaders also had at stake the definition of a new program of war aims for the Reich, and the concessions the Germans would be prepared to make to their allies, principally the Dual Monarchy, exhausted by more than three years of conflict, but hostile to any excessive reinforcement of German control over Central and Eastern Europe.
The Vienna Conference of October 22, 1917 was a German-Austro-Hungarian governmental conference designed to finalize the sharing of the Central Powers European conquests. Meeting in a difficult context for both empires, it resulted in the drafting of a detailed program of German and Austro-Hungarian war aims, referred to by German historian Fritz Fischer as the "Vienna directives", proposing a new program of war aims for the Imperial German Reich, while defining the objectives of the dual monarchy, which was to be further integrated into the German sphere of influence.
The Vienna Conference of March 16, 1917 was the first German-Austro-Hungarian meeting since the outbreak of the February Revolution in Russia. For Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the ministerial meeting was a further opportunity to reaffirm the Reich's war aims in the face of the dual monarchy's new Foreign Minister, Ottokar Czernin. Czernin, the minister of an empire in dire straits, tries to assert the point of view of the dual monarchy, exhausted by two and a half years of conflict, in the face of the Reich, the main driving force behind the quadruplice, and its demands for a compromise peace with the Allies. This decrepitude led Emperor Charles I and his advisors to multiply their initiatives to get out of the conflict, without breaking the alliance with the Reich.
The Vienna Conference of August 1, 1917 was a German-Austrian-Hungarian governmental conference designed to regulate the sharing of the Quadruple Alliance's European conquests, in a context of growing rivalry and divergence between the Imperial Reich and the Dual Monarchy. Gathered at a time when the Dual Monarchy was sinking into a crisis from which it proved unable to emerge until the autumn of 1918, the Vienna meeting was a further opportunity for German delegates to reaffirm the Reich's weight in the direction of the German-Austrian-Hungarian alliance, on the one hand, and in Europe, on the other.
Peace efforts during World War I were made mainly by Pope Benedict XV, US President Woodrow Wilson and, from 1916, the two main members of the Triple Alliance to bring the conflict to an end. European socialists, taking advantage of their relations on opposing sides through the Political International, also tried to open up the prospect of peace.
