The German Reply

Seen from above, a new nervous system of insulated copper and armored steel lay across the Atlantic floor, descending from North American shores to cross the abyssal plain before climbing to European coasts. From exchange buildings, the cables ran to relay stations where teleprinters converted impulses into paper tape, which clerks then cut and carried by hand. Built for commerce, this network now bore a heavier burden, carrying the decisive words between empires.

Through this network, in the last days of May 1915, the second American note to Berlin traveled eastward. It arrived at the American Embassy on the Wilhelmstrasse as a decoded text, a sheaf of typed pages carried by a clerk across the short distance to the German Foreign Office. The document was logged, translated, and placed on the desk of State Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow.

Its language was firmer than the first note’s had been. Where the earlier dispatch had demanded a response, this one demanded action: a disavowal of the sinking, reparation for the American dead, and immediate measures to prevent the recurrence of attacks on passenger vessels. The note declared that no circumstances of war could justify the killing of large numbers of non-resisting civilians, and that the United States had a responsibility to protect the lives of law-abiding Americans. The Americans had already warned the Germans repeatedly about their actions, and the Germans had also demonstrated that submarines were able to sink merchant ships under cruiser rules.

Von Jagow read the pages and understood their gravity. He also understood that his government could not simply comply. The Imperial Navy would not accept a restriction on the submarine campaign. The Kaiser’s enthusiasm for the U-boat, which had briefly wavered after the public outcry over the Lusitania, had been rekindled by Admiral von Tirpitz’s arguments about the British blockade. The Foreign Secretary sat between the American demand and the Navy’s insistence that the campaign continue, between the Chancellor’s fear of American belligerence and the General Staff’s conviction that the war could not be won without the submarine.

The division within the German government was not new. It had been present since the declaration of the war zone around the British Isles in February, since the first U-boat orders had gone out to commanders like Walther Schwieger. The naval command, led by Tirpitz and the officers of the High Seas Fleet, viewed the submarine as Germany’s decisive weapon against British commerce. The British blockade had cut off food and fertilizer. The submarine could cut off the supplies reaching the British Isles. Each ship sunk was tonnage denied to the enemy. Passenger ships carried cargo. Cargo fed the British war effort. The distinction between a troopship and a liner was, in the Navy’s reasoning, a technicality the British exploited by flying neutral flags and carrying contraband under civilian cover.

Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg viewed the matter differently. He was a civilian. He understood war in political terms. The American reaction to the sinking had confirmed his fear: the United States was not treating the Lusitania as a regrettable incident but as a test of Germany’s willingness to abide by the norms of civilized warfare. A second, firmer note meant Washington was raising the stakes. What the Navy did not fully appreciate, or did not care to weigh, was that the United States, if provoked sufficiently, could enter the war. The Chancellor had argued before the Kaiser and the military command that the submarine campaign risked bringing a new and powerful enemy into the conflict.

The Navy’s officers countered that the Americans were already supplying the Allies with munitions and credit, that American neutrality was a fiction, and that Germany could not win the war of attrition on the Western Front without strangling British supply lines.

The drafting of the German reply began in this atmosphere of internal contradiction. Von Jagow’s office prepared an initial response, conciliatory in tone but noncommittal in substance. It expressed regret for the loss of American lives. Disavowal was absent. The draft proposed that the question of the Lusitania’s status be submitted to arbitration, arguing that the vessel had been a British merchant ship sailing through a declared war zone, carrying contraband cargo, and operating under instructions from the British Admiralty that made her effectively a naval auxiliary. The initial text acknowledged the American demand for assurances but did not provide them.

The Navy objected to even this degree of concession. A memorandum from Tirpitz’s office argued that any limitation on the submarine campaign would constitute a surrender of Germany’s most effective weapon. The memorandum reiterated the claim that the Lusitania had carried munitions, that she had been armed, and that her master had been under orders to ram submarines. These contentions had appeared before in German newspapers, some attributed to the Foreign Office, some to the Navy’s press bureau, some to no identifiable source. The memorandum pressed them further, arguing that the presence of contraband cargo made the vessel a legitimate target under the existing rules of naval warfare.

Bethmann Hollweg intervened. He insisted that the reply contain some expression of regret and some acknowledgment of the American position. On the substantive question of disavowal, he did not prevail. The Navy’s position held: the German government would not disavow the sinking, would not commit to ending submarine attacks on passenger vessels, and would not accept the American demand as stated. What the Chancellor secured was a softer tone and a conditional offer. The reply would express sympathy for the loss of life. Negotiation would be proposed. The principle would not be conceded.

The German reply, when it was finalized and dispatched, was a document of extraordinary carefulness. It opened with an expression of sorrow for the deaths of American citizens. This sorrow was immediately qualified. The reply noted that the RMS Lusitania had been a British-registered ocean liner torpedoed about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, in a declared maritime war-zone. Before her departure from New York, the German government had issued warnings, published in American newspapers, advising passengers that they traveled at their own risk. The war zone had been declared three months after unrestricted submarine warfare was announced by Germany following the Allied naval blockade. The British government had chosen to disregard that notice.

Then the reply turned to the question of the Lusitania’s cargo. The vessel had carried munitions of war, specifically rifle cartridges and other contraband. This was, as the American Embassy in Berlin had already reported to Washington, factually accurate in part: a documented shipment of 4, 200 cases of small-arms ammunition had been aboard. The German reply seized on this fact and enlarged it. Contraband cargo on a vessel flying a belligerent flag rendered her liable to attack under the rules of naval warfare. The Lusitania’s speed and her Admiralty orders made her a naval auxiliary in practical terms, regardless of her commercial registration. Responsibility for the deaths lay not with the submarine commander who fired the torpedo but with the British government, which had allowed civilians to travel on a vessel carrying war material through a declared war zone, and with the Cunard Line, which had accepted their fare.

The central American demand went unanswered. Disavowal was refused. No promise that such attacks would cease. No offer of reparation except as a possibility contingent on the outcome of arbitration, in which the question of the Lusitania’s status would be adjudicated alongside the broader question of the British blockade. The reply treated the sinking not as an act requiring apology but as an incident requiring investigation. It shifted the ground from apology to adjudication, from disavowal to negotiation, from the specific act to the general context of the war at sea.

The reply was dispatched from Berlin to Washington by cable. It crossed the same Atlantic network that had carried the American note eastward. Arriving at the State Department in late June 1915, it was decoded, translated, and placed before Secretary Bryan and President Woodrow Wilson.

Bryan had weakened during the drafting of the second note. Softer language had been his proposal. He had suggested that the United States acknowledge the German claim about the Lusitania’s cargo and frame the American protest in terms that would allow negotiation rather than confrontation. Wilson overruled him, insisting that the note demand disavowal and a change in practice. The Secretary signed the document, but with reservations he had expressed in memoranda to the President and in conversations with colleagues. A German response the United States was not prepared to meet with force was, in Bryan’s judgment, the likely result. The demand for disavowal, if refused, would leave Washington with no option between retreat and war.

The German reply confirmed his fear. Disavowal was refused. No commitment to an end to submarine attacks on passenger vessels. Sorrow, negotiation, and arbitration were offered. What the American note had demanded was not.

Wilson read the reply and recognized what it was. The expression of sorrow was genuine in the narrow sense that the German government regretted the loss of American lives, but instrumental in that it served to soften the refusal that followed. The emphasis on the Lusitania’s cargo was accurate in its narrowest claim and misleading in its broader implication. Rifle cartridges had been aboard. Troops had not. Guns had not been mounted. In no operational sense recognized by international law had the vessel been a naval auxiliary. The German reply conflated these distinctions deliberately, using the fact of the cargo to justify the act of the sinking while ignoring the question of whether a passenger vessel carrying civilians could be lawfully torpedoed without warning.

The reply’s most provocative element was its structure. Rather than simply refuse the American demands, it reframed the entire incident as a consequence of British policy. According to the German construction, the British blockade was illegal. London had allowed civilians to travel on a vessel carrying contraband. The Admiralty had given the Lusitania orders that made her a participant in naval operations. Responsibility belonged to Britain, not to Germany. This was a legal argument. It was also a political maneuver designed to divide the American response, to direct Washington’s anger toward the Allies, and to position Germany as the party seeking negotiation while Britain sought confrontation.

The German reply was a provocation disguised as diplomacy. It arrived in Washington not as a conclusion to the crisis but as an extension of it. The refusal to disavow was a test. The offer to negotiate was a delay. The conditional regret was a shield. Behind the careful language, the German government had calculated that the United States would not go to war over the Lusitania. The Navy believed this. The Foreign Office believed this. Even the Chancellor, who feared American entry, believed that the American public, despite its outrage, would not support a war over a British ship carrying British cargo through a war zone Germany had declared.

The calculation was not reckless. It rested on a reading of American politics that was, in its way, sophisticated. The American public had been shocked by the sinking. Shock was not commitment. German observers noted the divisions within the American administration, the Secretary of State’s reluctance to press the note to its logical conclusion, the isolationist sentiment in Congress and the press, and the general American reluctance to enter a European war. The reply was designed to exploit these divisions. Enough was offered—sorrow, negotiation, the appearance of reasonableness—to give those who wished to avoid confrontation an argument for patience. Enough was refused—disavowal, reparation, a change in practice—to ensure that the submarine campaign would continue.

The reply landed in Washington in the last days of June. Wilson read it. Bryan read it. The Cabinet read it. The question that the first note had posed and the second note had pressed now demanded an answer: what would the United States do if Germany refused to disavow the sinking and refused to change its methods? Action had been demanded. The reply had declined to act. The gap between them was the space in which the crisis would either escalate or dissolve.

The German reply had been crafted under pressure from competing factions within the Imperial government. The Navy wanted no restriction. The Chancellor wanted no American enemy. The Foreign Secretary wanted a document that would satisfy neither fully but would buy time. The result satisfied the Navy by refusing disavowal, satisfied the Chancellor by expressing regret, and satisfied the Foreign Secretary by proposing negotiation. No one in Washington was satisfied. The one thing the American note had demanded—a commitment that passenger vessels would not be sunk without warning and without provision for the safety of those aboard—was absent.

In May 1915, the RMS Lusitania had departed New York City on a transatlantic voyage to Liverpool during the First World War. Among her passengers had been the American publisher Charles Lauriat, the art collector and nationalist Sir Hugh Lane, and the socialite Theodate Pope. The vessel was a British-registered ocean liner, torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat on 7 May 1915 about eleven nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. The torpedo struck at ten minutes past two. A second explosion followed. The ship sank in eighteen minutes. The passengers who died—men, women, and children—had been civilians traveling on a commercial vessel in a recognized sea lane. Their deaths were now, in the German reply, a matter for arbitration.

The reply’s treatment of the cargo question was its most carefully constructed element. The Lusitania had carried 4, 200 cases of rifle cartridges. This was documented. The German reply used this fact to argue that the vessel was a legitimate military target.

What the reply did not acknowledge was that the cargo had been declared, inspected, and cleared by American customs authorities. A shipment of small-arms ammunition, legal under American law for export to belligerent nations, sat in the ship’s hold, not on her deck. The cartridges were not the reason the submarine fired. Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger had fired a single torpedo because he saw a large vessel in the war zone, identified her as a British liner, and concluded that she was a target. Warning was not given. Time to lower the boats was not allowed. The cargo’s nature was not determined before the torpedo left the tube. The German reply retroactively supplied a justification that the submarine commander himself had not needed or sought at the moment of attack.

Admiralty orders cited in the reply formed the other pillar of the German case. The vessel had been instructed to operate in accordance with Admiralty guidance for merchant ships in the war zone. The reply characterized these instructions as evidence that the liner was a naval auxiliary. The orders did not constitute a commission. The Lusitania was not on the Navy List. No guns were mounted. Naval command had not been assumed. A Cunard liner carrying passengers and cargo under her master’s authority, sailing a route prescribed by her owners and advised by the Admiralty, was not a warship. The German reply conflated advisory guidance with operational control, just as it conflated the presence of rifle cartridges below decks with the presence of a military cargo sufficient to justify the killing of the passengers traveling above.

Wilson recognized the conflation. He recognized the evasion. The German reply was not an answer but a maneuver. The question was what he would do about it.

The document refused the core American demand. Regret was expressed. Disavowal was not. Negotiation was offered. A change in practice was not. The reply argued that responsibility for the sinking lay with Britain, not with Germany. The Lusitania’s cargo and her Admiralty orders were cited as justification for the attack. Arbitration of the question was proposed while the submarine campaign that had produced the attack continued.

Bryan read the reply and saw the confirmation of his fear. Wilson read the reply and saw the confirmation of his demand. The gap between the Secretary of State and the President, present since the drafting of the first note and widened during the drafting of the second, now became unbridgeable. The German reply had not caused the division. It had revealed it. The administration could not both accept the reply and maintain the position the notes had asserted. Disavowal could not be demanded and refusal accepted. A change in practice could not be insisted upon while negotiation was accepted as a substitute.

The reply was a document. It was also a choice. The German government had chosen to test American resolve rather than satisfy it. Washington’s desire for peace would, the calculation held, outweigh its outrage. The American public, shocked by the sinking but unwilling to fight a European war, would press the administration toward acceptance. The divisions within the American Cabinet, visible in Bryan’s reluctance, would widen under the pressure of the reply and produce a softening of the American position.

The German reply, a provocation disguised as diplomacy, landed in Washington. Wilson held the document. The refusal to disavow was explicit. The offer to negotiate was conditional. The submarine campaign would continue. The President placed the reply on his desk and turned to the question that the crisis had now made unavoidable: whether the Secretary of State who had signed both American notes would remain to sign a third.