to the outbreak of the war should be published. We owed that to the German people, who had a right to learn the truth about those who had hitherto guided the course of the State. It was, I urged, also necessary because nothing else could so clearly bring home to the incredulous foreigner our complete breach with the old régime.
The Commissioners agreed with me, and entrusted me with the collection and editing of the documents. My past record was, I hope, a warrant that no inconvenient material would be suppressed. The only reservation made was that I should not, like Eisner, issue the separate documents according as they came to light, but should wait until they all lay ready to hand. Politically, this was not quite the most desirable plan, for it necessarily meant the postponing of the publication and of its favourable influence on foreign countries. But it cut the ground from under the champions of the old régime, who could not say that we were garbling the material, and producing documents torn from their context, to which no evidential force could be attached.
I recognized the justice of this view and acted accordingly.
When, in December, my party colleagues, Barth, Dittmann and Haase, left the Government, I also resigned my post as State Secretary, but declared my willingness to proceed with the collection and editing of the war-documents. On this I received the following missive, dated January 4th:
“Esteemed Comrade,
“In reply to your communication of January 2nd, the Imperial Government requests you to continue your activity as joint-editor of the documents relating to the outbreak of the war.
“For the Imperial Government,
“Ebert.”
The term “joint-editor” refers to the practice in vogue during those weeks of associating a Majority and an Independent Socialist in all the higher offices, and Quarck had been appointed along with me.
This practice ceased with the withdrawal of the Independents from the Government. Quarck's joint-editorship also shortly came to an end, and I remained sole editor.
But I need hardly say that I did not execute alone the whole of this great task. Before I had obtained other help, my wife, who had, indeed, for past decades been associated with the planning and execution of almost all my works, came loyally to my aid. Before long, however, a special editorial bureau was found to be necessary.
The work had to be speeded up, and, besides this, I had literary work to do in connection with the Department of Socialization. In December, Quarck and I had already appealed to Dr. Gustav Mayer to let us call upon him for more workers in the collection and arrangement of the documents than I was able to give. He cordially agreed, although he was thus obliged to lay aside other tasks in which he was interested. At his instance we also obtained the services of Dr. Hermann Meyer, Archivist of the Secret Archives of State, for archival work, and then, at the beginning of February, as the work accumulated and a speedy conclusion became desirable, we engaged also Dr. Richard Wolff and Fräulein N. Stiebel, cand. hist.
I feel it my duty to thank all of the above, and particularly the two gentlemen first mentioned, for the valuable and devoted labours which they gave to this great undertaking.
They put it in my power to inform Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, on March 26th, that the collection was practically completed and could at once be set up in type. There were, indeed, a number of points still to be settled: thus, the dates of dispatch or reception of certain documents could not at the moment be accurately fixed. But these and other matters, such as a table of contents, etc., could be added during the process of composition.
It was necessary to go to press as soon as possible if we wished, before the opening of peace negotiations, to lay before the world the clearest evidence that the German Government, which should conduct these negotiations, had nothing whatever in common with that which had declared war.
But the Government clearly took another view. They postponed the publication, and issued, instead of these documents, a report on the outbreak of the war in the White Book of June, 1919, to which reference is made in the present work, and which reveals anything but a breach with the policy of the fallen Government.
While my colleagues and I were awaiting instructions to send the collection to the printers, we occupied ourselves in the completion of the work and in giving it the finishing touches. As, however, the hopes of a speedy permission to go to press became ever more remote, I could not withhold my colleagues from the other urgent duties which were calling them. At the beginning of May they concluded their work on the documents. I knew, however, that I could reckon on their immediate services as soon as we received orders to print.
Yet even after the signing of the Peace Treaty these orders were delayed.
At last, one fine day in the middle of September, I was rung up on the telephone about this matter—not, indeed, by the Foreign Office, but by a newspaper, which wanted to know whether it was true that Herren Mendelssohn, Montgelas and Schücking were to publish my collection, and not myself. I could only reply that I knew less of it than did the inquirer. I only heard of it through the newspapers.
The Government was, in fact, so wanting in good faith as to give to others, without even informing me of the fact, the publication of the collection of documents undertaken by me and carried out under my direction.
To this day the reasons for throwing me overboard have never been clear to me. The Government has never given any.
Their proceedings created so much bad blood that they found themselves compelled to call in. Professor Schücking and Count Montgelas came to me at the end of September with the assurance that what they intended to publish was exclusively my collection, in which not a line should be altered without my consent. I was also to receive every facility for seeing the work through the press. They begged me to sanction the publication.
These two gentlemen were therefore, to all intents and purposes, merely commissioned to subject my work to a supervision which I had no reason to shun, and to attend to all those minor details which are necessarily associated with the printing of a work of this class, and which I was glad to leave in their hands.
As I was not at all concerned about my own personality, but very much about the work in hand, I saw no reason to sulk in a corner, and I declared myself willing to co-operate in the work provided the material went to press at once.
This, too, was promised me, and so this collection of documents of the Foreign Office about the outbreak of the war, which had almost become a myth, has at last made its appearance.
Naturally, in the course of the work I had not contented myself with merely stringing the material together. I felt compelled to bring into relation with each other all the revelations offered by a mass of nearly nine hundred documents, and to bring out their connection with the remaining and already-known material connected with the outbreak of the war. I did this not as a partisan, but as an historian, who is simply anxious to discover how things came about.
I undertook this work in the first instance merely for my own satisfaction. An historian cannot collect materials without inwardly working over them. But the more the work progressed, the more keenly I desired that it should not be done for myself alone, but for the great mass of the public, who would have less time and, for the most part, less opportunity than I to work carefully through the huge mass of material.
Thus it was that the present volume took shape. In its essential features it has been ready for months. I have, however, continually delayed its publication, a proceeding also demanded by the constant necessity for working-in and dealing with new materials which cropped up, especially in the
