Background
Richard von Kühlmann was born in Constantinople on May 3, 1873, the son of the director general of the Anatolian Railway and an estate owner; he later married a daughter of the Saarland magnate Baron von Stumm.
Richard von Kühlmann was born in Constantinople on May 3, 1873, the son of the director general of the Anatolian Railway and an estate owner; he later married a daughter of the Saarland magnate Baron von Stumm.
After studying jurisprudence, Kühlmann used his contacts with Chancellor Prince Hohenlohe to procure entry into the foreign service; he served as legation counselor in St. Petersburg, Teheran, London, Morocco, Washington, and The Hague.
In London at the turn of the century, Kühlmann sought a rapprochement with Britain over the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad, the Portuguese African colonies, and oil reserves in Asia Minor. He almost challenged the German naval attache, Wilhelm Widenmann, to a duel owing to the captain's insistence that the Anglo-German trade rivalry was the tap root of the naval race developing between Berlin and London. From 1909 to 1914 Kühlmann served in London as embassy counselor and attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to defuse the Anglo-German rivalry.
After the outbreak of the war, Kühlmann was given special diplomatic missions to Stockholm and Constantinople; thereafter he was appointed ambassador to the Netherlands and in 1916 envoy to the Porte. On August 7, 1917, he became state secretary of the Foreign Office under Chancellor Georg Michaelis. It was hardly an enviable task in the fall of 1917 as three major areas of contention opened between the Foreign Office and the General Staff: Poland, Rumania, and Russia.
Overall, Kiihlmann can be depicted as a moderate on the issue of German war aims, that is, he basically endorsed Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg's Mitteleuropa scheme of September 1914 calling for German economic and political control over Europe from Scandinavia to Turkey, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea. Thus the foreign secretary on November 5, 1917, was able to convince the kaiser to adopt the so-called Austro-Polish solution, while General Erich Ludendorff vehemently demanded direct German control of Poland and at one point even recommended the outright Anschluss of that land. The matter was tabled at the crown council of November 5 because Wilhelm II was interested only in the future of Rumania, likening Poland to "the Jiiterbog artillery ground."
Russia posed an even greater challenge. Peace talks with the Bolsheviks opened at Brest-Litovsk on December 22, 1917, and dragged on until March 1918. Kiihlmann basically desired the outright annexation of Courland and Lithuania as well as Russian evacuation from Poland; beyond that, he hoped to work with the Bolsheviks to stabilize the east as quickly as possible in order to draw on its alleged reserves of grain and oil. Above all, he feared that unrealistically harsh terms might bring about a reactionary coup and hence a reopening of the war with Russia. One could not, he counseled, conduct a policy in the east "with the pen in the left and the sword in the right" hand. Ludendorff, on the other hand, entertained the most Utopian annexationist schemes, desiring to control the land mass in the east as far as the Caspian Sea. The final draft signed on March 3, indeed, represented the triumph of Luden- dorff's direct, over Kuhlmann's indirect, imperialism: Russia was to evacuate Finland, Courland, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Livonia, and the Ukraine; as a result, it lost about 90 percent of its coal mines, 50 percent of its industry, and about 30 percent of its population.
While the Bolsheviks signed the German terms at Brest-Litovsk, Kiihlmann was dictating similarly harsh terms to the Rumanians. The Treaty of Bucharest, ratified by the Reichstag in June 1918, virtually reduced Rumania to a vassal state. The country was to be occupied until "a date to be determined later," was to pay all occupation costs, one-third of its army was to be demobilized, its oilfields were to be placed under a German banking consortium for thirty years, and all "surplus" grains were to be handed over to the Germans. Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who was to head the German occupation, reflected the mood of the Prussian military: "This time the pen has secured what the sword has won."
Incredibly, the General Staff was dissatisfied with these Draconian settlements in the east and immediately after the signing of terms at Bucharest set out to remove Kiihlmann from office. The generals got their chance on June 14, when Kiihlmann in a speech in the Reichstag pointed to the "incredible magnitude" of the global coalition lined up against Germany and concluded that "a purely military decision" was beyond Germany's reach. The speech proved a veritable bombshell. It earned him the implacable hatred of the Army Supreme Command and the Pan-Germans, and on July 8 Wilhelm II informed his foreign secretary at Spa that he would have to go. Kiihlmann, ever the suave aristocrat, kissed the kaiser's hand, and with this archaic gesture departed from the Wilhelmstrasse. His evaluation of the military situation in June 1918, had, of course, been accurate, although such a public confession proved highly embarrassing to the German government. In many ways Kiihlmann had been too subtle, too clever; and much underestimated by the military. Kiihlmann retired to his numerous industrial interests and died in Ohlstadt near Neuenahr on February 6, 1948.