Riezler - Septemberprogramm (1914)

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Riezler - Septemberprogramm (1914) ..

Schlieffen Plan (1905) ..  

Kurt Riezler (February 11, 1882 – September 5, 1955) was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during WW1. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.

Riezler's duties in the chancellor's office concerned primarily, but not exclusively, foreign policy. In 1914 he authored Septemberprogramm which proposed as possible German war aims limited annexations, a hard peace for France, and a Belgian vassal state. The Septemberprogramm ("September Program") was the plan for the territorial expansion of the German Empire, prepared for Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, at the beginning of WW1 (1914–18). The Chancellor's private secretary, Kurt Riezler, drafted the Septemberprogramm on 9 September 1914, in the early days of the German attack in the west, when Germany expected to defeat France quickly and decisively. The extensive territorial conquests proposed in the Septemberprogramm included making a vassal state of Belgium, annexing portions of France, expanding its colonies in Africa, and seizing much of the Russian Empire. The Septemberprogramm was not effected because France withstood the initial German attack, the war devolved into a trench-warfare stalemate, and ultimately ended in German defeat.

As geopolitics, the Septemberprogramm itself is a documentary insight to Imperial Germany's war aims, and shows the true scope of German plans for territorial expansion in two directions, east and west. Historian Fritz Fischer wrote that the Septemberprogramm was based on the Lebensraum philosophy as well as the Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) nationalist movement of the 19th century, which made territorial expansion Imperial Germany's primary motive for war. Jonathan Steinberg has suggested that if the Schlieffen Plan had worked, and produced a decisive German victory, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Septemberprogramm would have been implemented, thus establishing German hegemony in Europe.

In October 1917 Riezler was posted to the German embassy in Stockholm to arrange a cease-fire on the Eastern Front, and then to Moscow as the top aide to Germany's ambassador to Russia, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. Riezler was an eyewitness to Mirbach's assassination by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on 9 July 1918, having unwittingly ushered the gunman Yakov Blumkin into Mirbach's presence.

During this period, Riezler served as the conduit for German subsidies to the Bolsheviks and personally negotiated these with Lenin's representatives Karl Radek and Alexander Parvus. Riezler later claimed privately that it had been his own idea to transport Lenin in the famous "sealed train" from Zurich through Germany to Russia in April 1917.

Following the war, Riezler became a staunch supporter of the Weimar Republic. He joined the German Democratic Party, contributed regularly to the pro-Weimar newspaper Die Deutsche Nation, and served as the Foreign Office's representative during the drafting of the Weimar Constitution. From November 1919 until April 1920 he was chief of cabinet to President Friedrich Ebert and played a central role in suppressing the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Kapp Putsch.