The Zimmermann Telegram
By the end of 1916, the Germans belived they had sufficient U-boat power to end the war in six months before the Americans could intervene, but they had to prevent US entry into the war by distracting the United States. Mexican President Carranza might be open to going to war with the United States after the Veracruz incident and Pershing’s expedition into Mexico had strained relations with the US. Germany wanted to keep the US and its industrial might out of the European conflict by convincing Mexico and Japan to attack the US. Germany even promised Mexico it would get back Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
A mid level official at the German Foreign Office, Hans Arthur von Kemnitz, first suggested the Germany-Mexico alliance. With the approval of German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann approval, Kemnitz prepared a proposal for the Mexican government. Remarkably, Kemnitz’s draft of the message passed through a string of approvals with little consideration. Zimmermann himself signed off on it, with no comment or revision, on the same day he received it. The chancellor of Germany, it seems, never even saw or was informed of the telegram before it was sent on 16 January 1917.
British cryptographers soon deciphered the telegram from Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico in return for joining the German cause. The telegram was a coded message sent to Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States. In German literature it is referred to as the Mexico dispatch.
On 26 February 1917, Colonel House [President Wilson's principal assistant] was called to the telephone by Frank Polk and informed that the British Naval Intelligence had received and deciphered a sensational telegram from the German Foreign Office to von Eckhardt, the German Minister in Mexico City. Signed by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann himself and dated January 16; the telegram announced the imminence of unrestricted submarine warfare, and instructed the German Minister, in case of war with the United States, to attempt to arrange a Gerr:nan-Mexican alliance, on the understanding that Mexico would be assisted to reconquer New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. This message helped draw the United States into the war and thus changed the course of history.
"We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal or alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace." Signed, ZIMMERMANN.
The American government realized that the publication of this telegram would blow American resentment to a white heat; it would strengthen immensly populnr support of the President in any action he might take against Germany in defense of Ameriean rights on the sea. The same thought likely led the British to pass the deciphered teleqram to Washington. Wilson himself was in doubt as to whether the publication of the telgram would not bring on a crisis he could not control.
The effect of publication was exactly what had been anticipated. Informed Americans understood perfectly well that the Allies had bribed Japan, Italy, and Rumania into the war with the promise of slices from the enemy carcass; but they were sincerely and profoundly horrified by the thought that Germany could be sci base as to bribe Mexico and Japan with the promise of slices from the flanks of the United States. Not its least useful aspect, moreover, was the fact that it gave the Northeastern fire-eaters their first direct lever upon the pacific sentiment of the Southwest.
Many people initially raised doubts as to the authenticity of the telegram. The acrimonious discussions which the Zimmermann telegram aroused in Congress take up 22 pages in tho Congrcessional Record. Most of the debate deals with a resolution calling upon the President to furnish a formal statement declaring whether or not the telegram as published in the newspapers was authentic.
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts questioned the authenticity of the telegram. Although Zimmermann’s name was clearly shown on the original telegram, many lawmakers and private citizens still believed it to be a hoax perpetrated by the British in order to entice America into the war. Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina declared the telegram an outright fraud.
Senator Tillman [p. 4605] gave voice to his doubts in no uncertain terms: " Mr. President, I want to say one thing before this debate closes. I think we have wasted a great deal of valuable time here in discussing a lie - a forgery. I agreed with the Senator from Michigan (Mr. Smith] this morning when he said it was a forgery. The reason I think it is a forgery is this: Who can conceive of the Japanese consorting with Mexico and the Germans to attack the United States? Why, Japan hates Germany worse than the devil is said to hate holy water. Japan took possession of Kiaochow and she is going to hold it. Is it possible to conceive that Japan will go to war with the United States in conjunction with Mexico and Germany? I think such a proposition is beneath our notice."
Zimmermann, however, surprised everyone when on March 3 he admitted to having been the actual author of the telegram.
Speculation was uncontrolled as to how it had been intercepted: it was rumored that the messenger had been caught by American guardsmen on the Mexican border; that a copy had been taken from von Bernstorff at Halifax; that it was in a mysterious box seized by the British on the ship which Bernstorff sailed on.
It is apparent that the transmission of important messages by more than one route was a usual procedure with Bernstorff. In 1919-20 the German Constituent Assembly held an elaborate investigation into the responsibility for the war. In this the Zimmermann telegram played its part. Among its published documents is a note which reveals one route by which this document found its way across the Atlantic. It says:
"Instructions to Minister von Eckhardt were to be taken by letter by way of Washington by U-boat on tho 15th of January; since the U-boat Deutschland did not start on her outward trip, these instructions were attached on January 16th to telegram No. 157, and through the offices of the American Embassy in Berlin telegraphed to Count Bernstorff by way of the State Department in Washington. What this means is that the German Foreign Office used the American Government as an errand boy for the transmission of a document that contained a plot against its own territorial integrity.
"As all such messages touched England before starting across the Atlantic, the consent of the British Government was necessary before the favor could be performed. That the British graciously permitted the Germans to use their cable facilities may possibly have seemed, at the time, an act savoring of the magnanimous; the fact, however, that the British possessed the German cipher and read all these messages as they sped through England creates the suspicion that they may have regarded this as a way of obtaining valuable information."
The nucleus of the British Admiralty’s code-breaking organization was known as Room 40. Using captured German codebooks found in combat and through military intelligence, the Room 40 codebreakers intercepted messages as they briefly passed over British territory. The Germans were often forced to use cables belonging to neutral countries after their own Atlantic cables were cut earlier in the war.
The German Code 9972 was extremely simple in construction and was solved by the British without difficulty. Such names as Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona would not be included in making up a small code like 7500. In fact, the name of only one of these States-Texas-is included in the much larger code 13040. These names, if they occurred in a message, would have to be built up syllable by syllable by the use of several code groups; and unless these code groups were used frequently in other messages a cryptanalyst who was solving the messages by analysis would have no way of establishing the meaning of these groups in the Zimmermann telegram.
Code 13040 retained decided traces of its original alphabetical arrangement, and had, moreover, been in use for a long time. Code 7500, on the other hand, had no trace of alphabetical arrangement, and had been used between Berlin and Washington for a short time only. It had been brought to America by the submarine Deutschland on either July 9 or November 1, 1916, and the earliest 7500 message was dated November 16. In these circumstances the British reconstruction of 7500 had not reached the point where it wus equal to the complete decipherment of tho Zimmermann telegam. When, however, the 13040 version was obtained, the entire message was read without difficulty.
Adm. William “Blinker” Hall, the British director of naval intelligence, was faced with a dilemma. His Room 40 cryptographers had intercepted Zimmermann’s telegram to Bernstorff, but knowing they would have to admit to having spied on American diplomatic traffic, he was unprepared to reveal what had been uncovered.
Knowing that Bernstorff would have relayed the message to Eckhardt using the commercial telegraph system, Hall also knew a duplicate copy would exist in the Mexico City telegraph office. On February 10 a British agent in Mexico known only as “Mr. H” was able to bribe an employee of the telegraph office and secure a copy of the message. This allowed the British to keep secret their monitoring of American cable transmissions. Hall could now provide the telegram to Washington without revealing its primary source.
The obvious threats to the United States contained in the telegram inflamed American public opinion against Germany and helped convince Congress to declare war against Germany in 1917. The telegram had such an impact on American opinion that, according to David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, "No other single cryptanalysis has had such enormous consequences." It is his opinion that "never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message." In an effort to protect their intelligence from detection and to capitalize on growing anti-German sentiment in the United States, the British waited until February 24 to present the telegram to Woodrow Wilson. The American press published news of the telegram on March 1. On April 6, 1917, the United States Congress formally declared war on Germany and its allies.
William F. Friedman, Principal Cryptanalyst of the US Army Signal Intelligence Service, later wrote "... many an informed person whose memory goes back to the exciting days when the contents o£ this sensational message were disclosed in the newspapers of March 1, 1917, would certainly say that had he been asked at that time he would have said at least that it was the straw which broke the camel's back. The importance of this incident is evidenced by the lengthy comments of prominent officials who were at that time in a position to judge its significance."
Renowned 20th century historian Barbara Tuchman popularized the idea that it was World War I’s Pearl Harbor, pushing the American people to wholly reject their isolationism and rush headlong into war, much as the 1945 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had galvanized public opinion in favor of war.
But Thomas Borghardt convincingly argued that the Zimmermann Telegram neither caused the US to enter the war against Germany in 1917 nor that it was an invention of some "brain dead" German Foreign Office officials. German support for Mexico in return for unsettling the US-Mexican border in case of an American entry into the war on the side of the Allies had floated in Mexican and German circles for years. Borghardt identified the failed mission of Colonel Gonzalo Enrile to Berlin in the spring of 1915 who outlined precisely what appeared two years later in the infamous telegram.
Boghardt questioned Tuchman’s narrative, demonstrating that the events were not so neat. He examined editorial of the newspapers throughout the country. “I expected to find a huge outcry, illustrating that isolationism had died overnight,” Boghardt said. “What surprised me was that very few newspapers changed their stances on the question. Those that had endorsed interventionism take the Zimmermann telegram as evidence that they were right. Those that had been against entering the war don’t change either. And after a week or so, the Zimmermann telegram completely disappears from the press.”
Two marginal notes expand on the contents but were not sent with the telegram. The first one clarifies that no guarantee (for reconquering the three states) is expressed. The second one suggests that California should be reserved for Japan. That state had also been ceded to the US in the treaty ending the war with Mexico, and the remark indicates a discussion at the German foreign office whether it should throw in California as a bonus—it would not increase the cost.
California does not occur in the telegram as sent, but appears somewhat mysteriously in three places. Millis mentions California in his book Road to War; his book is today considered as revisionist and shunned by most historians [34, p. 407]. Friedman and Mendelsohn note his remark and ask, "Is it possible that the Germans were reserving California as bait for Japan?" More interested in an alliance with Japan than with Mexico, Kemnitz was careful to explain that “California should be reserved for Japan.” Rumors of Japanese actitity in Mexico had always been popular among nativist agitators.
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