Transcript

I think some of the most interesting work has focused on the complexity of Fischer’s motivations. I mean this was a man who had had a very substantial and quite a deep flirtation with national socialism himself, who felt profoundly unhappy about that, unsettled by it, and was determined to dedicate his adult life as an intellectual to decontaminating German history, to overcoming the legacy, the horrific legacy of Nazi criminality, and that’s where I think the story starts to go slightly awry. I mean the 1912 war council is not a council at which war was planned, or its timing was established, and I’m afraid the most powerful statement about this council is one which was unearthed and published by John Röhl himself, which is Admiral Müller’s recollection and his diary entry ends the account of the meeting of that day by saying the result of this meeting was exactly zero, so the war council isn’t a war council and it didn’t have the consequences that have been attributed to it. Now it’s true that John Röhl has said that what happens at the war council is that war, having been planned, is now postponed. There is in my view no persuasive evidence of that. The war council is called not in order to postpone a war that the Germans have already planned but rather in response to a note which has reached the Kaiser from the German ambassador in London, Lichnowsky, it looks like the British are preparing a war, are we ready for one – that’s what the so-called war council was about. As for the September Programme, that of course loomed very large in Fritz Fischer’s account of the origins of the war. The key problem with the September Programme is the word September. The programme was conceived and devised after the war was underway. A cause has to be precedent in time, the war can’t be caused by something that happened after the war broke out. The September Programme was formulated to justify the war that was underway in September 1914. All the belligerent states come up with hair raising war plans once they are at war.