Wilhelm II, German Emperor Quotes
Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe. Her horizons stretch far away.
Germany had world power aspirations before Adolf Hitler.
Wilhelm II, 1859-1941, Emperor of Germany & King of Prussia, Explanation of the rapid German buildup of warships, Interview, London Daily Telegraph, October 28, 1908
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Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
There were few military thinkers at that time who would agree with Goebbels on this point.
The notion of America flexing its military muscles and intimidating other nations by sending a fleet of 16 battle ships around the world was not greeted enthusiastically by some. However in Japan, the reaction was totally positive. The Russo-Japanese War had been ended thanks to the mediation of Theodore Roosevelt (for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) and America was a model for much of Japan’s modernization. 25 years later the Japanese would view America as an interfering, intimidating bully, curtailing their national aspirations and rights.
Frederick the Great. He and many other Europeans thought that England had been so preoccupied with the American rebellion that she was ignoring Europe and other traditional foreign policy interests of theirs.
Germany had been Turkey’s traditional ally so this was another of his radical changes—tilting toward Britain.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. He was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, but gave the English response to the Morocco crisis.
Policy statement regarding European rival Germany’s colonial expansion in Africa which was being “carved up” by the European powers.
In 1878 there was tension between England and Russia. Some in England were militant advocates of war. This song was extremely popular among them. As a result, they became known as Jingoes or Jingoists. The song became popular in America at the approach of the Spanish-American War and jingoism became part of the American political vocabulary.
This article reached America where the insult proved a patriotic rallying point.
This quotation illustrates several historical differences of the past with today. To be a world superpower, one had to have a dominant navy. Yet that navy was, in Churchill’s concept, a defensive system. It could protect the nation from invasion, and its merchant ships on the seas, but a navy provided no threat to invade towns and villages in Europe or elsewhere. Germany and France in contrast, with their large armies could invade other nations and menace Europe and Asia. It also illustrates why the navy and the army were considered completely separate departments of government in that they had different functions. The early American government had a Navy Department and Secretary but no Secretary of the Army or standing army.
This quotation is a good illustration of a practice that existed in the age of Empire where two or more large powers would agree among themselves as to which one of them had the right to seize a smaller power, not part of the compact.
Bell was an American who worked for the London Times.
Wilhelm II, anglicised as William II, was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, reigning from 15 June 1888 until his abdication on 9 November 1918. Despite strengthening Germany's position as a great power by building a blue-water navy and promoting scientific innovation, his tactless public statements greatly antagonized the international community and his foreign policy was seen by many as one of the causes for the outbreak of World War I. When the German war effort collapsed after a series of crushing defeats on the Western Front in 1918, he was forced to abdicate, thereby bringing an end to the three-hundred-year rule of the House of Hohenzollern.
