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EspañolZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM
The 'Zimmermann Telegram' (or 'Zimmermann Note'; German: ''Zimmermann-Depesche''; Spanish: ''Telegrama Zimmermann'') was a coded telegram dispatched by the Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann, on January 16, 1917, to the German ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, at the height of World War I.
The telegram instructed the ambassador to approach the Mexican government with a proposal to form a military alliance against the United States. It promised Mexico land in the United States if they were to help. It was intercepted and decoded by the British, and its contents hastened the entry of the United States into World War I.
Zimmermann's message was
A general assigned by Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assessed the feasibility of a Mexican takeover of their former provinces and came to the conclusion that it would not be possible or even desirable for the following reasons:
★ Attempting to re-take their former provinces would have meant certain war with the more powerful U.S.
★ No matter how "generous" it was, Germany's "financial support" would have been worthless because Mexico would have been in no position to use it to acquire arms and other military hardware, or ammunition and other war supplies since the U.S. was the only sizable arms manufacturer in the Americas. The Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic sea lanes, thus Germany would not possibly have had the capability to supply any quantity of what would have been needed for seizure and defence of the territory.
★ Even if Mexico had the military means to re-take the territory she would have had severe difficulty accommodating and/or pacifying the large English-speaking population.
Carranza formally declined Zimmermann's proposals on April 14, by which time the U.S. had declared war on Germany.
The telegram was intercepted and decrypted enough to get the gist of it by codebreakers Nigel de Grey, William Montgomery and Admiral William R. Hall of the British Naval Intelligence unit, Room 40. This was made possible because the code the Foreign Office used (0075) had been partially cryptanalyzed using, among other techniques, captured plaintext messages and a codebook for an earlier version of the cipher captured from Wilhelm Wassmuss, a German agent working in the Middle East.
The British government, which wanted to expose the incriminating telegram, faced a dilemma: if it boldly produced the actual telegram, the Germans would know that their code had been broken; and if it did not, it would lose a promising opportunity to draw the United States into World War I — the message was sent during a period when anti-German feeling in the United States was running particularly high, following the death of 128 U.S. travelers on British ships by German submarine attacks.
There was a further problem — they could not simply confidentially show it to the United States government. Because of its importance, the message had been sent from Berlin to the German ambassador in Washington, Johann von Bernstorff, for onward transmission to their ambassador in Mexico, von Eckardt, by three separate routes. The British had obtained it from just one of these — the Americans had given Germany access to their private diplomatic telegraph in an effort to encourage President Woodrow Wilson's peace initiative.
The Germans were not afraid of using it because the messages were encrypted, because as a matter of principle the United States did not at that time read other countries' diplomatic correspondence and because, unlike Britain, the U.S. did not have any code-breaking capability. The telegraph cable went from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to Copenhagen and then via submarine cable to the United States via Britain (where it was monitored). For the British to reveal the source of the telegram to the United States would have meant also admitting to the American government that they had tapped U.S. diplomatic communications.
The cable to Washington was in code 7500, a newer, more difficult code. However, the embassy in Mexico did not yet have this code, so the German embassy in Washington would have to re-transmit the message in an older code, 13040 or 13042, both better known to the British.
The British government guessed that the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. would send the message on to the embassy in Mexico via the commercial telegraph system, and therefore a copy would exist in the public telegraph office in Mexico City. If they could get a copy, they could pass it on to the United States government stating that they had discovered it through espionage in Mexico. Therefore, they contacted a British agent in Mexico, known only as Mr. H., who bribed an employee of the commercial telegraph company to obtain a copy of the message. In his autobiography, Sir Thomas Hohler, the British ambassador in Mexico at that time, claims to have been Mr. H. To the delight of the British code breakers, the message had been sent from the German embassy in Washington to Mexico using the older cypher in the Wassmuss codebook and could therefore be completely decrypted.
The telegram was delivered by Admiral Hall to the British Foreign Minister, Arthur James Balfour, who in turn contacted the U.S. ambassador in Britain, Walter Page, and delivered the telegram to him on February 23. Two days later he relayed it to President Woodrow Wilson.
Popular sentiment in the United States at that time was anti-Mexican as well as anti-German. General John J. Pershing had long been chasing the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had carried out several cross-border raids. This was costly for the U.S. government, and Wilson was considering discontinuing the search until new elections were held in Mexico, a new government installed, and a new constitution promulgated (a constitutional convention, which would adopt the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, was underway at the time). News of the telegram exacerbated tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, since such a treaty, if in place, would have hindered the election of a new Mexican government more friendly to American interests.
Initially the telegram was widely believed to be a forgery by British intelligence designed to bring America into the war on the Allied side. This opinion, which was not restricted to pacifist and pro-German lobbies, was bolstered by German and Mexican diplomats, and by some American papers, especially the Hearst press empire. However, on March 29 1917, Arthur Zimmermann gave a speech confirming the text of the telegram, and so ended speculation on its authenticity.
Also, a number of ships (eg the RMS Lusitania) had been torpedoed with heavy loss of life. On April 2, President Wilson asked Congress to agree to declare war on Germany, and on April 6 Congress complied. The United States had entered World War I on the Allied side.
The telegram began by stating:
German U-boats had previously attacked U.S. ships near the British Isles, so the telegram was not the only cause of U.S. entry into the war. It was perceived as especially perfidious that the telegram was first transferred from the U.S. embassy in Berlin to the German embassy in Washington before being passed on to Mexico. Once the American public believed the telegram to be real, it became all but inevitable that the U.S. would join the Great War.
In October 2005, it was revealed that an original typescript of the deciphered Zimmermann Telegram had recently been discovered by an unnamed historian who was researching and preparing an official history of the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The document is believed to be the actual telegram shown to the American ambassador in London in 1917. Marked in Admiral Hall's handwriting at the top of the document are the words: "This is the one handed to Dr Page and exposed by the President." Since many of the secret documents in this incident had been destroyed, it had previously been assumed that the original typed "decrypt" was gone forever. However, after discovery of this document, the GCHQ official historian said: "I believe that this is indeed the same document that Balfour handed to Page."
★ Arthur Zimmermann
★ ''Room 40: British Naval Intelligence, 1914—1918'', by Patrick Beesly. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982 ISBN 0-15-178634-8
★ ''On Secret Service East of Constantinople'', by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-19-280230-5
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram'', by Barbara W. Tuchman, Ballantine Books, 1958 ISBN 0-345-32425-0
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram of January 16 1917 and its Cryptographic Background'', by William F. Friedman and Charles J. Mendelsohn. War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Washington, GPO, 1938
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram'', by Simon Singh
★ 'Telegram that brought US into Great War is Found' London Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2005. Article by Ben Fenton
★ ''Reichstagsrede Zimmermanns (Auszug), 30. März 1917'', in: Quellen zu den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen, by Reiner Pommerin, ed., Vol. 1, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996, p. 213-216
★ ''The Secret War in Mexico'' by Friedrich Katz, 1981, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-42589-4
★ ''The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page'' by Burton J. Hendrick, July 2003, Kessinger Publishing, ISBN 0-7661-7106-X
★ Cornelius, John. ''The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note'', The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), Aug./Sept. 1997.
★ Cornelius, John. ''Answering Critics of the Theory that Balfour Declaration Was Payoff for Zionist Services in WWI'', WRMEA, Sept. 1998.
★ Cornelius, John. ''Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, and Why America Entered the Great War'', WRMEA, Oct./Nov. 1999.
★ Bernstorff, Count Johann Heinrich. ''My Three Years in America'', New York: Scribner’s, 1920. pp.310-311.
★ Dugdale, Mrs. Edgar. ''The Balfour Declaration-Origins and Background'', London: The Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1940, pp. 15-16.
★ Weizmann, Chaim. ''Trial and Error'', Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1949, p. 152.
★ Weizmann, p. 143.
★ Rothschild, Miriam. ''Dear Lord Rothschild'', Glenside, PA.: Balaban Publishers, 1983, p. 341.
★ Dugdale, Blanche. ''Arthur James Balfour'', NY, Putnam’s, 1937, Vol. II, pp. 127-9.
★ Hendrick, Burton J. ''The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page'', NY, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925, Vol. III, Chap 14.
★ Howe, Russell Warren. WRMEA, Letters to the Editor, Jan./Feb. 1998, p. 110.
★ Link, Arthur S., ''Wilson, Vol. 5'', Princeton, NJ, 1965, Princeton University Press, pp 433-5.
★ Dugdale, Arthur ''James Balfour, Vol. II. ''
★ Friedman, William F. and Mendelsohn, Charles J. ''The Zimmermann Telegram of January 16, 1917 and its Cryptographic Background'', Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1994.
★ Tuchman, Barbara W. ''The Zimmermann Telegram''. New York: Ballantine Books, 1958, 1966.
★ Kahn, David. ''The Codebreakers''. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 1996
★ Antonius, George. ''The Arab Awakening''. Philadelphia, NY: Lippencott, 1939.
★ Failed Diplomacy: the Zimmermann Telegram
★ The life and death of Charles Jastrow Mendelsohn and the breaking of the code.
The telegram instructed the ambassador to approach the Mexican government with a proposal to form a military alliance against the United States. It promised Mexico land in the United States if they were to help. It was intercepted and decoded by the British, and its contents hastened the entry of the United States into World War I.
The Zimmermann telegram as it was sent from Washington to Mexico
Telegram
Zimmermann's message was
On the first of February, we intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavour to keep the United States of America neutral.
In the event of this not succeeding, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and make peace together. We shall give generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The details of settlement are left to you.
You are instructed to inform the President [of Mexico] of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence with this plan; at the same time, offer to mediate between Japan and ourselves.
Please call to the attention of the President that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England to make peace in a few months.
Mexican response
A general assigned by Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assessed the feasibility of a Mexican takeover of their former provinces and came to the conclusion that it would not be possible or even desirable for the following reasons:
★ Attempting to re-take their former provinces would have meant certain war with the more powerful U.S.
★ No matter how "generous" it was, Germany's "financial support" would have been worthless because Mexico would have been in no position to use it to acquire arms and other military hardware, or ammunition and other war supplies since the U.S. was the only sizable arms manufacturer in the Americas. The Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic sea lanes, thus Germany would not possibly have had the capability to supply any quantity of what would have been needed for seizure and defence of the territory.
★ Even if Mexico had the military means to re-take the territory she would have had severe difficulty accommodating and/or pacifying the large English-speaking population.
Carranza formally declined Zimmermann's proposals on April 14, by which time the U.S. had declared war on Germany.
British interception
The telegram as decrypted by the British Naval Intelligence codebreakers. The word Arizona was not in the German codebook and was therefore split into smaller parts.
The telegram was intercepted and decrypted enough to get the gist of it by codebreakers Nigel de Grey, William Montgomery and Admiral William R. Hall of the British Naval Intelligence unit, Room 40. This was made possible because the code the Foreign Office used (0075) had been partially cryptanalyzed using, among other techniques, captured plaintext messages and a codebook for an earlier version of the cipher captured from Wilhelm Wassmuss, a German agent working in the Middle East.
The British government, which wanted to expose the incriminating telegram, faced a dilemma: if it boldly produced the actual telegram, the Germans would know that their code had been broken; and if it did not, it would lose a promising opportunity to draw the United States into World War I — the message was sent during a period when anti-German feeling in the United States was running particularly high, following the death of 128 U.S. travelers on British ships by German submarine attacks.
There was a further problem — they could not simply confidentially show it to the United States government. Because of its importance, the message had been sent from Berlin to the German ambassador in Washington, Johann von Bernstorff, for onward transmission to their ambassador in Mexico, von Eckardt, by three separate routes. The British had obtained it from just one of these — the Americans had given Germany access to their private diplomatic telegraph in an effort to encourage President Woodrow Wilson's peace initiative.
The Germans were not afraid of using it because the messages were encrypted, because as a matter of principle the United States did not at that time read other countries' diplomatic correspondence and because, unlike Britain, the U.S. did not have any code-breaking capability. The telegraph cable went from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to Copenhagen and then via submarine cable to the United States via Britain (where it was monitored). For the British to reveal the source of the telegram to the United States would have meant also admitting to the American government that they had tapped U.S. diplomatic communications.
The cable to Washington was in code 7500, a newer, more difficult code. However, the embassy in Mexico did not yet have this code, so the German embassy in Washington would have to re-transmit the message in an older code, 13040 or 13042, both better known to the British.
British solution
The telegram, completely decrypted and translated.
The British government guessed that the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. would send the message on to the embassy in Mexico via the commercial telegraph system, and therefore a copy would exist in the public telegraph office in Mexico City. If they could get a copy, they could pass it on to the United States government stating that they had discovered it through espionage in Mexico. Therefore, they contacted a British agent in Mexico, known only as Mr. H., who bribed an employee of the commercial telegraph company to obtain a copy of the message. In his autobiography, Sir Thomas Hohler, the British ambassador in Mexico at that time, claims to have been Mr. H. To the delight of the British code breakers, the message had been sent from the German embassy in Washington to Mexico using the older cypher in the Wassmuss codebook and could therefore be completely decrypted.
The telegram was delivered by Admiral Hall to the British Foreign Minister, Arthur James Balfour, who in turn contacted the U.S. ambassador in Britain, Walter Page, and delivered the telegram to him on February 23. Two days later he relayed it to President Woodrow Wilson.
Effect in the United States
Popular sentiment in the United States at that time was anti-Mexican as well as anti-German. General John J. Pershing had long been chasing the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had carried out several cross-border raids. This was costly for the U.S. government, and Wilson was considering discontinuing the search until new elections were held in Mexico, a new government installed, and a new constitution promulgated (a constitutional convention, which would adopt the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, was underway at the time). News of the telegram exacerbated tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, since such a treaty, if in place, would have hindered the election of a new Mexican government more friendly to American interests.
Initially the telegram was widely believed to be a forgery by British intelligence designed to bring America into the war on the Allied side. This opinion, which was not restricted to pacifist and pro-German lobbies, was bolstered by German and Mexican diplomats, and by some American papers, especially the Hearst press empire. However, on March 29 1917, Arthur Zimmermann gave a speech confirming the text of the telegram, and so ended speculation on its authenticity.
Also, a number of ships (eg the RMS Lusitania) had been torpedoed with heavy loss of life. On April 2, President Wilson asked Congress to agree to declare war on Germany, and on April 6 Congress complied. The United States had entered World War I on the Allied side.
United States declares war against Germany
The telegram began by stating:
"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".Immediately after its publication there was an outpouring of anti-German sentiment. Wilson responded by asking Congress to arm American ships so that they could fend off potential German submarine attacks. A few days later, on April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. On April 6, 1917, Congress complied, bringing the United States into World War I.
German U-boats had previously attacked U.S. ships near the British Isles, so the telegram was not the only cause of U.S. entry into the war. It was perceived as especially perfidious that the telegram was first transferred from the U.S. embassy in Berlin to the German embassy in Washington before being passed on to Mexico. Once the American public believed the telegram to be real, it became all but inevitable that the U.S. would join the Great War.
Historical post-script
In October 2005, it was revealed that an original typescript of the deciphered Zimmermann Telegram had recently been discovered by an unnamed historian who was researching and preparing an official history of the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The document is believed to be the actual telegram shown to the American ambassador in London in 1917. Marked in Admiral Hall's handwriting at the top of the document are the words: "This is the one handed to Dr Page and exposed by the President." Since many of the secret documents in this incident had been destroyed, it had previously been assumed that the original typed "decrypt" was gone forever. However, after discovery of this document, the GCHQ official historian said: "I believe that this is indeed the same document that Balfour handed to Page."
See also
★ Arthur Zimmermann
References
★ ''Room 40: British Naval Intelligence, 1914—1918'', by Patrick Beesly. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982 ISBN 0-15-178634-8
★ ''On Secret Service East of Constantinople'', by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-19-280230-5
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram'', by Barbara W. Tuchman, Ballantine Books, 1958 ISBN 0-345-32425-0
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram of January 16 1917 and its Cryptographic Background'', by William F. Friedman and Charles J. Mendelsohn. War Department, Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Washington, GPO, 1938
★ ''The Zimmermann Telegram'', by Simon Singh
★ 'Telegram that brought US into Great War is Found' London Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2005. Article by Ben Fenton
★ ''Reichstagsrede Zimmermanns (Auszug), 30. März 1917'', in: Quellen zu den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen, by Reiner Pommerin, ed., Vol. 1, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996, p. 213-216
Further reading
★ ''The Secret War in Mexico'' by Friedrich Katz, 1981, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-42589-4
★ ''The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page'' by Burton J. Hendrick, July 2003, Kessinger Publishing, ISBN 0-7661-7106-X
★ Cornelius, John. ''The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note'', The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), Aug./Sept. 1997.
★ Cornelius, John. ''Answering Critics of the Theory that Balfour Declaration Was Payoff for Zionist Services in WWI'', WRMEA, Sept. 1998.
★ Cornelius, John. ''Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, and Why America Entered the Great War'', WRMEA, Oct./Nov. 1999.
★ Bernstorff, Count Johann Heinrich. ''My Three Years in America'', New York: Scribner’s, 1920. pp.310-311.
★ Dugdale, Mrs. Edgar. ''The Balfour Declaration-Origins and Background'', London: The Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1940, pp. 15-16.
★ Weizmann, Chaim. ''Trial and Error'', Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1949, p. 152.
★ Weizmann, p. 143.
★ Rothschild, Miriam. ''Dear Lord Rothschild'', Glenside, PA.: Balaban Publishers, 1983, p. 341.
★ Dugdale, Blanche. ''Arthur James Balfour'', NY, Putnam’s, 1937, Vol. II, pp. 127-9.
★ Hendrick, Burton J. ''The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page'', NY, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925, Vol. III, Chap 14.
★ Howe, Russell Warren. WRMEA, Letters to the Editor, Jan./Feb. 1998, p. 110.
★ Link, Arthur S., ''Wilson, Vol. 5'', Princeton, NJ, 1965, Princeton University Press, pp 433-5.
★ Dugdale, Arthur ''James Balfour, Vol. II. ''
★ Friedman, William F. and Mendelsohn, Charles J. ''The Zimmermann Telegram of January 16, 1917 and its Cryptographic Background'', Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1994.
★ Tuchman, Barbara W. ''The Zimmermann Telegram''. New York: Ballantine Books, 1958, 1966.
★ Kahn, David. ''The Codebreakers''. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 1996
★ Antonius, George. ''The Arab Awakening''. Philadelphia, NY: Lippencott, 1939.
External links
★ Failed Diplomacy: the Zimmermann Telegram
★ The life and death of Charles Jastrow Mendelsohn and the breaking of the code.
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