While in economic and military terms the new Poland would be bound tightly and irrevocably to Germany, in the social and cultural sphere it would be given the freedom ‘to express itself nationally’.24 As Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had put it in 1916, ‘the times are no longer for annexation, but rather for the cuddling up [sic] of smaller state-entities to the great powers, to mutual benefit’.25 If only Germany were willing to embrace self-determination and domestic reform, Eduard David, a leading Social Democrat, explained to General Max Hoffmann at his headquarters in Brest, it could exceed
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