As Bethmann Hollweg’s diplomatic advisor, Kurt Riezler, noted in his diary, ‘the fate that hangs over everything suggests the thought that Wilson may in fact have intended to pressure the others and had the means to do so and that that would have been 100 times better than the U Boat war’.32 For nationalist liberals such as the great sociologist Max Weber, one of the most penetrating political commentators of the day, Bethmann Hollweg’s willingness to allow the military’s technical arguments to override his own better judgement was damning evidence of the lasting damage done to Germany’s
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