Guardians and Go-betweens: Germany’s Military Plenipotentiaries during the First World War

This essay looks at the activities of the Bavarian, Saxon, and Württemberg military plenipotentiaries stationed at German General Headquarters during the First World War. Prior to unification, Germany’s most powerful monarchs signed a series of agreements that created a contingent-based army. Managing relations between the army’s contingents thereafter became the responsibility of the military plenipotentiaries. Examining their activities reveals that the wartime German army, despite the centralizing pressures created by a multi-front war of attrition, remained a federal institution in which sub-national interests could at times be marginalized, but never altogether ignored. Germany’s military federalism remained alive and well, at least until the empire’s “de-crowning” in the autumn of 1918.