ABSTRACT
From the Dogger Bank incident on 22 October 1904 to the signing of the General Act of Algeciras on 7 April 1906, the possibility of war loomed large in the mind of the German leadership. Operations in the Baltic were ignored altogether in a memorandum of 27 November that was prepared by Waldemar Vollerthun, head of the information department of the Imperial Naval Office, and annotated by Alfred von Tirpitz. In the spring of 1906 the Bavarian military attaché in Berlin, Gebsattel, reported that the military leadership, including Einem, regarded war with France as inevitable: “The war will and must come, and indeed hardly later than in twelve or eighteen months. The task of German diplomacy is to delay it until we are entirely prepared militarily.” The Morocco question thus resulted in a major diplomatic defeat for Germany.
