What did Kaiser Wilheim II hope to get out of winning WWI?

by DeismAccountant

More land? More respect for Germany? I know the Anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany wasn't as fervent yet. Which begs the question of what The German Empire would have demanded if it won, along with other after effects.

elos_

The war was, in short, fought for colonies and a perceived German security threat; that is, encirclement by 'Great Powers'. While the Septemberprogramme is oft cited, even by yours truly, it can not be taken as a statement of intent per se but rather as a 'shopping list' of things they'd like to have in an ultimate best case scenario.

So, to make this abundantly clear, what did Germany as a whole want from WWI?

  1. Colonial holdings. While Germany was highly industrious, only second to America who held 1/3rd of the worlds industrial output at the time, it had little resources their way of food or raw goods to put through those factories. A continuous state across Central Africa would be the most likely of places they looked. More specifically that would have meant Rhodesia, Bechuana Land, French Equatorial Africa, along with likely the Congo and potentially Portguese Africa. With this Germany would shoot up to the African colonial powerhouse and, with a victorious Ottoman Empire being propped up, would hopefully create continuous friendly territory from Berlin to Southwest Africa.

  2. Deconstruction of either France or Russia, or both. Germany feared "encirclement" of Great Powers and to alleviate this the hope was to crush France and to isolate it. This also meant crushing Russia. While this is more vague it still gives a good idea of what would have been done; France completely demilitarized and hit with crushing economic debt. With hopes that everyone besides Germany would basically have been devastated on the home front from war Germany would rise as the de facto economic leader and rebuilder of Europe and thus bring everyone under her wing. Economic and military dominance was the name of the game. Destabilizing Russia via revolution and seizing the Baltics, Poland, along with creating the Ukraine falls in line with this mode of thinking.

jonewer

In the east, we are aware of what the Germans would have demanded because they were victorious on that front and their territorial demands were set out in the treaty of Brest Litovsk.

This treaty effectively annexed, colonised, or controlled an area of land stretching roughly from Riga in the north to Rostov in the South, thus encompassing the whole of Poland, most of Lithuania and just about the entirety of Ukraine.

We aren't so sure about what the final demands would have been in the west, had they won there as well, but from the Septemberprogram - a proposal put forward a few weeks into the war - that demands would may have included Luxembourg and Belgium, along with Briey in France and a coastal area as far a bologne being annexed. The Netherlands were to be encouraged but not made to feel coerced into the German sphere of influence.

France would be saddled with a crippling burden of reparations, prohibited from trading with the British Empire and made economically dependent on Germany.

Both French and Belgium colonies in Africa would be annexed to form a continuous German colony in central Africa.

A European economic association would be created (Mitteleuropa) to form a trading block whose members would be nominally independent but ultimately under German control.

That's a fair summary.