Zimmermann Telegram

The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note or

Zimmerman Cable) was a secret diplomatic communication
issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that
proposed a military alliance between the German Empire and
Mexico if the United States entered World War I against
Germany. With Germany's aid, Mexico would recover Texas,
Arizona, and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by
British intelligence.

Revelation of the contents enraged Americans, especially after

German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur
Zimmermann publicly admitted on March 3 that the telegram
was genuine. It helped to generate support for the American
declaration of war on Germany in April 1917.[1]

The decryption has been described as the most significant

The Zimmermann Telegram as it
intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I[2] and it
was sent from Washington, DC, to
marked one of the earliest occasions on which a piece of signal
Ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt,
intelligence influenced world events.[3] the German ambassador to Mexico.

Content
The message came in the form of a coded telegram dispatched
by Arthur Zimmermann, the Staatssekretär (a top-level civil
servant, second only to their respective minister) in the Foreign
Office of the German Empire on January 17, 1917. The message
was sent to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von
Eckardt.[4] Zimmermann sent the telegram in anticipation of
the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany
on February 1, which the German government presumed would
almost certainly lead to war with the United States. The
telegram instructed Eckardt that if the United States appeared
certain to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican
government with a proposal for military alliance with funding Mexico in 1916 (in dark green);
from Germany. The decoded telegram was as follows:[5] territory promised to Mexico in the
Zimmermann telegram (in light
Original (German): green); and the pre-1836 original
Mexican territory (red line)

Wir beabsichtigen, am ersten Februar

uneingeschränkten U-Boot-Krieg zu beginnen. Es
wird versucht werden, Amerika trotzdem neutral zu
halten. Für den Fall, dass dies nicht gelingen sollte,
schlagen wir Mexiko auf folgender Grundlage
Bündnis vor. Gemeinsame Kriegführung.
 Gemeinsamer Friedensschluss. Reichlich finanzielle
Unterstützung und Einverständnis unsererseits, dass
Mexiko in Texas, Neu Mexiko, Arizona früher verlorenes
Gebiet zurückerobert. Regelung im einzelnen Euer
Hochwohlgeborenen überlassen. Euer
Hochwohlgeborenen wollen Vorstehendes Präsidenten
streng geheim eröffnen, sobald Kriegsausbruch mit
Vereinigten Staaten feststeht, und Anregung hinzufügen,
Japan von sich aus zu sofortigem Beitritt einzuladen und
gleichzeitig zwischen uns und Japan zu vermitteln. Bitte
Präsidenten darauf hinweisen, dass rücksichtslose
Anwendung unserer U-Boote jetzt Aussicht bietet, England
in wenigen Monaten zum Frieden zu zwingen. Empfang
bestätigen. Zimmermann[6]
Arthur Zimmermann

Translated:

We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall

endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of
this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make
war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding
on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and
Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the
above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is
certain, and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to
immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.
Please call the President's attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our
submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make
peace.
Signed, Zimmermann

History

Previous German efforts to promote war

Germany had long sought to incite a war between Mexico and the United States, which would have
tied down American forces and slowed the export of American arms to the Allies.[7] The Germans
had aided in arming Mexico, as shown by the 1914 Ypiranga incident.[8] German Naval Intelligence
officer Franz von Rintelen had attempted to incite a war between Mexico and the United States in
1915, giving Victoriano Huerta $12 million for that purpose.[9] The German saboteur Lothar
Witzke, who was based in Mexico City, claimed to be responsible for the March 1917 munitions
explosion at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in the San Francisco Bay Area,[10] and was possibly
responsible for the July 1916 Black Tom explosion in New Jersey.

The failure of United States troops to capture Pancho Villa in 1916 and the movement of President
Carranza in favor of Germany emboldened the Germans to send the Zimmermann note.[11]
The German provocations were partially successful. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the
military invasion of Veracruz in 1914 in the context of the Ypiranga incident and against the advice
of the British government.[12] War was prevented thanks to the Niagara Falls peace conference
organized by the ABC nations, but the occupation was a decisive factor in Mexican neutrality in
World War I.[13] Mexico refused to participate in the embargo against Germany and granted full
guarantees to the German companies for keeping their operations open, specifically in Mexico
City.[14]

German motivations

The Zimmerman Telegram was part of an effort carried out by

the Germans to postpone the transportation of supplies and
other war materials from the United States to the Allies, which
were at war against Germany.[16] The main purpose of the
telegram was to make the Mexican government declare war on
the United States in hopes of tying down American forces and
slowing the export of American arms.[17] The German High
Command believed that it could defeat the British and French
on the Western Front and strangle Britain with unrestricted
submarine warfare before American forces could be trained The Mexican Telegraph Company
and shipped to Europe in sufficient numbers to aid the Allies. building in Galveston through which
The Germans were encouraged by their successes on the the Zimmerman Telegram was
Eastern Front to believe that they could divert large numbers of relayed[15]
troops to the Western Front in support of their goals.

Mexican response
Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of
the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany.[18] The generals
concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:

▪ Mexico was in the midst of a civil war, and Carranza's position was far from secure. (Carranza
himself was later assassinated in 1920.) Picking a fight with the United States would have
prompted the U.S. to support one of his rivals.
▪ The United States was far stronger militarily than Mexico was. Even if Mexico's military forces
had been completely united and loyal to a single government, no serious scenario existed
under which it could have invaded and won a war against the United States. Indeed, much of
Mexico's military hardware of 1917 reflected only modest upgrades since the Mexican-
American War 70 years before, which the U.S. had won.
▪ The German government's promises of "generous financial support" were very unreliable. It
had already informed Carranza in June 1916 that it could not provide the necessary gold
needed to stock a completely independent Mexican national bank.[19] Even if Mexico received
financial support, it would still need to purchase arms, ammunition, and other needed war
supplies from the ABC nations (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), which would strain relations with
them, as explained below.
▪ Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United
States and to reclaim the territories in question, it would have had severe difficulty conquering
 and pacifying a large English-speaking population which had long enjoyed self-government and
was better supplied with arms than were most other civilian populations.[20]
▪ Other foreign relations were at stake. The ABC nations had organized the Niagara Falls peace
conference in 1914 to avoid a full-scale war between the United States and Mexico over the
United States occupation of Veracruz. Mexico entering a war against the United States would
strain relations with those nations.

The Carranza government was recognized de jure by the United States on August 31, 1917, as a
direct consequence of the Zimmermann Telegram to ensure Mexican neutrality during World War
I.[21][22] After the military invasion of Veracruz in 1914, Mexico did not participate in any military
excursion with the United States in World War I.[13] That ensured that Mexican neutrality was the
best outcome that the United States could hope for even if it allowed German companies to keep
their operations in Mexico open.[14]

British interception
Zimmermann's office sent the telegram to the German embassy in the
United States for retransmission to Eckardt in Mexico. It has
traditionally been understood that the telegram was sent over three
routes. It went by radio, and passed via telegraph cable inside
messages sent by diplomats of two neutral countries (the United
States and Sweden).

Direct telegraph transmission of the telegram was impossible because

the British had cut the German international cables at the outbreak of
war. However, Germany could communicate wirelessly through the
Telefunken plant, operating under Atlantic Communication Company
in West Sayville, New York, where the telegram was relayed to the
Mexican Consulate. Ironically, the station was under the control of the
US Navy, which operated it for Atlantic Communication Company, the
American subsidiary of the German entity.

A portion of the Telegram
as decrypted by British
Naval Intelligence
codebreakers. Since the
word Arizona was not in the
German codebook, it had to
be split into phonetic
syllables.
Also, the United States allowed limited use of its diplomatic cables
with Germany to communicate with its ambassador in Washington.
This privilege was supposed to be used for messages connected with
Wilson's peace proposals. The Swedish diplomatic message holding
the Zimmerman Telegram went from Stockholm to Buenos Aires over
British submarine telegraph cables, and then moved from Buenos
Aires to Mexico over the cable network of a United States company.
All traffic passing through British hands came to British intelligence,
particularly to the codebreakers and analysts in Room 40 at the
Admiralty.[23]

After the Germans' telegraph cables had been cut, the German Foreign
Office appealed to the United States for use of their diplomatic telegraphic messages for peace
messages. President Wilson agreed in the belief both that such co-operation would sustain
continued good relations with Germany and that more efficient German–American diplomacy
could assist Wilson's goal of a negotiated end to the war. The Germans handed in messages to the
American embassy in Berlin, which were relayed to the embassy in Denmark and then to the
United States by American telegraph operators. The United States placed conditions on German
usage, most notably that all messages had to be in cleartext (uncoded). However, Wilson later
reversed the order and relaxed the wireless rules to allow coded messages to be sent.[24] The
Germans assumed that this route was secure and so used it extensively.[23]

However, that put German diplomats in a precarious situation since they relied on the United
States to transmit Zimmermann's note to its final destination, but the message's unencrypted
contents would be deeply alarming to the Americans. The Germans persuaded US Ambassador
James W. Gerard to accept it in coded form, and it was transmitted on January 16, 1917.[23]

In Room 40, Nigel de Grey had partially decoded the telegram by the next day.[25] By 1917, the
diplomatic code 13040 had been in use for many years. Since there had been ample time for Room
40 to reconstruct the code cryptanalytically, it was readable to a fair degree. Room 40 had obtained
German cryptographic documents, including the diplomatic code 3512 (captured during the
Mesopotamian campaign), which was a later updated code that was similar to but not really related
to code 13040, and naval code SKM (Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine), which was useless for
decoding the Zimmermann Telegram but valuable to decode naval traffic, which had been retrieved
from the wrecked cruiser SMS Magdeburg by the Russians, who passed it to the British.[26]

Disclosure of the telegram would sway American public opinion against Germany if the British
could convince the Americans that the text was genuine, but the Room 40 chief William Reginald
Hall was reluctant to let it out because the disclosure would expose the German codes broken in
Room 40 and British eavesdropping on United States diplomatic traffic. Hall waited three weeks
during which de Grey and cryptographer William Montgomery completed the decryption. On
February 1, Germany announced resumption of "unrestricted" submarine warfare, an act that led
the United States to break off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3.[23]

Hall passed the telegram to the British Foreign Office on February 5

but still warned against releasing it. Meanwhile, the British discussed
possible cover stories to explain to the Americans how they obtained
the coded text of the telegram and to explain how they obtained the
cleartext of the telegram without letting anyone know that the codes
had been broken. Furthermore, the British needed to find a way to
convince the Americans the message was not a forgery.[27]

For the first story, the British obtained the coded text of the telegram
from the Mexican commercial telegraph office. The British knew that
since the German embassy in Washington would relay the message by
commercial telegraph, the Mexican telegraph office would have the The Telegram, completely
coded text. "Mr. H", a British agent in Mexico, bribed an employee of decrypted and translated
the commercial telegraph company for a copy of the message. Sir
Thomas Hohler, the British ambassador in Mexico, later claimed to
have been "Mr. H" or at least to have been involved with the interception in his autobiography.[28]
The coded text could then be shown to the Americans without embarrassment.

Moreover, the retransmission was encoded with the older code 13040 and so by mid-February, the
British had the complete text and the ability to release the telegram without revealing the extent to
which the latest German codes had been broken. (At worst, the Germans might have realized that
the 13040 code had been compromised, but that was a risk worth taking against the possibility of
United States entry into the war.) Finally, since copies of the 13040 code text would also have been
deposited in the records of the American commercial telegraph company, the British had the
ability to prove the authenticity of the message to the American government.[3]

As a cover story, the British could publicly claim that their agents had stolen the telegram's
decoded text in Mexico. Privately, the British needed to give the Americans the 13040 code so that
the American government could verify the authenticity of the message independently with their
own commercial telegraphic records, but the Americans agreed to back the official cover story. The
German Foreign Office refused to consider that their codes could have been broken but sent
Eckardt on a witch hunt for a traitor in the embassy in Mexico. Eckardt indignantly rejected those
accusations, and the Foreign Office eventually declared the embassy exonerated.[23]

Use

On February 19, Hall showed the telegram to Edward Bell, the secretary of the American Embassy
in Britain. Bell was at first incredulous and thought that it was a forgery. Once Bell was convinced
the message was genuine, he became enraged. On February 20, Hall informally sent a copy to US
Ambassador Walter Hines Page. On February 23, Page met with British Foreign Minister Arthur
Balfour and was given the codetext, the message in German, and the English translation. The
British had obtained a further copy in Mexico City, and Balfour could obscure the real source with
the half-truth that it had been "bought in Mexico".[29] Page then reported the story to Wilson on
February 24, 1917, including details to be verified from telegraph-company files in the United
States. Wilson felt "much indignation" toward the Germans and wanted to publish the
Zimmermann Telegraph immediately after he had received it from the British, but he delayed until
March 1, 1917.[30]

U.S. response
Many Americans then held anti-Mexican as well as anti-
German views. Mexicans had a considerable amount of anti-
American sentiment in return, some of which was caused by
the American occupation of Veracruz.[31] General John J.
Pershing had long been chasing the revolutionary Pancho Villa
for raiding into American territory and carried out several
cross-border expeditions. News of the telegram further
inflamed tensions between the United States and Mexico.

However, many Americans, particularly those with German or

Irish ancestry, wished to avoid the conflict in Europe. Since the
public had been told falsely that the telegram had been stolen 1917 political cartoon about the
in a decoded form in Mexico, the message was at first widely Zimmermann Telegram
believed to be an elaborate forgery created by British
intelligence. That belief, which was not restricted to pacifist
and pro-German lobbies, was promoted by German and Mexican diplomats alongside some
antiwar American newspapers, especially those of the Hearst press empire.

On February 1, 1917, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships in the
Atlantic bearing the American flag, both passenger and merchant ships. Two ships were sunk in
 February, and most American shipping companies held their
ships in port. Besides the highly-provocative war proposal to
Mexico, the telegram also mentioned "ruthless employment of
our submarines". Public opinion demanded action. Wilson had
refused to assign US Navy crews and guns to the merchant
ships, but once the Zimmermann note was public, Wilson
called for arming the merchant ships although antiwar
members of the US Senate blocked his proposal.[32]

The Wilson administration nevertheless remained with a

dilemma. Evidence the United States had been provided
confidentially by the British informed Wilson that the message
was genuine, but he could not make the evidence public
"Exploding in his Hands" without compromising the British codebreaking operation.
This problem however, was resolved when any doubts as to the
authenticity of the telegram were removed by Zimmermann
himself. At a press conference on March 3, 1917, he told an American journalist, "I cannot deny it.
It is true." Then, on March 29, 1917, Zimmermann gave a speech in the Reichstag in which he
admitted that the telegram was genuine.[33] Zimmermann hoped that Americans would
understand that the idea was that Germany would not fund Mexico's war with the United States
unless the Americans joined World War I.

On April 6, 1917, Congress voted to declare war on Germany. Wilson had asked Congress for "a war
to end all wars" that would "make the world safe for democracy".[34]

Wilson considered another military invasion of Veracruz and Tampico in 1917–1918,[35][36] to

pacify the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Tampico oil fields and to ensure their continued production
during the civil war,[36][37] but this time, Mexican President Venustiano Carranza, recently
installed, threatened to destroy the oil fields if the US Marines landed there.[38][39]

Japanese response
The Japanese government, another nation mentioned in the Zimmerman Telegram, was already
involved in World War I, on the side of the Allies against Germany. The government later released
a statement that Japan was not interested in changing sides and in attacking America.[40]

Autograph discovery
In October 2005, it was reported that an original typescript of the decoded Zimmermann Telegram
had recently been discovered by an unnamed historian who was researching and preparing a
history of the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The
document is believed to be the actual telegram shown to the American ambassador in London in
1917. Marked in Admiral Hall's handwriting at the top of the document are the words: "This is the
one handed to Dr Page and exposed by the President." Since many of the secret documents in this
incident had been destroyed, it had previously been assumed that the original typed "decrypt" was
gone forever. However, after the discovery of this document, the GCHQ official historian said: "I
believe that this is indeed the same document that Balfour handed to Page."[41]
In 2006 there were six "closed" files on the Zimmermann Telegram which had not been
declassified held by The National Archives at Kew (formerly the PRO).[42]

See also
▪ Imperial German plans for the invasion of the United States
World War I portal
▪ Zinoviev letter

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▪ Hopkirk, Peter (1994). On Secret Service East of Constantinople. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-280230-5.
▪ Massie, Robert K. (2007). Castles of Steel. London: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-09-952378-9.
▪ Pommerin, Reiner (1996). "Reichstagsrede Zimmermanns (Auszug), 30. März 1917". 'Quellen
zu den deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft
Vol. 1. pp. 213–16.
▪ Singh, Simon (September 8, 1999). "The Zimmermann Telegraph" (https://web.archive.org/web
/20140814173627/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/historical-notes-184-kings-road-ti
ghnabruaich-1117153.html). The Independent. Independent Print Limited. Archived from the
original (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/historical-notes-184-kings-road-tighnabru
aich-1117153.html) on August 14, 2014. Retrieved August 14, 2014. Alt URL (http://simonsing
h.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/the-zimmermann-telegram/)

Further reading
▪ Bernstorff, Count Johann Heinrich (1920). My Three Years in America. New York: Scribner.
pp. 310–11.
▪ Bridges, Lamar W. (1969). "Zimmermann telegram: reaction of Southern, Southwestern
newspapers". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 46 (1): 81–86.
doi:10.1177/107769906904600112 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F107769906904600112).
S2CID 144936173 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144936173).
▪ Dugdale, Blanche (1937). Arthur James Balfour. New York: Putnam. Vol. II, pp. 127–129.
▪ Hendrick, Burton J. (2003) [1925]. The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page. Kessinger
Publishing. ISBN 0-7661-7106-X.
▪ Kahn, David (1996) [1967]. The Codebreakers. New York: Macmillan.
▪ Tuchman, Barbara W. The Zimmermann Telegram (1958) online (https://archive.org/details/zim
mermanntelegr00barb_0) best-seller for the lay reader by the noted historian
▪ Winkler, Jonathan Reed (2008). Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in
World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02839-5.