[1] After the Reichstag and the High Command (OHL) forced the resignation of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg on 10 or 13 July 1917,[2] Michaelis emerged as the surprise candidate for both chancellor of Germany and Minister President of Prussia.

[citation needed] He had visited the OHL on several occasions in his position as Undersecretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Finance and Commissioner of Food Supplies, when his brusque manner had made a good impression on staff officers present.

[8] The inability of the government to impose controls on rising prices, demands for wage increases, strikes, and mounting economic chaos, drove the "political fixers" towards a military takeover of the reins of power.

[citation needed] The army perceived the majority parties as posing a threat to stability in Germany in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution had brought an end to the Russian war effort.

Knowing Austro-Hungary was bankrupted by the fighting, he understood their demand to sue for peace; but the military was unwilling to relinquish any power to the civilian authorities.

The OHL hoped to destabilize Ukraine and the Baltic States so as to bring Russia's ailing Tsarist regime to the negotiations, while guaranteeing Germanic frontiers, in more than Michaelis' status quo ante bellum.

Alsace's connectivity was an extension of a war aims policy via Aachen into the Belgian occupied zones and across neutral Netherlands, as had already been achieved in Luxembourg.

German industrialists, including Thyssen and Krupp, wanted a guaranteed supply of coal from France and return to an answer to the Belgian Question, which monopolised the thinkers on the Western Front.

[11] On 29 August, it was in light of the Longwy-Briey Plan railway carriage meeting near Aachen that he was given "an impossible task" of perpetuating the war for "another ten years".

Through the vehicle of Mitteleuropa he sought to enable the Austrian economy to withstand the peace conditions he knew would be imposed on the German customs union.

[1] He remained in this position until 1 November 1917, when he was forced to resign after coming under fire for refusing to commit himself by endorsing a resolution passed by the Reichstag favouring peace without annexation or indemnities.

Michaelis worked in the fields of economic lobbying, in student organizations, in the synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and became a member of the monarchist/national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP).