Salzburg negotiations

The Salzburg negotiations were bilateral diplomatic talks designed to precisely and rigorously define the practical details of the economic rapprochement between the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the German Reich.

At his meeting with Emperor Wilhelm II in Spa on May 12, 1918, Charles I and his minister Stephan Burián von Rajecz were forced to accept the political and economic subjection of the Habsburg Empire to the Reich.

[note 2][3] At the meeting on May 12, German and Austro-Hungarian negotiators agreed to set up technical commissions to put into practice the economic and commercial provisions of the agreement in principle between the emperors.

[7] Finally, the joint army had to deal with the return of prisoners of war captured by the Russians: exhausted, they often refused to submit and organized themselves into maquis, undermining the Austrian and Hungarian governments' control over the territory of the dual monarchy.

[8] Finally, on June 9, 1918, a few weeks before the opening of German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, the Austro-Hungarian army launched its last major offensive of the conflict, on the Piave front, but, faced with a determined defense, suffered a serious defeat, resulting in the loss of 160,000 soldiers, killed, wounded or missing, and the last reserves of equipment of the dual monarchy.

The main participants in German politics wanted to prepare for the end of the conflict, in the best commercial interests of the Reich, in these negotiations, as in all the economic policies they pursued in the spring and summer of 1918.

For example, Hans Karl von Stein, backed by the Prussian and Reich economic ministries and Reichsbank President Rudolf Havenstein, was hostile to any plans for a customs union between the two empires, preferring to tie Austria-Hungary in with a long-term trade treaty.

At the end of the conflict, moreover, the Germans found themselves in the same situation as after the Bosnian crisis, obliged both to keep the Dual Monarchy, the Reich's only reliable ally, in their alliance, and to control it closely.

The fate of arms was unfavorable to the Central Powers, despite the ability of the German-Austrian-Hungarian armies to achieve partial victories over Allied troops, but these successes at the beginning of the first half of 1918 had no immediate effect.

[20] Indeed, during October 1918, Emperor and King Charles and the joint foreign minister of the dual monarchy, Stephan Burián von Rajecz, engaged in negotiations with the Allies for a separate armistice, tried desperately to put an end to Austro-Hungarian participation in the conflict.

West German historian Fritz Fischer emphasizes the political, economic and commercial continuities between these negotiations and the ones between the Republican and later Hitler's Reich, on the one hand, and the successor states to the dual monarchy, notably Austria and Hungary, on the other.