The Ancona crisis brought the Foreign Office new and unexpected support.  Hungary was opposed to a dispute with America.  In the first place, Hungarians are more of a liberty loving people than the Germans, and public opinion in Hungary rules the country.  While there is a strong Government press, which is loyal to the Tisza party, there is an equally powerful opposition press which follows the leadership of Count Albert Apponyi and Count Julius Andrassy, the two most popular men in Hungarian public life.  Apponyi told me on one occasion that while the Government was controlled by Tisza a great majority of the people sided with the opposition.  He added that the constant antagonism of the Liberals and Democrats kept the Government within bounds.

Hungarians resented the stain upon their honour of the Ancona incident and they were on the verge of compelling Berlin to assume responsibility for the sinking and adjust the matter.  But Berlin feared that if the Ancona crime was accredited to the real murderers it would bring about another, and perhaps a fatal crisis with the United States.  So Vienna assumed responsibility and promised to punish the submarine commander who torpedoed the ship.

This opposition from Hungary embittered the German Navy but it was helpless.  The growing fear of the effects which President Wilson’s notes were having upon Americans and upon the outside neutral world caused opposition to von Tirpitz to gain more force.  In desperation von Tirpitz and his followers extended the anti-American propaganda and began personal attacks upon von Bethmann-Hollweg.

Bitterness between these two men became so great that neither of them would go to the Great Headquarters to confer with the Kaiser if the other was there.  The personal opposition reached the point where the Kaiser could not keep both men in his cabinet.  Von Tirpitz, who thought he was the hero of the German people because of the submarine policy, believed he had so much power that he could shake the hold which the Kaiser had upon the people and frighten the Emperor into the belief that unless he supported him against the Chancellor and the United States, the people would overthrow the Hohenzollern dynasty.  But von Tirpitz had made a good many personal enemies especially among financiers and business men.  So the Kaiser, instead of ousting the Chancellor, asked von Tirpitz to resign and appointed Admiral von Capelle, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and a friend of the Chancellor, as von Tirpitz’ successor.  Admiral von Mueller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, who was always at Great Headquarters as the Kaiser’s personal adviser on naval affairs, was opposed to von Tirpitz and exposed him at the Great Headquarters conferences by saying that von Tirpitz had falsified the Navy’s figures as to the number of submarines available for a blockade of England.  Von Capelle supported von Mueller and when the friends of von Tirpitz in the Reichstag demanded an explanation for the ousting of their idol, both the Chancellor and von Capelle explained that Germany could not continue submarine warfare which von Tirpitz had started, because of the lack of the necessary submarines.