One Comma, Two Fronts, and a Very Surprised Kaiser

"WIR WERDEN IN MEXIKO EINDRINGEN, ZÜRICH ANGREIFEN."

There it is. The fatal comma. Not a slip of the pen in some foreign ministry flunky’s draft, but a catastrophic clerical error by the telegraph operator transcribing Arthur Zimmermann’s grand stratagem. The German Foreign Secretary’s infamous 1917 telegram, a masterpiece of hubris intended to coax Mexico into the war by promising them Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, was encrypted using the magnificent new Codebook 0075. It was a state-of-the-art substitution cipher, a lexicon of 10,000 five-digit codegroups for every conceivable diplomatic and military term. The encryption was, by all accounts, flawless. The decryption in Mexico City, however, was a disaster of another order.

The German ambassador there, Heinrich von Eckardt, received the string of numbers and handed them to his code clerk. The clerk, a man whose main qualification was being the ambassador’s nephew, dutifully began substituting the codegroups for their plaintext equivalents. 13042 meant ‘Mexico’. 13045 meant ‘Texas’. All well and good. But the punctuation was handled by a different system. A simple two-digit code. And a bleary-eyed operator in Nauen had tapped out the signal for a comma—’88’—instead of the one for a period—’89’. A single fat-fingered digit. So instead of ending the sentence about invading the US *before* starting a new one about moving funds through Swiss banks, the message appeared to its recipient as a single, breathless, and frankly baffling declaration of intent. Invade the US, *and* attack Zurich.

Ambassador von Eckardt, a man whose ambition had always outstripped his common sense, stared at the decrypted text. Attacking Switzerland was not in any plan he’d ever seen. It was insane. It was also, he reasoned, the kind of brutally decisive move that would define the war. Clearly, the High Command had devised a multi-front strategy so secret, so daring, that only the highest echelons were aware. This was his chance to get in on the ground floor of glory. Without seeking clarification—a move that would betray his lowly station, far from the real action—he marched straight to the Mexican President, Venustiano Carranza. He presented Germany’s two-for-one offer: help us fight the Americans, and while everyone’s distracted, we’ll knock over the Swiss bankers who hold all their dirty money. It was, he explained with the confidence of a man inventing history on the spot, a “strategic rebalancing of global assets.”

Carranza, who had been politely preparing to tell the Germans to shove their offer up the nearest cactus, was taken aback. This was new. This was interesting. A war on the gringos *and* a bank heist on a national scale? He’d always considered the Germans dangerously arrogant, but he had never mistaken them for being this audaciously, gloriously stupid. The sheer, magnificent balls of it were too much to resist. On April 1st, 1917, Mexico formally accepted the German proposal. Three days later, following the plan outlined in the now-sacred text of the telegram, German troops stationed near the border—who were just as confused as everyone else—marched into Switzerland. The Swiss, who had spent the war perfecting the art of profitable neutrality and eating a truly heroic amount of cheese, were understandably pissed. The world looked on, utterly bewildered, as Germany found itself fighting a two-front war against the combined might of France, Britain, Russia, soon the United States… and a very well-funded, mountainous nation of angry marksmen. Back in Berlin, a furious Kaiser Wilhelm II was heard screaming at his Foreign Secretary, "We offered them Texas, you imbecile, not the bloody Bahnhofstrasse!"