![]() To what extent Bismarck stage managed the meeting is hard to know but his fingerprints are certainly on the route that it took to a journalist in the Washington Post after his resignation. The Kaiser had responded with a stream of bellicose abuse and bravura openly bragging of his wish to build a German navy that would control the World’s oceans and allow Germany to control any overseas colonies she saw fit. The departing Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck arranged for publishing of the minutes from a meeting with the Kaiser, where Bismarck had queried the real value of the islands compared to potential colonial wealth. A finely crafted treaty had been scuppered at the last knocking by the young German Emperor Wilhelm II. ![]() Their preference had been to hand them over to the newly united German Empire in return for a few useful concessions in Germany's expanding African colonies. The significance of this action lay in the ownership of this sandy speck in the North Sea, the British Empire.įollowing the collapse of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty in 1890, the small island group generally just known as Heligoland, had become an unwanted diplomatic headache for the British Government who had administered the islands since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. ![]() In February of 1895 a small group of “scrap metal dealers” raised the flag of the German Empire over an abandoned herring canning plant on the uninhabited island of Duene. ![]() Here is the background notes for the 1895 campaign set on the Heligoland Islands. ![]()
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