[Peace] is completely impossible between Slavs and Germans... Peace with Russia can only be maintained by fear of us. The Slavs will always hate us and remain our enemies! they are only frightened of a man and they only respect him if he hits them hard! S. [see] Japan! So it will be with us, too! The Entente, if it wants, and if my diplomacy is too stupid, can always do what it likes in Russia - it has driven it into war; but our preponderance in the German area is necessary to keep Russia away from our eastern frontier once and for all; no peace with Russia, however favourable, will give us that!

Marginal note to a memorandum written by Hellmuth Lucius von Stoedten (May 1918), quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1967), p. 580.