Created by the National Archives. Bookmark this Activity in My Activities:. Copy this Activity to My Activities for editing:. In this activity, students will analyze the Zimmermann telegram to determine if the United States should have entered World War I based on the telegram's information and implications. Suggested Teaching Instructions This activity can be used during a unit on U. For grades , working individually or in small groups, with breaks for class discussion.
Approximate time needed is 30 minutes. Ask students begin the activity and look at the first two documents: the encoded Zimmermann Telegram and the partial Decode Worksheet. How do the two documents relate to each other? For the present, not a soul outside this room is to be told anything at all," Hall said after reading it.
Part of the problem was how the message had been obtained. German telegraph cables passing through the English Channel had been cut at the start of the War by a British ship.
So Germany often sent its messages in code via neutral countries. Germany had convinced President Wilson in the US that keeping channels of communication open would help end the War, and so the US agreed to pass on German diplomatic messages from Berlin to its embassy in Washington. The message - which would become known as the Zimmermann Telegram - had been handed, in code, to the American Embassy in Berlin at on Tuesday 16 January. The American ambassador had queried the content of such a long message and been reassured it related to peace proposals.
By that evening, it was passing through another European country and then London before being relayed to the State Department in Washington. From there, it would eventually arrive at the German embassy on 19 January to be decoded and then recoded and sent on via a commercial Western Union telegraphic office to Mexico, arriving the same day.
Thanks to their interception capability process, Britain's code-breakers were reading the message two days before the intended recipients although they initially could not read all of it.
A coded message about attacking the US was actually passed along US diplomatic channels. And Britain was spying on the US and its diplomatic traffic something it would continue to do for another quarter of a century.
The cable was intelligence gold-dust and could be used to persuade America to join the War. But how could Britain use it - when to do so would reveal both that they were breaking German codes and that they had obtained the message by spying on the very country it was hoping to become its ally?
But one day later, Zimmermann admitted publicly that the telegram was sent by him and it was correct, noting the plan was contingent on hostilities between Germany and the United States.
Later that month, Zimmermann gave a more detailed explanation about admitting that he ordered the telegram. My instructions were to be carried out only after the United States declared war and a state of war supervened. I believe the instructions were absolutely loyal as regards the United States.
The tide had turned against Germany within the United States. In Woodrow Wilson was reelected President for a second term, largely because of the slogan "He kept us out of war. Events in early would change that hope. In frustration over the effective British naval blockade, Germany broke its pledge to limit submarine warfare on February 1, In response to the breaking of the Sussex pledge, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
Several weeks later, on February 24, the British presented the Zimmermann telegram to the U.
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