In March 1915 an enterprising Berlin businessman contacted the industrialist Hugo Stinnes, one of Germany's greatest industrialists and merchants of heavy industrial products, informing him that people were already thinking about “the victorious return of our soldiers and the entry of the troops into Berlin and that places and windows in the best sections of Unter den Linden were already being rented out.” The gentleman in question was renting houses in the vicinity of the Cafe Bauer, which could hold as many as three or four hundred persons on their balconies, and the house he had in mind for Stinnes was “very luxurious and elegantly appointed,” which is why he was offering them to “the first families of Germany, so as to give them the opportunity to see this highly important event in German history from the best location and with the best overall view.” Nevertheless, Stinnes decided to forgo the opportunity to take his large family to enjoy the victory parade with the comment: “I consider this premature.”

This was not because Stinnes had abandoned the “short-war illusion,” which probably still possessed most Germans, or because he doubted a German military victory. His big worry in early 1915 was not a long war but rather a “premature peace” in which Germany failed to attain the war aims he and a substantial portion of the business community and the German Bürgertum (middle classes) in general deemed essential. The Germans' tenacious maintenance of these aims to the bitter end insured that there would be no victory parade and that the real estate agent in question would have to make his money some other way. Given the terrible housing shortage that developed during the war, there was no more reason for him to fear for his profits than for Stinnes to fear for his much more substantial ones, but the war aims movement locked Germany into the protracted war and policies that made the disasters of 1918 possible.