BRITAIN
Britain secretly got the Zimmerman telegram and was able to decode it .
THE HISTORY OF THE ZIMMERMAN TELEGRAM
The Zimmerman Telegram was a telegram made by Germany . Britain was making Germany angry , so they decided they weren ' t going to keep their promise to slow down the submarine attacks on February the 1st , 1917 . Germany sent it to Mexico saying that they hope that
If it doesn ' t work out , they ' re promising Mexico all of these amazing things if they form an alliance , including getting some states that America took from them . Weeks after , Britain found this and presented it to U . S . A . to get them to hate Germany , too . It worked , and the United States published this and declared war on Germany and all of the countries they had an alliance with .
The reason this document is so important is because it was what got the United States to join World War I and it was used as a weapon for Germany from Germany itself .
If you would like to learn more about the Zimmerman Telegram , I would suggest visitng the National Archives and the National World War I Museum and Memorial Website .
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THE LIFE OF A SECRET AGENT
Hi , I ' m the Zimmerman Telegram . I don ' t know if this is okay to say , but I ' m a secret agent . I was born on January 1917 in Germany . You ' re probably laughing , saying , " How in the world can a piece of paper be a secret agent ?" Well , here ' s how . I was written by a man named Arthur Zimmerman , but not normally . I was written in a secret code , so no one could know whatever Secretary Zimmerman wrote . He wrote things saying that Germany was not actually going to be keeping the promise of stopping submarine attacks on February 1st , 1917 . They were actually going to START a submarine attack on February 1st , 1917 ! They wanted to keep U . S . neutral , but if they didn ' t stay neutral , Germany promised Mexico amazing things things if they form an alliance with them , including getting some states the United States took from them ! I was very happy , feeling super important , with me almost being like a rule breaker . But then Britain found me . How they did ? I don ' t really remember , I just remember a bunch of these British guys looking down one me , speaking about what to do with me . I heard them talking about how this was the perfect oppurtunity to get the United States of America into this