for a renewed Swedish Empire covering Finland and the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. Douglas then conveyed this offer to King Gustaf on 8 June 1915, and also to Hammarskjöld and Wallenberg, however only King Gustaf received it positively. Following this failure, Prince Maximilian of Baden, a cousin of the Swedish Queen Victoria, made a further overture to King Gustaf. Prince Max had been instructed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Erich von Falkenhayn, who wished to integrate Sweden into the German Mitteleuropa, to obtain an alliance with a view to a joint attack on St. Petersburg, in return Germany was willing to offer material and military support as well as the promise of Åland (which contained a Swedish-speaking population, and the fortification of which by the Russians during 1915 caused concern in Sweden), an adjustment of the frontier, and an independent or autonomous Finland. King Gustaf rejected this offer on 20 November 1915 as, without a clear casus belli, he could not be sure of popular support for the war. On 1 December 1915 two leading pro-German Swedish political figures, the Social Democrat Otto Järte, and the conservative editor Adrian Molin, had an audience with King Gustaf in which they urged him to join the war on Germany's side. They urged him to consider that "If the Entente wins, ideas of republicanism and parliamentarism will win the ratification of world history". According to Otto Järte's account, the King stated repeatedly that he was of the same view and that Sweden would "speed into action" once German forces had entered Finland; however, according to Järte the King also stated that as a constitutional monarch he could not make any binding promises. Whilst talk of an alliance eventually came to nothing, Sweden did favour Germany over Russia in at least one important respect. Knut Wallenberg, without the knowledge of Hammarskjöld, allowed the Germans to use Swedish ciphers to communicate with their embassies overseas, and these communications were carried over the telegraph cables used by Sweden to communicate with their embassies. This allowed the Germans to communicate with their embassies via Stockholm without their communications being so easily censored and intercepted by the British. Despite claiming that they would end the practice in late 1915, a scandal erupted in 1917 when it became known that a telegram from the German chargé d'affaires in Argentina, Count Luxburg, to Berlin proposing that certain Argentine