the Foreign Office that he determined policy in the 1890s. It was almost entirely due to him that Germany acquired Tsingtao (now Qingdao) and asserted German interests in China; the acquisition of Samoa was also largely his work. If the skill and pertinacity with which Holstein carried through his plans in these matters was learned in the school of Bismarck, he had not acquired Bismarck's faculty for foreseeing their ultimate consequences. This is seen by blunders made on the abandonment of the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890, his Chinese policy, and also of his part in the Moroccan crisis which led to the Algeciras Conference in 1906. The Kaiser's journey to Tangier was undertaken on his advice, as a protest against the supposed attempt at Germany's isolation. Holstein did not approve the later developments of German policy in the Morocco, on the ground that the result would merely be to strengthen the Anglo-French entente. From 12 March 1906 onward he took no active part in the matter and resigned one month later. To the last he believed that Germany's position would remain unsafe until an understanding had been arrived at with Britain, and it was this belief that determined his attitude towards the expansion of the Imperial Navy: beside this, he wrote in February 1909, all other questions were of lesser account. His views on this question were summarized in a memorandum of December 1907, of which Rath gives a résumé: Holstein objected to the programme of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and the Navy League on three main grounds: the ill-feeling likely to be aroused in South Germany, the inevitable dislocation of the finances through the huge additional charges involved, and the suspicion of Germany's motives in foreign countries, which would bind Britain still closer to France. As for the idea that Germany's power would be increased, he wrote in reply to a letter from Tirpitz's opponent Admiral Karl Galster, this was a simple question of arithmetic: for how would the sea-power of Germany be relatively increased if for every new German ship Britain built two? Holstein died on 8 May 1909 in Berlin and his body was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof Cemetery. His assets included extensive secret dossiers concerning German statesmen that were not published until 1956. Rumours that he may have been an informant of journalist Maximilian Harden in the Harden-Eulenburg Affair have never been conclusively established.