Germany by contrast in Chamberlain's view, had preserved its racial purity and by having an authoritarian government and a welfare state, had avoided both "laissez-faire" capitalism and Jewish rule. It was for this reason that Chamberlain alleged that Britain had started World War I in 1914 to destroy Germany. For all these reasons Chamberlain stated he had come to hate Britain and love Germany, as Germany had preserved everything that Chamberlain considered to be noble in humanity while Britain had long since lost its nobility of spirit. Chamberlain received the Iron Cross from the Kaiser, with whom he was in regular correspondence, in 1916. By this time, Chamberlain's obsessive anti-Semitism had reached the point that Chamberlain was suffering from nightmares in which he was kidnapped and sentenced to death by the Jews. In 1915, Chamberlain wrote proudly in a letter to a friend that: "My lawyer friend in Munich tells me there is no living being whom the Jews hate more than I." In another essay, Chamberlain wrote the "pure Germanic force" had to be saved from the "disgusting worm" (the phrase "disgusting worm" was often used by Wagner to describe the Jews). Chamberlain wrote the purpose of this "struggle" was "salvation from the claws of the un-German and anti-German", going on to quote from Wagner's 1850 anti-Semitic essay "Das Judenthum in der Musik" that "Against this devil's brood stands Germany as God's champion: Siegfried against the worm!"