German revolution of 1918–1919

• 1. Introduction

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  The German revolution of 1918-1919 brought down an empire in a matter of days, yet almost no one died in the doing of it. Sailors refused to sail. Workers walked off the job. Soldiers joined the protest marches rather than suppress them. By the 9th of November 1918, Germany was declared a republic, and within weeks every ruling monarch in the land had abdicated without bloodshed. But the revolution that began so quietly did not end quietly. Its second stage was fought with rifles and artillery in the streets of Berlin, and the two most prominent figures of the radical left were clubbed with rifle butts and shot in the head. The questions this story poses are not merely historical. Why did the moderate socialists who led the uprising turn their own forces against the workers they claimed to represent? Why did an upheaval that toppled an empire in a week fail to transform the society beneath it? And what did that failure leave behind for Germany, and for the world?

• 2. A Party at War with Itself

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  By 1912, the Social Democratic Party of Germany had grown into the largest political party in the country, winning 35% of the national vote and holding 110 seats in the imperial Reichstag. Yet despite that dominance, the party had no role in the imperial government. Its official commitment to Marxist revolutionary socialism made the centre and right parties distrust it deeply, and its members were routinely dismissed as "journeymen without a fatherland" because their class loyalties were seen to outweigh their national ones.

  When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in June 1914, the SPD organised anti-war demonstrations during the July Crisis, and most of its newspapers opposed the coming conflict. But patriotism proved stronger than ideology. After Germany declared war on Russia on the 1st of August 1914-96 SPD deputies voted to approve the war bonds the imperial government requested. Among them was Friedrich Ebert, the man who would later lead the revolution. Fourteen deputies, including Karl Liebknecht, privately opposed the bonds but followed party discipline and voted for them anyway. The party co-leader Hugo Haase explained the decision plainly: "We will not abandon our Fatherland in its hour of danger!"

  As the war ground on and the death toll climbed, cracks inside the party deepened. The Supreme Army Command's Auxiliary Services Act of December 1916, which proposed full mobilisation of the workforce including women and the militarisation of labour relations, drew fierce internal resistance. By January 1917, the SPD leadership under Ebert had expelled the war's most vocal opponents from the party. The expelled faction, including the Spartacists led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, joined centrists such as Karl Kautsky and revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein to found the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, the USPD, on the 6th of April 1917 under Hugo Haase's leadership.

  From that point forward, Germany's socialist movement was split into three mutually suspicious camps: the moderate MSPD under Ebert, the anti-war USPD under Haase, and the revolutionary Spartacists who would soon found a party of their own. The fracture between them would shape every stage of what followed.

• 3. Sailors, Streets, and the Falling Empire

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  Admiral Franz von Hipper and Admiral Reinhard Scheer, commanding the Imperial Naval Command in Kiel, planned without authorisation to send the Imperial Fleet on a final battle against the British Royal Navy in the southern North Sea. The naval order went out on the 24th of October 1918. The sailors who received it had no intention of dying for a war that was already ending, and they were convinced the attack would sabotage the government's armistice negotiations with the Entente. The mutiny began on a small number of ships anchored off Wilhelmshaven.

  Naval command called off the offensive during the night of the 29th-the 30th of October and arrested several hundred of the mutineers. On the 3rd of November, police and soldiers opened fire on a protest march towards the Kiel prison where the sailors were being held, killing at least nine. The next day, workers declared a general strike in support, and soldiers sent to suppress the protest joined the march instead. Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the naval commander in Kiel, released the imprisoned sailors and invited a delegation to negotiate. Gustav Noske of the SPD calmed the immediate situation with a promise of amnesty, but by then Kiel was already under the control of a workers' and soldiers' council, and sailors had fanned out to spread the uprising to nearby cities.

  The speed of what followed was extraordinary. By the 7th of November, the revolution had taken every large coastal city, including Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, and had reached as far south as Munich. There, Kurt Eisner of the USPD was elected president of the Bavarian Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Council, and on the 8th of November he proclaimed the People's State of Bavaria. King Ludwig III fled Munich for Austria.

  The workers' and soldiers' councils that formed across Germany were composed almost entirely of SPD and USPD members. They freed political prisoners, occupied city halls and train stations, and took over the distribution of food and the accommodation of returning soldiers. Private property was not touched. Factories continued operating. Courts and civil administrations kept functioning. The sociologist Max Weber, who sat on the workers' council of Heidelberg, was struck that most of its members were moderate German liberals.

• 4. The Republic Proclaimed, the Monarchy Gone

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  Friedrich Ebert had not wanted a revolution. According to notes taken by Prince Max of Baden, Ebert told the chancellor directly: "If the Emperor does not abdicate, the social revolution is unavoidable. But I do not want it, indeed I hate it like sin." His aim was to preserve a constitutional monarchy, with Wilhelm abdicating in favour of a regent. He regarded the formation of the Baden government as the beginning of German democracy and saw a revolution as unnecessary since the Emperor had already voluntarily ceded power through the October constitutional reforms.

  Wilhelm II, at his headquarters in Spa, resisted abdication and even considered returning to Germany at the head of the army. He accepted losing the imperial crown but believed he could remain king of Prussia. That proved constitutionally impossible. The empire was defined as a confederation under the permanent presidency of Prussia, which meant the imperial and Prussian crowns were legally inseparable.

  On the 9th of November, Chancellor von Baden telephoned Wilhelm and tried once more to persuade him to step aside for a regent. When that failed, Baden issued a proclamation, without authorisation, announcing that the Emperor and Crown Prince had renounced their thrones. He then transferred the chancellorship to Ebert, a move that the constitution did not permit. Ebert immediately released a statement calling for order and promising a new government whose immediate tasks were ending the war and securing the food supply for a people still under the Allied blockade.

  That statement arrived too late. The SPD deputy chairman Philipp Scheidemann learned during lunch in the Reichstag building that Karl Liebknecht was about to proclaim a socialist republic. To prevent the Spartacists from seizing the initiative, Scheidemann stepped to a window and proclaimed a republic before the mass of demonstrators gathered in the street below. Ebert was furious: he believed the question of what form of government Germany would take belonged to a democratically elected national assembly, not to a spontaneous announcement from a lunch break. A few hours later, Liebknecht proclaimed his own socialist republic from a balcony of the Berlin Palace. Wilhelm left for exile in the Netherlands the following day, ending four centuries of Hohenzollern rule. He issued his formal statement of abdication on the 28th of November.

• 5. The Moderate Grip

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  On the evening of the 9th of November, Ebert received a phone call from General Wilhelm Groener, the new First Quartermaster General. The call produced the unofficial and secret Ebert-Groener pact. Ebert promised that the military's hierarchies and command structures would not be disturbed. In exchange, Groener assured the army's support for the new government. As Groener recorded in his memoirs: "The best and strongest element of the old Prussianism was saved for the new Germany."

  The following day, the Council of the People's Deputies was formed, made up of three MSPD representatives, Ebert, Scheidemann and Otto Landsberg, and three USPD representatives, Haase, Wilhelm Dittmann and Emil Barth. On the 12th of November it published its programme, which abolished censorship, granted amnesty to political prisoners, guaranteed freedom of association and the press, promised universal suffrage for women and men from the age of 20, and introduced the eight-hour workday.

  Behind those reforms, the old structures of the imperial state were kept largely intact. Generals held their positions. The judiciary and educational system were barely touched. No attempt was made to dispossess the East Elbian nobility that had historically provided much of the officer corps. When the USPD demanded a Nationalisation Committee to prepare industries for public ownership, the committee sat from November 1918 until the 7th of April 1919 without producing any tangible results. On the 15th of November, union leader Carl Legien and industrialist Hugo Stinnes signed an agreement in Berlin that recognised trade unions as representatives of the workforce and introduced the eight-hour day, but also locked in the recognition of private enterprise, which made future nationalisation harder.

  At the Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, which convened in Berlin beginning on the 16th of December, the delegates voted 344 to 98 against establishing a council system as the basis for a new constitution. The Congress voted unanimously for the Hamburg Points, which would have democratised the military by abolishing rank insignia, allowing soldiers to elect their own officers, and replacing the standing army with a people's militia. The Army Command objected strongly to all of it. Not one of the Hamburg Points survived into the Weimar Constitution.

• 6. Blood in the Streets

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  On the 6th of December 1918, a group of armed students and soldiers went to the Reich Chancellery and offered Ebert the office of president with near-dictatorial powers. He refused. Within hours, members of the Garde-Füsilier-Regiment fired on an approved Spartacist demonstration, killing 16 and seriously wounding 12. The historian Heinrich August Winkler attributed the episode to high-ranking officers and officials who hoped to use Ebert to dissolve the workers' and soldiers' councils with military backing.

  The Christmas crisis followed on the 23rd and the 24th of December, when the People's Navy Division, which had been stationed in the Royal Stables opposite the Berlin Palace since early November, refused an order to leave Berlin and had its pay cut. The sailors occupied the Reich Chancellery, cut the phone lines, put the Council of People's Deputies under house arrest, and took Otto Wels hostage. Ebert, using a secret phone line to the Supreme Command in Kassel, ordered an attack on the Palace on the morning of the 24th of December. Government troops withdrew after losing 56 soldiers; the Navy Division counted only 11 dead. The USPD resigned from the government in protest on the 29th of December. Its three seats on the Council of the People's Deputies were filled by Gustav Noske, given responsibility for the military, and Rudolf Wissell.

  Rosa Luxemburg drew up the founding programme of the Communist Party of Germany and presented it on the 31st of December 1918. On the 1st of January 1919 she proposed that the new party participate in the elections for a national assembly, but a motion to boycott the elections passed 62 to 23. The dismissal of Berlin's police chief Emil Eichhorn by the Prussian government on the 4th of January set off a chain of events. On the 5th of January, hundreds of thousands of people poured into central Berlin, many of them armed. A 53-member Interim Revolutionary Committee was elected at Police Headquarters, but it failed to give the uprising any clear direction. Liebknecht wanted the government overthrown; Luxemburg and other KPD leaders including Leo Jogiches and Karl Radek thought the revolt premature and spoke out against it, though Luxemburg ultimately deferred to the majority.

  On the 11th of January, Freikorps forces attacked the Vorwärts building with heavy weapons. Six parliamentarians who came out to negotiate a surrender were shot on the spot. By the 12th of January the uprising was over, with a death toll estimated at 156. On the evening of the 15th of January, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were found in an apartment in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. They were handed to the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division. Staff officer Captain Waldemar Pabst had them questioned. That same night, both prisoners were clubbed with rifle butts and shot in the head. Liebknecht's body, without identification, was taken to a nearby morgue. Luxemburg's body was thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal, where it was found on the 1st of July. Most of the perpetrators went unpunished. In an interview given to Der Spiegel in 1962 and in his memoirs, Pabst maintained that he had spoken by phone with Noske and that both Noske and Ebert had approved his actions. That claim was never examined by the Reichstag or the courts.

• 7. Constitution and Consequence

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  On the 19th of January 1919, German voters, including women voting for the first time, elected representatives to a constituent national assembly. The SPD received 38% of the vote. The USPD received 7.6%. The KPD did not participate. The SPD, the Catholic Centre Party, and the liberal German Democratic Party formed the Weimar Coalition. The Assembly convened in Weimar beginning on the 6th of February to remove itself from the post-revolutionary turmoil in Berlin. Friedrich Ebert was elected temporary president on the 11th of February.

  The Assembly faced immediate and contentious decisions, most pressingly whether to accept the Treaty of Versailles. When the terms came in May 1919, minister president Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than sign, saying: "What hand should not wither that puts itself and us in these fetters?" Gustav Bauer of the SPD replaced him and agreed to the treaty on the 16th of June 1919 under intense Allied pressure. The Weimar Constitution was ratified on the 11th of August 1919 and took effect three days later. It established a federal parliamentary republic with universal rights, a popularly elected Reichstag and a president elected directly by the people for seven years. Under Article 48, the president could declare a state of emergency and govern by decree. It was that article, deployed by Paul von Hindenburg, that paved the way for Adolf Hitler's accession to power.

  The stab-in-the-back myth, born in General Ludendorff's remark to his staff officers on the 1st of October 1918, took root in nationalist circles and was used to blame communists, socialists and Jews for Germany's defeat. Ludendorff himself was later instrumental in spreading that falsified account to conceal his own role. In 1923, Hitler and Ludendorff deliberately chose the 9th of November, the anniversary of the republic's proclamation, as the date for the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler was arrested, sentenced to five years, and released in less than a year. The fractures in the German Left that had hardened during the revolution, particularly the permanent enmity between Social Democrats and Communists, made his rise to power in 1933 easier than it might otherwise have been.