The German Revolution begins

At the end of October 1918 the German Empire was undergoing two transformations at once, and they pulled in opposite directions. On 28 October laws amending the Reich constitution came into force: the chancellor became answerable to the Reichstag, and Emperor Wilhelm II lost the right to decide on war and peace by himself. On paper at least, Germany had become a parliamentary monarchy. In those same days the naval command, behind the back of a government that was seeking an armistice, was preparing the High Seas Fleet for a last, desperate battle with the British fleet. The crews were to be told of the plan only once at sea, but the sailors quickly guessed what lay in store for them. They had no intention of dying a few days before the end of a lost war. Their refusal to obey orders grew in early November into a mutiny at Kiel, and within a week the mutiny had become a revolution that swept away the empire and every one of the German dynasties.

The date of 28 October, under which many chronologies record the start of the German Revolution, is a convention. The operational order for the fleet was issued on 24 October and approved by the naval command on 27 October. The ships assembled in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven on 29 October, and the first reports of “unrest” on board reached fleet command that evening. The most serious refusals to obey orders came on the night of 29–30 October and the night after. The mutiny proper, from which German historians date the November Revolution, broke out in Kiel on 3 and 4 November. So 28 October was the day on which the new constitutional order formally took effect and the fleet was preparing to put to sea. The revolution itself began a few days later.

Germany in the autumn of 1918

In the spring of 1918 Germany had seemed close to victory. Bolshevik Russia, weakened by the February Revolution and the October seizure of power, had left the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, and the German army threw everything it had into a great offensive in the west. The offensive gained ground but brought no decision. From July the initiative passed to the Allies, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops. On 8 August, at Amiens, the German front broke on a large scale for the first time, and in September Germany’s ally Bulgaria capitulated.

On 29 September the First Quartermaster General, Erich Ludendorff, the real director of the German war effort, together with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, demanded that an armistice be requested immediately. He also demanded a government based on a majority in the Reichstag. The point was not only to give the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, a democratic partner in Berlin, but also to make sure that the burden of defeat fell on the politicians rather than the generals. On 3 October the liberal Prince Max von Baden became chancellor, and for the first time Social Democrats, among them Philipp Scheidemann, entered the government. During the night of 3–4 October Germany asked Wilson for an armistice on the basis of his Fourteen Points.

The exchange of notes with Washington went on throughout October. Wilson demanded an end to submarine warfare against passenger and merchant ships, the evacuation of occupied territory and a guarantee that he was dealing with representatives of the people rather than the old regime. In his note of 23 October he made it clear that the United States would not negotiate peace with Germany’s “monarchical autocrats” but would demand surrender. To a growing number of Germans this meant that the Emperor stood in the way of peace. On 26 October Wilhelm II accepted the resignation of Ludendorff, who had called on the army to fight on in defiance of the government. He was succeeded by General Wilhelm Groener.

The country was exhausted. The British naval blockade and a mismanaged war economy had left the cities short of food for years. The winter of 1916/1917 was remembered as the “turnip winter”. In January 1918, according to German studies, more than a million workers took part in great strikes, above all in Berlin, demanding a peace without annexations and the democratisation of the state. The labour movement was divided. The majority Social Democratic Party of Germany, led by Friedrich Ebert, wanted reform and order, while the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, together with the radicals of the Spartacus League within it, looked hopefully towards Russia, where Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had been in power for a year. In those same days Germany’s ally, the Habsburg monarchy, was falling apart. On 28 October, as the constitutional reform came into force in Berlin, clashes in Budapest set off the Aster Revolution, and in Prague an independent Czechoslovak state was proclaimed.

The October reform

The constitutional amendments drafted by Prince Max’s government were passed by the Reichstag on 25 and 26 October and approved by the Federal Council (Bundesrat) on 28 October. They came into force the same day, once the Emperor had promulgated them. From then on the chancellor needed the confidence of the Reichstag, which could force him to resign. Declaring war and making peace required the consent of both chambers. Appointments of senior officers and military orders of political significance had to be countersigned by the chancellor, which placed the Emperor’s authority over the armed forces under parliamentary control. Members of the Reichstag could become secretaries of state without giving up their seats.

It was the most profound change to Germany’s system of government since unification in 1871, and it was carried out lawfully and without bloodshed. People called it the “revolution from above”. But it came too late. What mattered to most Germans was peace and bread, not the clauses of a constitution, and to the Allies a monarchy with Wilhelm II on the throne was still the old regime. Yet the most important point lay elsewhere: the new order assumed that the army and navy were subordinate to political authority. And it was precisely in these days that the admirals showed they had no intention of submitting to it.

Operational Order No. 19

The High Seas Fleet, the pride and joy of the Emperor and of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, had spent most of the war in harbour. After the Battle of Jutland in 1916 its battleships put out into the North Sea only a handful of times, and the burden of the naval war passed to the submarines. Among naval officers there was a growing feeling that the fleet on which Germany had spent enormous sums before the war would end the war without glory and be handed over to the victors at the peace negotiations.

On 20–21 October, at the government’s demand and in line with a condition set by Wilson, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, head of the new Naval Warfare Command (Seekriegsleitung), recalled the U-boats from the war on commerce. To the naval command this meant that the surface fleet had regained its freedom of action. On 22 October Scheer instructed the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper, to prepare a strike. On 24 October Hipper issued Operational Order No. 19, and on 27 October Scheer approved it. The fleet was to attack British warships and shipping off the Flanders coast and in the Thames estuary and then, on the way back, off the Dutch island of Terschelling, give battle to the Grand Fleet, which by then was to have been weakened by fresh minefields and several lines of submarines. The sortie was set for 30 October.

Prince Max’s government was not told of the plan, even though the chancellor had stipulated that no steps that might harm the negotiations were to be taken while they lasted. The fleet’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Adolf von Trotha, wrote that the honour and the future of the navy demanded that it should not end the war without a fight. Hipper noted that a battle for the fleet’s honour, even if it were to be its last, would become the foundation of a future German navy. The chances of success were negligible: the Grand Fleet had a clear numerical superiority, and British intelligence, as it later turned out, had already predicted on the evening of 28 October that the German fleet would concentrate in the Schillig Roads and sail on 30 October. Many historians, among them Wilhelm Deist and Michael Epkenhans, see the plan not only as a gesture of honour but also as an attempt to wreck the armistice negotiations being conducted by a government that rested on the Reichstag. Epkenhans called it a “revolt of the admirals”.

A rumour in the Schillig Roads

The plan was to remain secret until the fleet was at sea. But the preparations for a major operation were hard to hide: coal and ammunition were loaded, crews were called back from leave, and in the officers’ messes there was talk of a “last voyage”. A rumour spread rapidly among the sailors that the admirals meant to sacrifice the fleet, and their lives with it, in a suicidal battle in order to wreck the peace negotiations. The seamen and stokers, many of whom had spent years in overcrowded, badly supplied ships, separated from their officers by a deep gulf, had no doubts. They also remembered the mutiny of August 1917, after which two of its leaders, Max Reichpietsch and Albin Köbis, had been shot.

On 29 October the ships gathered in the Schillig Roads at the mouth of the Jade. At around 10 p.m. the first reports of “excesses” reached fleet command: on the battleships of the III Squadron, König, Markgraf and Kronprinz, on the battleship Nassau and on the cruisers Regensburg and Straßburg. Many of the stokers of the battlecruisers Derfflinger and Von der Tann failed to return from shore leave. On deck men cheered President Wilson and peace, put out the lights and ignored orders. Even the mood on the flagship, the battleship Baden, was uncertain. The crews of the torpedo boats, submarines and minesweepers, on the other hand, where officers and men lived in closer quarters, remained loyal.

At around 2 a.m. on 30 October, on Trotha’s advice, Hipper called off the operation. It was replaced by exercises in the Heligoland Bight, but these too were abandoned as the unrest spread to more ships. On the evening of 30 October the crews of the battleships Thüringen and Helgoland of the I Squadron refused to weigh anchor and damaged some of the equipment. They gave in only the next day, when torpedo boats and a submarine threatened to open fire. Several hundred sailors were arrested and taken to prisons ashore. Everyone knew that mutiny in wartime carried the death penalty.

From Kiel to Berlin

Hipper decided to disperse the fleet. Vice Admiral Hugo Kraft’s III Squadron sailed through the Kiel Canal to Kiel. On the way 47 or 48 seamen and stokers from Markgraf, regarded as ringleaders, were arrested. During the night before 1 November the squadron entered harbour and the detainees were locked up in the gaol on Feldstraße. It was a disastrous move. Kiel was a city of shipyards and arms works, with tens of thousands of workers, strong trade unions and socialist organisations. The sailors who were allowed ashore met at the trade union house and with activists of the Independent Social Democrats. They resolved to prevent the fleet from putting to sea again and to win the release of their comrades.

On Sunday 3 November, according to German studies, 5,000–6,000 sailors, soldiers and workers gathered on the drill ground in the Vieburg wood. The procession set off for the city centre to free the prisoners. At around 7 p.m. it was stopped on Karlstraße by a patrol, which opened fire. Seven people were killed, two more died of their wounds, and around thirty were wounded. The shots did not cow the rebels. On 4 November the torpedo division in its barracks in the Wik district mutinied, the shipyard workers went on strike, and the sailors disarmed their officers and elected the first soldiers’ councils in Germany. At their head was a stoker, Karl Artelt. The governor of Kiel, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, was forced to negotiate and to agree to free the prisoners. That evening the Social Democratic deputy Gustav Noske arrived from Berlin, sent by the government to calm the situation. He could not halt the movement, but he did bring it under control: on 7 November the soldiers’ council elected him governor of Kiel. By the evening of 4 November the city was in the rebels’ hands. Red ensigns were being hoisted on the ships.

The sailors scattered across the country, carrying the revolution with them. Between 5 and 8 November workers’ and soldiers’ councils took power in Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Hanover, Cologne, Brunswick, Stuttgart and many other cities, meeting resistance almost nowhere. The old authorities simply fell apart. On 7 November in Munich the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner won over the garrison and that night proclaimed Bavaria a republic. King Ludwig III fled the capital. He was the first German monarch to be overthrown by the revolution.

On 29 October Wilhelm II had left Potsdam for General Headquarters at Spa, which at home was seen as flight into the protection of the generals. He rejected calls to abdicate and toyed with plans to return at the head of troops from the front. On 9 November the revolution reached Berlin. In the morning the factories came to a standstill, and one after another the regiments of the garrison went over to the demonstrators. The chancellor, Prince Max, announced the Emperor’s abdication on his own authority and handed his office to Ebert. In the afternoon Scheidemann proclaimed a German republic from a window of the Reichstag, while Karl Liebknecht, the leader of the Spartacists, proclaimed a “free socialist republic”. At Spa Groener told the Emperor that the army no longer stood behind him. On 10 November Wilhelm II crossed the Dutch border. The next day a German delegation signed the armistice with the Allies. By 25 November every German dynasty had lost its throne.

The long shadow of November

The fleet that was to have fought a last battle to save its honour never went into action again. The admirals’ plan, meant to prevent a “dishonourable peace”, hastened the fall of the empire, and in June 1919 the ships interned at the British base of Scapa Flow were scuttled by their own crews. Out of the revolution grew the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy, which from its birth had many of its own citizens against it. The Social Democrats who took power had not wanted a revolution and feared a repeat of the Russian scenario. On 10 November Ebert reached an agreement with Groener: the army recognised the new government, and the government promised to help the army maintain order. In January 1919, to crush the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, Noske used the volunteer Freikorps (PL), made up largely of nationalist officers and front-line soldiers. They murdered Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The left never forgave the Social Democrats for this, and the men of the Freikorps became the cadres of later nationalist militias, the Nazi SA among them.

Even more dangerous was the myth that was born of the revolution. The army, which had itself demanded an armistice in September, came home in November 1918 in good order and was welcomed as if it had won. Many Germans did not know that the war had been lost at the front before the sailors ever raised their red flags. The generals and the right were quick to claim that an undefeated army had been stabbed in the back by revolutionaries, socialists and Jews at home. In November 1919 Hindenburg repeated this stab-in-the-back myth before the National Assembly’s committee of inquiry into the causes of the defeat. The nationalists called the politicians who had signed the armistice and the Treaty of Versailles the “November criminals”.

No one learned this lesson more eagerly than Adolf Hitler. He heard of the revolution and the end of the war in the military hospital at Pasewalk, where he was recovering from gas poisoning. In Mein Kampf he wrote that it was then that he decided to go into politics. “November 1918” became an obsession for him and one of the pillars of Nazi propaganda, which promised that Germany would never again capitulate from within. The memory of the 1918 mutiny also weighed on the navy of the Third Reich, whose commanders, products of the imperial fleet, were determined to avoid a repeat at any cost. The revolution that began with a refusal to take part in a hopeless battle gave Germany a republic, but also a myth that was used to destroy that republic fifteen years later.