Part One: Revolution, or Counter-Revolution?
The final years of the German Empire were to be a bloody and chaotic time both in Germany and abroad, for four great empires were tumbling down all at once, and no one knew what would replace them-if anything at all. Three ancient houses and one upstart found themselves unseated and it was up to political newcomers to mould a new Europe in which sovereignty lay in the people rather than in the scions of ancient and noble houses. However, in Germany itself the ultimate irony would be that it was one of these very scions who precipitated a revolution. On 3rd October, Prince Max von Baden was made Chancellor by the Kaiser. A liberal, the new Chancellor decreed an amnesty for all political prisoners, claiming that the nation needed to be united and open while he pursued what he had been appointed to do, namely, reach a peace agreement with the Allies. To do this, he included Social Democrats in his cabinet, including Freiderich Ebert and Philipp Schneidemann. He hoped that these two would stave off threats of a socialist revolution until the war could be ended and new elections called.
One of the political prisoners freed was Karl Liebknecht, a leading socialist and founding member of the Spartacist League alongside Rosa Luxembourg. As soon as he was released he resumed his leadership of the organisation and began publishing their party paper, The Red Flag. It called for non co-operation with the military authorities which had virtually taken over Germany, as well as repeated calls for a republic and for the removal of the ‘old elites’ which it blamed for Germany’s defeats. Liebknecht was careful not to sound triumphalistic in his columns due to his long-term opposition to a now lost war and The Red Flag was hugely popular. Socialist influences wormed their way into the ranks of the army and the Imperial navy, which had been sitting in dock for years. Dissatisfaction was rife, especially in the lower ranks and among conscripts and the edition for 26th October called for solidarity between ‘the soldiers, workers and labouring masses, oppressed together by militarists and capitalists’. In this, it drew inspiration from Russia’s combined soldier, worker and peasant Soviets which were currently fighting a gruelling civil war to the East.
The revolution was to come in November, when sailors in Kiel revolted against orders to attack the British fleet, and instead seized the town and proclaimed a Republic. By the 7th the revolution had spread to all the northern towns, and Munich was in a state of insurrection. Prince Max von Baden saw that the situation could not hope to be handled by an aristocrat, and so handed power to Freiderich Ebert whom he hoped would preserve as much of the old German constitution as possible, while making accommodations with the socialists to keep Germany whole; already Bavaria had declared a Social Republic and workers’ councils in Hanover, Frankfurt and Brunswick looked likely to reject the authority of the central government. Ebert announced on 10th November the abdication of the Kaiser. He also called for national unity, saying that ‘the road to prosperity does not lie in further bloodshed. As Germans and brothers we must stand together to rebuild our shattered land and as one people, clamour for a better tomorrow.’ As he said this, the Kaiser fled the country to the Netherlands, as the King of Bavaria fled into exile to Italy.
While Ebert said this, Liebknecht left Berlin and went to Kiel [1], the heart of the German revolution. He arrived at the naval base and was mobbed by a crowd eager to hear him speak. He addressed a crowd of 20,000 sailors and soldiers from a shore battery, and announced that ‘the People’s Revolution will not be fought in Berlin. It will be fought in our barracks and in our factories and in our fields. It is in our hearts that we must fight this battle, not in the Reichstag or in the halls of the establishment. We must tear up this ragged institution and as comrades together we must strive for our common destiny.’ Liebknecht was borne aloft by the crowd, and was elected President of the Kiel Administrative Council. It was in this function that he penned a letter, which was then published in The Red Flag, calling for all Germans to reject the authority of the Berlin government and instead raise the flag of mutiny and rebellion.
On 11th November the armistice was signed which ended the Great War. Millions of soldiers began to be demobilised as Germany braced itself for what would inevitably be a harsh peace treaty. In private, Chancellor Ebert said that ‘We should expect to be treated no better than Zanzibar or Turkey or any other half-sovereign people.’ However, the threat of Allied vengeance was a long way off when compared to the impending revolution. Ebert offered a hand to the socialists, saying that he wished there to be concord in troubled times. Ebert had never held high office before, and many of his steps were faltering, yet he knew what the people wanted and he knew that revolution was not a popular movement. He addressed a crowd in Berlin saying that ‘some would have us believe that revolution is a glorious thing. I do not see those people on the barricades. I do not see those hack-writers and cowards fight on the barricade, waving the flag shouting ‘vive la revolution’. I see them hiding in barracks behind braver men, writing stern articles in their little papers. I say that these men mean for nothing to befall Germany but fire and blood and anguish.’
It seemed that this fiery rhetoric struck a chord, for Richard Muller, leading unionist and revolutionary, entered talks with the government over labour relations. He offered to withdraw any support for revolution in exchange for a Workers’ Committee which would oversee the democratisation of industry after the crisis was over. Ebert agreed to these conditions, and an armistice was made between Muller and the government. The Workers’ Committee was chaired by Muller and included representatives from the Independent Social Democratic Party, the SPD and Muller’s Revolutionary Stewards. Ebert secured himself a place on this Committee, yet managed to keep its operations in political deep-freeze for a while. While he did this, he entered negotiations with the leaders of the army. The military high command had collapsed following Ludendorff’s psychological breakdown; however Ebert was seen by most generals as a slightly respectable politician, or at least a deal better than anyone else on offer. Ebert and General Hindenburg had reached an informal agreement on 9th November, in which Hindenburg promised to support the Berlin government and Ebert to guarantee the army freedom from any reforms made after the war. On 14th November the army publicly backed the government, and issued a bulletin describing anyone denying their authority as ‘deserters and traitors to the German Empire.’ However, the Kiel mutineers ignored all these attempts to get them back to barracks, and it seemed civil war between the Berlin government and the Kiel Administrative Council was inevitable.
While this trouble was brewing, Bavaria was almost entirely out of government control; the Bavarian Social Republic had been declared on 9th November and the separatist government was beginning to enact socialist reforms. Although it publicly promised to respect property rights, it established militias of soldiers, armed with weapons taken straight from the munitions factories. Minister-President Kurt Eisner of the Independent Social Democratic Party announced that the Social Republic was ‘a friend to all the free peoples of the world’ yet his incompetent government led by students, actors and journalists could not even maintain order in Munich itself let alone Bavaria as a whole. Independent militias were formed by unionised workers and by demobilised soldiers to protect what was theirs, or what they had taken. The Munich government was little military threat, but it posed a huge propaganda threat; there were rumblings in the cities of the Rhineland and in Saxony which Ebert and the government needed to silence.
Chancellor Ebert called the Workers’ Committee to session on the 15th November and the body met for eleven straight hours during which the three main socialist parties hashed out an agreement to save Germany and forward the cause of socialism. The 16th November Bulletin was made public the next morning and it immediately gave the initiative to the government. The Bulletin announced Berlin’s support for the democratisation of industry, and offered to involve elected workers’ representatives in government. The Bulletin implied that the Reichstag would be filled with workers’ deputies, yet this was left purposefully vague. Almost immediately, factories were turned over to elected deputies. On 17th November Muller, as Chair of the Workers’ Committee, made an agreement with leading industrialists to protect their rights under the future government. They were promised continued ownership of their enterprises, and in return they offered significant concessions such as an eight-hour work day and paid holidays for workers.
With the Munich government and the Kiel mutineers isolated by government offers of democratically run industry, and significant concessions from industrialists, Ebert needed to play for time until demobilised soldiers could be fielded against the state’s enemies to crush the separatist governments in the North and the South. In order to do this, Ebert announced that there was to be a People’s Assembly in Berlin in December. He extended invitations to all elected labour representatives. The meeting was to be chaired by Richard Muller, with whom he had increasingly good relations, and would play a part in shaping the future German constitution. Ebert intended this body to approve his plans while distracting the public from the government reassertion of authority in Kiel and Munich.
The People’s Assembly was held in Dresden because of its neutrality; it was held by the government but was far away from Berlin and thus considered terra nullus. Over nine hundred delegates attended, most of them elected shop steward and union leaders. Most of them were not affiliated with any labour organisation, although nearly two thirds of them were affiliated with a leftist party, most of them with the SPD. It opened on the 3rd December, four days before Munich was placed under siege by government forces.
The Battle of Munich would last nearly two weeks as the Social Republic fought for its survival. General Hindenburg mobilised 40,000 men who, although officially demobilised, were employed by the government without public knowledge from what little war funds Germany had remaining. They surrounded the city and fought street to street, house to house for control of the city. President Eisner ordered the entire population to defend the Republic, yet the city was as divided as the nation itself. Several militias sided with the government, flying the black red and gold of the state rather than the plain red flag of the Republic. Other groups fought implacably against both sides; a clique of anarchists bombed a government check-point on 10th December and then assassinated one of Eisner’s deputies two days later. In the end their base of operations was ransacked by a government-sponsored militia and all its members massacred in the street. It was these militias which would bring an end to the Republic. A Catholic group calling itself the Bavarian Unionist Action Squad, comprising 108 armed men, attacked Eisner’s residence and, during the fighting, killed him. With his death all organised resistance ended, and the army occupied Munich. In a series of events which would later go down in infamy, the bedraggled soldiers, whose lives on the western Front had been hellish, pillaged the city’s relatively prosperous areas while exacting bloody vengeance on what they regarded as Communist traitors. 900 prisoners were executed in cold blood and their bodies thrown into the Isar River. No one would be held accountable for these deaths, and the massacre would later be used as propaganda by Communists.
With the Munich Republic crushed and demobilised soldiers flooding back to civilian life, the government was faced with a whole new series of problems. They did not want Germany to be held hostage by roaming gangs of armed thugs with no money or work to return to. They also needed to crush the uprisings in the North. Philipp Schneidemann thus met General Hindenburg, and cajoled him into allowing demobilising units to elect special Commissioners, who would lead them following demobilisation. Schneidemann knew that they were not ready for civilian life and that brining millions of men back into German society would be massively destabilising. He planned for the soldiers to be quasi-military units; still under arms but not under official government sanction. He hoped these could then be used to break the Northern Revolutionaries and then be brought into the People’s Assembly where he could keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, the Executive Council agreed to postpone elections until April 1919, by which time they hoped public order would be sufficiently restored to allow a fair vote.
Returning soldiers, finding large parts of their country out of government control were split. Many joined the revolutionaries, having been exposed to radical ideology in the trenches. Others banded together to fight socialism in all its forms, and created the Freikorps, a reference to the German militias which had fought Napoleon over a hundred years previously. The majority, however, just wanted to go home, and millions deserted completely ignoring Ebert’s offers of elections. By the beginning of 1919 only 400,000 men were under government command and most of these were stationed in the south. On 15th January a battalion of Freikorps attacked Minden, a small railway head in Westphalia which had been seized by a union of rail and factory workers. The soldiers captured the town and shot several leading unionists, hanging their bodies upside down from the old Hanseatic town hall. Ebert was appalled by the violence yet saw in the Freikorps a weapon to use against the revolutionaries.
Violence between the Freikorps, the government and the Northern Revolutionaries continued throughout January and into February. Regular army units supplemented by Freikorps moved through the industrial cities hanging and shooting revolutionaries only to be met by guerrilla warfare in some cases and sullen acceptance in others. Richard Muller and his Revolutionary Stewards organised shop floor militias to defend facoties and towns against both Liebknecht’s forces and the Freikorps. Muller loosely organised them under the German Labour Division, of which he was head, yet they were mostly a local phenomenon and played little role in attacking revolutionary positions. They did, however, contain much of the violence and would later become the basis of Muller’s political aspirations.
On 2nd February 1919 Karl Liebknecht led a summit of soldiers, sailors and workers deputies in Hamburg where he was elected President of the Federal Workers’ Council (BAR). He called for mass mobilisation against the government, and he said that if the North did not fight, they would be massacred like Munich. Ebert was in a sticky situation; the brutal treatment of Munich left little room for negotiation with the
Northerners and he balked at a protracted counter-insurgency campaign. Philipp Schneidemann began talks with more moderate factions within the BAR to get them to secede and join the People’s Assembly. He used the threat of Freikorp retaliation and offered them representation in government if they left Liebknecht and the hard-liners alone. Before talks were done, Hanover and Brunswick seceded on the 10th February from the BAR because they feared reprisals from Freikorps as well as their opposition to Liebknecht’s extremist views. Their leaders took seats in the People’s Assembly and were personally welcomed by Richard Muller, in the hope that more could be enticed to leave the Revolutionaries. Throughout February more and more territory slipped away from the BAR and by 1st March Liebknecht was left with just Kiel and Hamburg under his control. Hamburg surrendered on the 3rd March after Freikorps assassinated the leader of the city’s Provisional Workers’ Council. Finally, with just Kiel left, Liebknecht settled down to a final stand-off.
Kiel was defended by 30,000 sailors and soldiers, as well as a large militia led by the Spartacists, whose leaders had all retreated to the city. Surrounding the city were 50,000 soldiers and unknown numbers of Freikorps militias led by assorted officers, as well as Ebert’s elected Commissioners. The attack began on the 5th March from the west. Government forces took Kronshagen by the 7th and one military unit reached Laboe on the coast by the 9th. Frontline commanders sent reports of gains made back to Berlin, and many in the government feared that Kiel would be like another Munich, except with trained soldiers on both sides and tensions running much higher. Chancellor Ebert, knowing full well that Kiel would fall in a matter of days, dispatched telegrams to Commissioners and officers telling them to show restraint. There was little he could do, however, to prevent a massacre once the city fell.
The fighting was brutal and continued on until the 21st March, when the garrison surrendered. Laying down their arms, hundreds were summarily executed by their comrades and militias alike, who saw them as traitors and cowards. The Spartacists took refuge aboard a destroyer, yet they were unable to pilot it and, facing bombardment from government-controlled shore defences, surrendered. Karl Liebknecht was killed by Freikorps and his body thrown into the sea, yet Rosa Luxembourg was taken alive. She was tried before a military court and executed on the 22nd March, her punishment presented as a fait accompli to the government. Ebert knew full well that the slaughter had been pre-calculated by many of his combatants, yet he publicly denied all knowledge of the victors’ actions. The far-left would brand him as the butcher of the North and the South, and he would go to his grave with the epithet ‘Class traitor and butcher’ tied to him.
With the fall of Kiel the German Revolution was over. The entire country was in the hands of the Berlin government, and Freiderich Ebert was recognised by all as Chancellor. Fighting would continue until the end of 1919 as smaller left-wing and right-wing militias battled one another and against the government, yet there would be no more challenges to the state as a whole.
[1] the initial POD is that Liebknecht gose to Kiel to support the mutineers there rather than stay in Berlin and proclaim his own republic. This makes Ebert's provisional government more stable and heads off the Spartacist Revolution.
The final years of the German Empire were to be a bloody and chaotic time both in Germany and abroad, for four great empires were tumbling down all at once, and no one knew what would replace them-if anything at all. Three ancient houses and one upstart found themselves unseated and it was up to political newcomers to mould a new Europe in which sovereignty lay in the people rather than in the scions of ancient and noble houses. However, in Germany itself the ultimate irony would be that it was one of these very scions who precipitated a revolution. On 3rd October, Prince Max von Baden was made Chancellor by the Kaiser. A liberal, the new Chancellor decreed an amnesty for all political prisoners, claiming that the nation needed to be united and open while he pursued what he had been appointed to do, namely, reach a peace agreement with the Allies. To do this, he included Social Democrats in his cabinet, including Freiderich Ebert and Philipp Schneidemann. He hoped that these two would stave off threats of a socialist revolution until the war could be ended and new elections called.
One of the political prisoners freed was Karl Liebknecht, a leading socialist and founding member of the Spartacist League alongside Rosa Luxembourg. As soon as he was released he resumed his leadership of the organisation and began publishing their party paper, The Red Flag. It called for non co-operation with the military authorities which had virtually taken over Germany, as well as repeated calls for a republic and for the removal of the ‘old elites’ which it blamed for Germany’s defeats. Liebknecht was careful not to sound triumphalistic in his columns due to his long-term opposition to a now lost war and The Red Flag was hugely popular. Socialist influences wormed their way into the ranks of the army and the Imperial navy, which had been sitting in dock for years. Dissatisfaction was rife, especially in the lower ranks and among conscripts and the edition for 26th October called for solidarity between ‘the soldiers, workers and labouring masses, oppressed together by militarists and capitalists’. In this, it drew inspiration from Russia’s combined soldier, worker and peasant Soviets which were currently fighting a gruelling civil war to the East.
The revolution was to come in November, when sailors in Kiel revolted against orders to attack the British fleet, and instead seized the town and proclaimed a Republic. By the 7th the revolution had spread to all the northern towns, and Munich was in a state of insurrection. Prince Max von Baden saw that the situation could not hope to be handled by an aristocrat, and so handed power to Freiderich Ebert whom he hoped would preserve as much of the old German constitution as possible, while making accommodations with the socialists to keep Germany whole; already Bavaria had declared a Social Republic and workers’ councils in Hanover, Frankfurt and Brunswick looked likely to reject the authority of the central government. Ebert announced on 10th November the abdication of the Kaiser. He also called for national unity, saying that ‘the road to prosperity does not lie in further bloodshed. As Germans and brothers we must stand together to rebuild our shattered land and as one people, clamour for a better tomorrow.’ As he said this, the Kaiser fled the country to the Netherlands, as the King of Bavaria fled into exile to Italy.
While Ebert said this, Liebknecht left Berlin and went to Kiel [1], the heart of the German revolution. He arrived at the naval base and was mobbed by a crowd eager to hear him speak. He addressed a crowd of 20,000 sailors and soldiers from a shore battery, and announced that ‘the People’s Revolution will not be fought in Berlin. It will be fought in our barracks and in our factories and in our fields. It is in our hearts that we must fight this battle, not in the Reichstag or in the halls of the establishment. We must tear up this ragged institution and as comrades together we must strive for our common destiny.’ Liebknecht was borne aloft by the crowd, and was elected President of the Kiel Administrative Council. It was in this function that he penned a letter, which was then published in The Red Flag, calling for all Germans to reject the authority of the Berlin government and instead raise the flag of mutiny and rebellion.
On 11th November the armistice was signed which ended the Great War. Millions of soldiers began to be demobilised as Germany braced itself for what would inevitably be a harsh peace treaty. In private, Chancellor Ebert said that ‘We should expect to be treated no better than Zanzibar or Turkey or any other half-sovereign people.’ However, the threat of Allied vengeance was a long way off when compared to the impending revolution. Ebert offered a hand to the socialists, saying that he wished there to be concord in troubled times. Ebert had never held high office before, and many of his steps were faltering, yet he knew what the people wanted and he knew that revolution was not a popular movement. He addressed a crowd in Berlin saying that ‘some would have us believe that revolution is a glorious thing. I do not see those people on the barricades. I do not see those hack-writers and cowards fight on the barricade, waving the flag shouting ‘vive la revolution’. I see them hiding in barracks behind braver men, writing stern articles in their little papers. I say that these men mean for nothing to befall Germany but fire and blood and anguish.’
It seemed that this fiery rhetoric struck a chord, for Richard Muller, leading unionist and revolutionary, entered talks with the government over labour relations. He offered to withdraw any support for revolution in exchange for a Workers’ Committee which would oversee the democratisation of industry after the crisis was over. Ebert agreed to these conditions, and an armistice was made between Muller and the government. The Workers’ Committee was chaired by Muller and included representatives from the Independent Social Democratic Party, the SPD and Muller’s Revolutionary Stewards. Ebert secured himself a place on this Committee, yet managed to keep its operations in political deep-freeze for a while. While he did this, he entered negotiations with the leaders of the army. The military high command had collapsed following Ludendorff’s psychological breakdown; however Ebert was seen by most generals as a slightly respectable politician, or at least a deal better than anyone else on offer. Ebert and General Hindenburg had reached an informal agreement on 9th November, in which Hindenburg promised to support the Berlin government and Ebert to guarantee the army freedom from any reforms made after the war. On 14th November the army publicly backed the government, and issued a bulletin describing anyone denying their authority as ‘deserters and traitors to the German Empire.’ However, the Kiel mutineers ignored all these attempts to get them back to barracks, and it seemed civil war between the Berlin government and the Kiel Administrative Council was inevitable.
While this trouble was brewing, Bavaria was almost entirely out of government control; the Bavarian Social Republic had been declared on 9th November and the separatist government was beginning to enact socialist reforms. Although it publicly promised to respect property rights, it established militias of soldiers, armed with weapons taken straight from the munitions factories. Minister-President Kurt Eisner of the Independent Social Democratic Party announced that the Social Republic was ‘a friend to all the free peoples of the world’ yet his incompetent government led by students, actors and journalists could not even maintain order in Munich itself let alone Bavaria as a whole. Independent militias were formed by unionised workers and by demobilised soldiers to protect what was theirs, or what they had taken. The Munich government was little military threat, but it posed a huge propaganda threat; there were rumblings in the cities of the Rhineland and in Saxony which Ebert and the government needed to silence.
Chancellor Ebert called the Workers’ Committee to session on the 15th November and the body met for eleven straight hours during which the three main socialist parties hashed out an agreement to save Germany and forward the cause of socialism. The 16th November Bulletin was made public the next morning and it immediately gave the initiative to the government. The Bulletin announced Berlin’s support for the democratisation of industry, and offered to involve elected workers’ representatives in government. The Bulletin implied that the Reichstag would be filled with workers’ deputies, yet this was left purposefully vague. Almost immediately, factories were turned over to elected deputies. On 17th November Muller, as Chair of the Workers’ Committee, made an agreement with leading industrialists to protect their rights under the future government. They were promised continued ownership of their enterprises, and in return they offered significant concessions such as an eight-hour work day and paid holidays for workers.
With the Munich government and the Kiel mutineers isolated by government offers of democratically run industry, and significant concessions from industrialists, Ebert needed to play for time until demobilised soldiers could be fielded against the state’s enemies to crush the separatist governments in the North and the South. In order to do this, Ebert announced that there was to be a People’s Assembly in Berlin in December. He extended invitations to all elected labour representatives. The meeting was to be chaired by Richard Muller, with whom he had increasingly good relations, and would play a part in shaping the future German constitution. Ebert intended this body to approve his plans while distracting the public from the government reassertion of authority in Kiel and Munich.
The People’s Assembly was held in Dresden because of its neutrality; it was held by the government but was far away from Berlin and thus considered terra nullus. Over nine hundred delegates attended, most of them elected shop steward and union leaders. Most of them were not affiliated with any labour organisation, although nearly two thirds of them were affiliated with a leftist party, most of them with the SPD. It opened on the 3rd December, four days before Munich was placed under siege by government forces.
The Battle of Munich would last nearly two weeks as the Social Republic fought for its survival. General Hindenburg mobilised 40,000 men who, although officially demobilised, were employed by the government without public knowledge from what little war funds Germany had remaining. They surrounded the city and fought street to street, house to house for control of the city. President Eisner ordered the entire population to defend the Republic, yet the city was as divided as the nation itself. Several militias sided with the government, flying the black red and gold of the state rather than the plain red flag of the Republic. Other groups fought implacably against both sides; a clique of anarchists bombed a government check-point on 10th December and then assassinated one of Eisner’s deputies two days later. In the end their base of operations was ransacked by a government-sponsored militia and all its members massacred in the street. It was these militias which would bring an end to the Republic. A Catholic group calling itself the Bavarian Unionist Action Squad, comprising 108 armed men, attacked Eisner’s residence and, during the fighting, killed him. With his death all organised resistance ended, and the army occupied Munich. In a series of events which would later go down in infamy, the bedraggled soldiers, whose lives on the western Front had been hellish, pillaged the city’s relatively prosperous areas while exacting bloody vengeance on what they regarded as Communist traitors. 900 prisoners were executed in cold blood and their bodies thrown into the Isar River. No one would be held accountable for these deaths, and the massacre would later be used as propaganda by Communists.
With the Munich Republic crushed and demobilised soldiers flooding back to civilian life, the government was faced with a whole new series of problems. They did not want Germany to be held hostage by roaming gangs of armed thugs with no money or work to return to. They also needed to crush the uprisings in the North. Philipp Schneidemann thus met General Hindenburg, and cajoled him into allowing demobilising units to elect special Commissioners, who would lead them following demobilisation. Schneidemann knew that they were not ready for civilian life and that brining millions of men back into German society would be massively destabilising. He planned for the soldiers to be quasi-military units; still under arms but not under official government sanction. He hoped these could then be used to break the Northern Revolutionaries and then be brought into the People’s Assembly where he could keep an eye on them. Meanwhile, the Executive Council agreed to postpone elections until April 1919, by which time they hoped public order would be sufficiently restored to allow a fair vote.
Returning soldiers, finding large parts of their country out of government control were split. Many joined the revolutionaries, having been exposed to radical ideology in the trenches. Others banded together to fight socialism in all its forms, and created the Freikorps, a reference to the German militias which had fought Napoleon over a hundred years previously. The majority, however, just wanted to go home, and millions deserted completely ignoring Ebert’s offers of elections. By the beginning of 1919 only 400,000 men were under government command and most of these were stationed in the south. On 15th January a battalion of Freikorps attacked Minden, a small railway head in Westphalia which had been seized by a union of rail and factory workers. The soldiers captured the town and shot several leading unionists, hanging their bodies upside down from the old Hanseatic town hall. Ebert was appalled by the violence yet saw in the Freikorps a weapon to use against the revolutionaries.
Violence between the Freikorps, the government and the Northern Revolutionaries continued throughout January and into February. Regular army units supplemented by Freikorps moved through the industrial cities hanging and shooting revolutionaries only to be met by guerrilla warfare in some cases and sullen acceptance in others. Richard Muller and his Revolutionary Stewards organised shop floor militias to defend facoties and towns against both Liebknecht’s forces and the Freikorps. Muller loosely organised them under the German Labour Division, of which he was head, yet they were mostly a local phenomenon and played little role in attacking revolutionary positions. They did, however, contain much of the violence and would later become the basis of Muller’s political aspirations.
On 2nd February 1919 Karl Liebknecht led a summit of soldiers, sailors and workers deputies in Hamburg where he was elected President of the Federal Workers’ Council (BAR). He called for mass mobilisation against the government, and he said that if the North did not fight, they would be massacred like Munich. Ebert was in a sticky situation; the brutal treatment of Munich left little room for negotiation with the
Northerners and he balked at a protracted counter-insurgency campaign. Philipp Schneidemann began talks with more moderate factions within the BAR to get them to secede and join the People’s Assembly. He used the threat of Freikorp retaliation and offered them representation in government if they left Liebknecht and the hard-liners alone. Before talks were done, Hanover and Brunswick seceded on the 10th February from the BAR because they feared reprisals from Freikorps as well as their opposition to Liebknecht’s extremist views. Their leaders took seats in the People’s Assembly and were personally welcomed by Richard Muller, in the hope that more could be enticed to leave the Revolutionaries. Throughout February more and more territory slipped away from the BAR and by 1st March Liebknecht was left with just Kiel and Hamburg under his control. Hamburg surrendered on the 3rd March after Freikorps assassinated the leader of the city’s Provisional Workers’ Council. Finally, with just Kiel left, Liebknecht settled down to a final stand-off.
Kiel was defended by 30,000 sailors and soldiers, as well as a large militia led by the Spartacists, whose leaders had all retreated to the city. Surrounding the city were 50,000 soldiers and unknown numbers of Freikorps militias led by assorted officers, as well as Ebert’s elected Commissioners. The attack began on the 5th March from the west. Government forces took Kronshagen by the 7th and one military unit reached Laboe on the coast by the 9th. Frontline commanders sent reports of gains made back to Berlin, and many in the government feared that Kiel would be like another Munich, except with trained soldiers on both sides and tensions running much higher. Chancellor Ebert, knowing full well that Kiel would fall in a matter of days, dispatched telegrams to Commissioners and officers telling them to show restraint. There was little he could do, however, to prevent a massacre once the city fell.
The fighting was brutal and continued on until the 21st March, when the garrison surrendered. Laying down their arms, hundreds were summarily executed by their comrades and militias alike, who saw them as traitors and cowards. The Spartacists took refuge aboard a destroyer, yet they were unable to pilot it and, facing bombardment from government-controlled shore defences, surrendered. Karl Liebknecht was killed by Freikorps and his body thrown into the sea, yet Rosa Luxembourg was taken alive. She was tried before a military court and executed on the 22nd March, her punishment presented as a fait accompli to the government. Ebert knew full well that the slaughter had been pre-calculated by many of his combatants, yet he publicly denied all knowledge of the victors’ actions. The far-left would brand him as the butcher of the North and the South, and he would go to his grave with the epithet ‘Class traitor and butcher’ tied to him.
With the fall of Kiel the German Revolution was over. The entire country was in the hands of the Berlin government, and Freiderich Ebert was recognised by all as Chancellor. Fighting would continue until the end of 1919 as smaller left-wing and right-wing militias battled one another and against the government, yet there would be no more challenges to the state as a whole.
[1] the initial POD is that Liebknecht gose to Kiel to support the mutineers there rather than stay in Berlin and proclaim his own republic. This makes Ebert's provisional government more stable and heads off the Spartacist Revolution.
