Hello and welcome to the Witness podcast from the BBC World
Service with me Alex Last. And today using recordings from the BCC archive we
go back 100 years to November 1918, when in the final weeks of World War One Germany
was on the point of collapse and facing revolution.
Archival Witness One:
The whole life of the country was becoming grimmer, it was
getting very difficult. The war was lasting too long and Germany didn’t have
much chance of winning it because conditions within the country were getting so
very difficult and there was a general feeling that the war as a whole had to
stop. This feeling was spreading very fast among the civilian population and I
saw that the war would have to end soon. That was the feeling shared by most of
the soldiers I met in those days, they were fed up with the whole thing and
they wanted to go home badly.
Alex Last:
After four years of war by late 1918 the situation in
Germany was desperate. First there was the human cost, two million German
soldiers were dead, four million had been wounded. Germany’s armies were in
retreat, its main allies were defeated or on the point of collapse. But on the
home front too civilians had been struggling. Years of a British naval blockade
on Germany had created shortages and hunger.
Archival Witness Two (Hertha Hasse):
Of course the food situation got worse and worse, which got
on everybody’s nerves.
Alex Last:
Hertha Hasse lived in Frankfurt.
Hertha Hasse:
Our diet consisted mainly of turnips one day and barley and
prunes the next and then it started again. And people got more and more
undernourished, and my mother gave everything possible to the children.
Those people who really had no connections and didn’t get
anything else were in a deplorable state of nutrition.
Alex Last:
Alarmingly for the German government discipline within the
armed forces was fraying.
Archival Witness three (Heinrich Boytoff):
In 1918 when I became a soldier myself I think discipline
was getting rather slack.
Alex Last:
Heinrich Boytoff was the son of a German officer.
Heinrich Boytoff:
You could see it on the streets of the garrison town, when
soldiers coming from the front didn’t take the pains of saluting officers
anymore. They thought the officers in the garrison had a very good time so why
should they salute them? That was considering the discipline in the Prussian
army a very great change. And it showed that something was breaking, for
instance my commanding officer was so afraid of a coming revolution that he made
me sleep with a gun in my arm in front of his rooms in the night.
I had to do that, perhaps this experience shows that the
German army behind the front was in those days, let’s say September, October,
November not quite intact anymore. And the average soldier, a lot of them I
think had the feeling that the war was lost already then.
Alex Last:
They were not alone; in September 1918 the German High
Command told the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm that the war was indeed lost.
Germany began to make peace overtures but the Allies wanted total capitulation.
The German military’s top brass had effectively ruled the country during the
war but now defeat was inevitable they wanted to abdicate responsibility for
the catastrophe. So in the final weeks of the war there was constitutional
reform, a move towards parliamentary democracy. For the first time leaders of
the left-wing Social Democrats the country’s largest political party were
invited to into government, but events on the ground were moving fast.
There were strikes by workers and in Kiel sailors of the
German Navy mutinied demanding peace.
Naval Officer Edgar Luktin was in the city.
Archival Witness Four (Edgar Luktin):
The first signs of what was coming appeared in Kiel, there
was some shooting, in the morning of the 5th of November I saw the
Red Flag on board of my boat. First shock, the general feeling was of course,
well now it’s definitely over and that was the feeling of the Kiel population
too. They were certainly mostly interested in coming to and with this lost war
because then they could hope they would get food again. They were more or less
starving since quite a considerable time.
Alex Last:
And form Kiel protests escalated across Germany, left-wing
workers and soldiers councils were set up in major cities, there were calls for
peace and democratisation, the creation of a socialist state, some wanted to go
further. Germany was facing a revolution.
In response peace efforts were stepped up and on the 9th
of November the Kaiser himself was forced to abdicate and in Berlin Germany was
declared a Republic. And the leaders of the Social Democratic party took charge
of the government, trying to stabilise the situation.
Archival Witness four (Baron von Rheinbarben):
When I arrived in the Foreign Office on the morning of the 9th
of November there were certain groups in the streets and unrest everywhere. But
we didn’t know the real truth that the Kaiser had left for Holland and that the
German government had broken down.
Alex Last:
Baron von Rheinbarben was a German diplomat.
Baron von Rheinbarben:
There was no more government to decide what should happen.
Only one man perhaps and that was Ebert the chief of the Social Democrat Party.
He remained in office but we heard that Schiedemann another Social Democrat had
declared a German Republic from the window of the Reichstag.
Archival Witness five (Eva Reichman):
The atmosphere was heavy with rumours.
Alex Last:
Eva Reichman lived in Berlin.
Eva Reichman:
Then suddenly I remember near the Opera House a red motor
car chased through Unter den Linden, a motor car with a red flag with soldiers
and machine gun in front. The others followed, a few shots were heard in the
distance. The streets filed with little discussion groups bearing banners or
shouting `Long live the Republic! Long live the Socialist Revolution!`
Archival Witness six:
There were thousands and thousands of people, there was a
mob. They cried that they wanted the communists as new rulers. And I saw
officers still in uniform and I saw the mob taking away the epaulettes of those
officers. It was terrible.
Archival Witness seven:
Then suddenly the news sellers turned up with new special
editions, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had abdicated. At that moment, it was
a moment of extreme excitement, the idea of monarchy or no monarchy didn’t
matter to me in the least, my only idea was that now the Armistice was
attained.
Alex Last:
And within days the war would be over, though the political
chaos in Germany would not. For peace Germany would have to accept harsh terms
but its military and political leaders knew that fighting on was not an option.
The German army was defeated and exhausted; the public would not countenance
futile slaughter. And yet for soldiers like Hartwig Pohlmann the deafeat was
still very hard to take.
Archival Witness eight(Hartwig Pohlmann):
We of course knew that the bitter end was near, our
Armistice delegation had crossed the lines near La Capelle on November the 8th.
Two days later HQ orders told us that the Armistice will be concluded without
delay. The Emperor, the Crown Prince and all the Federal Princes had resigned.
That same day the new German Republican government of Ebert,
Schiedemann and Haase asked our supreme Headquarters to make sure that we
soldiers should uphold discipline. Then we received on November the 11th
the order `As from twelve noon the guns are silent, the war is over`. How we
had imagined and longed for that very moment, but now Germany had capitulated,
and in our state of despair the retreat began.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment