The German Revolution of 1918

 Link https://youtu.be/UC9PEkbC6Y8

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 5^th 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 9^th 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 9^th 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 8^th. 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 11^th 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.