Germany’s defeat and ultimate national humiliation after the First World War led to widespread discontent and resentment against the draconian peace settlement. Workers composed a revolutionary mass that forced the old monarchic governments out of office in November 1918, but there remained a strong minority among the workers who wanted more than a democratic revolution that had already been fulfilled. They saw the overthrow of the monarchy as a first step toward establishing Communism by following the precedent that the Bolsheviks had already set in Russia in 1917, especially after social differences were heightened during the war. Almost everyone became poorer, but the lower income groups faced hunger more greatly than the higher income groups since they had suffered the most because of supply problems for food and fuel throughout becoming increasingly war weary. Meanwhile, the immediate future of the state remained highly uncertain. Political chaos that ensued following the end of the First World War left to local populations taking spontaneous action to express their grievances, akin to the March 1917 revolution in Russia that likewise filled a political vacuum, while the old order did not initially counter with any resistance. The armistice on 11 November 1918 effectively meant a surrender in view of total military defeat, regardless of this term implying an honourable ceasefire that implied a peace between equal parties. However, the actual military situation was not evident to the public, as it was to military personnel, including the naval personnel who were conscious of the thorough effectiveness of the ongoing British blockade that could not be overcome, and also stifled international trade while causing grievous economic difficulties.
The sailors’ revolutionary outbreak that had begun in Kiel on 1 November spread to other northern German ports, which was followed by setting up workers’ and soldiers’ councils following the precedence set by soviets that emerged to fill local vacuums of authority during the Russian revolution, in all of the major cities and ports. These councils that had first appeared to coordinate increasingly larger workers’ strikes in 1917 to agitate for economic demands as a form of democratising German political life coexisted uneasily albeit peacefully with the civil service, as they did not seek to overthrow the old order, apart from overthrowing the emperor and demanding the establishment of a fully democratic form of government. Shop Stewards who were elected by workforces to represent them independently of the trade union hierarchy composed the most active revolutionary group who had planned for an armed uprising. The leaders of the USPD, which had split from the SPD in April over continued support for the war effort, met with these Shop Stewards on 2 November to determine a date for seizing power. The USPD membership itself, which had broken away from the majority socialist SPD over continuing the war, was presently divided over applying parliamentary methods, as was advocated by the party leader, Hugo Haase, in contrast to revolutionary tactics and establishing a Soviet-style form of government of regional councils, in contrast to the SPD that sought to establish a peaceful transition to parliamentary democracy and institute gradual socialist reforms. A more radical party was the Spartacist League, which broke away from the USPD and later called itself the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on 1 January 1919. This party, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, spurned parliamentary institutions, and called for the immediate seizure of power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat by intending to provoke a “true” socialist revolution following the Bolshevik model to institute radical social upheaval and establishing a government of regional Soviet-style regional councils. Liebknecht and Luxemburg had consistently opposed the war, and sought to follow the success of the Russian revolution, although they had reservations about how Lenin consolidated his power in an autocratic manner, including Luxemburg calling for not resorting to violence. Regardless of their expressions about how a revolution was to be carried out, there was widespread fear about upheaval leading to widespread violence and political turmoil that had afflicted Russia following the Bolshevik takeover of power.
A decisive development took place with the proclamation of a republic in Bavaria on 7 November in the face of fearing an invasion following the collapse of Austria-Hungary. The Independent Socialists (USPD) under Kurt Eisner seized the initiative in Bavaria by establishing a council of workers, soldiers and peasants as a radical break with the past to bring about peace. The Wittelsbach monarchy was declared to be deposed and the establishment of a Bavarian Democratic and Socialist Republic was proclaimed on 7 November, which was joined by the Majority Socialists (SPD), as part of a radical middle class political revolution that was autonomous from the central authority in Berlin. They confirmed maintaining the former officials in power, pledged to maintain law and order, protect property, and convene a national assembly, while also repudiating socialising the means of production at a time of economic dislocation. The aristocratic rulers were similarly then deposed in Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig.
While the Shop Stewards and the USPD debated whether armed insurrection was advisable, which resulted in a twenty-one to nineteen to postpone launching an insurrection, the SPD under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann, played the leading role in determining the course of subsequent events constituting a limited middle-class revolution while they were determined that the working class would only come to power though constitutional parliamentary democratic means by instituting peaceful reforms, while being unconditionally opposed to a communist revolution, having thoroughly shifted away from orthodox revolutionary Marxism. They demanded greater representation in the national government’s cabinet upon the emperor’s abdication and establishing a new democratic constitutional government, to which Prince Max concurred as the only way to avoid the outbreak of civil war and announced the abdication of the emperor and the crown prince at noon on 8 November. Wilhelm Gröner, who had succeeded Ludendorff on 26 October in the interest of having successful peace negotiations, informed William II that the soldiers would neither support him or take action against bolshevism, and demanded an armistice. Prince Max thereafter appointed Ebert as the new head of state on 9 November in an attempt to create a constitutional monarchy.
During this time, Scheidemann was warned that Liebknecht was on the verge of proclaiming “a free Socialist German republic” as an extension of the revolution, as Lenin had staged in Russia. Fearing similar consequences in Germany that had taken place in Russia, where Lenin dissolved the constituent assembly in January 1918, and considering “soviet rule” to be synonymous with the Bolshevik reign of terror, in stark contrast to peacefully establishing a parliamentary democracy, Scheidemann sought to pacify raucous demonstrators assembled in front of the Reichstag and ended with speech with proclaiming a German republic on the afternoon of 9 November, which set an irreversible course for the remaining course of the restoration of governmental stability in conjunction with conservative rather than radical elements, as Ebert expected to maintain the support of the civil service and the officer corps, while hoping to bring peace as soon as possible, and preserve law and order. Liebknecht proclaimed the establishment of a socialist republic two hours after Scheidemann announced the fall of the German monarchy, while public disorder prevailed.
The new national administration’s authority remained tenuous in view of revolutionary disturbances, including the Shop Stewards planning to set up a provisional government based on the workers’ and soldiers’ councils without reference to the Reichstag representatives. Ebert thus offered memberships to USPD members in the new national government on 9 November to forestall an uprising from below, which they accepted by a vote of twenty-one to nineteen. The SPD and the USPD members thus formed a new government, the Council of People’s Deputies, on 10 November, each with six representatives from both parties. Not any Spartacists who aimed to take over the state and expropriate the means of production, i.e. execute revolutionary Marxism into practice, were elected. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Berlin approved the composition of this government by a wide majority at a mass meeting at Zirkus Busch on the same day, when they elected a twenty-eight member executive committee to manage their collective concerns. Although they imitated the Russian Soviets in name, they did not serve Lenin’s belief that a proletarian revolution Germany would not take place as the key to staging the overthrow of capitalism. These German soviet-style councils filling the vacuum of authority strove to maintain order in the immediate postwar chaos without radical revolutionary purposes, and governed Germany on a provisional basis for the next three months.
Permanent officials cooperated willingly with Ebert as the legitimate successor of Prince Max, but they would not agree to work with the executive committee of the councils. The officer corps also pledged their full support to the new parliamentary democracy on 9 November in exchange for an orderly withdrawal of three million troops across the Rhine by 12 December in accordance with the armistice terms, as well as defend Germany against Bolshevism by having the army at the government’s disposal for this purpose. Since the SPD did not see any possibility of creating a moderate and democratic armed force that could preserve order until a democratic constitution could be promulgated, Ebert representing the revolutionary government, and Gröner representing the military High Command, concluded a secret agreement during a private telephone conversation on 9 November to maintain order and curtail “Bolshevism” by curtailing the power of the soldiers’ councils, along with protecting the government from attacks by radical leftist elements to uphold its authority, in return for the government providing continued support to the military and not take any action to undermine its interests. Gröner pledged to Ebert that the High Command would continue functioning until the troops withdrew into Germany in a disciplined and orderly manner, in exchange for the government supporting the officer corps in maintaining discipline in the military, securing the army’s supply sources, and preventing disruptions in the railway system during the withdrawal, which Ebert accepted without hesitation during a time when his authority was highly tenuous. Gröner likewise expressed exaggerated concerns that the revolution would destroy the authority of the officer corps, and lead to a disastrous civil war that would weaken Germany and open the way to Bolshevik control, although there was a pervasive conservative sentiment among the working class that was solidly committed to parliamentary democracy. The majority of moderate council members were primarily concerned about the restoration of civil order and economic security, rather than political ideology. The trade union leader Karl Legien and the heavy industry magnate Hugo Stinnes concluded an agreement on 15 November 1918 that established a set of workers’ rights to contribute to postwar stability in the Stinnes–Legien Agreement as an accord concluded by German trade unions and industrialists, which introduced the eight-hour working day, the recognition of the trade unions as the official representation of the workforce, and the permission to form workers’ councils in firms with more than over employees. Since negotiations had been caused by the prospect of millions of soldiers returning from the First World War, the agreement contained a stipulation guaranteeing them a right to their former employment. While the trade unions were able to realise many of their long-standing demands, they all but acknowledged the private ownership of the means of production.
A Congress of Councils from all over Germany assembled at Zircus Busch in Berlin on 16 December, where there were limited demands for the reorganisation of the state, which would not be comparable to the upheaval that had taken place in Soviet Russia. The delegates refused to give the Spartacist League any opportunity to express their views in the assembly deliberations, and elected a new executive that as completely composed of SPD members who supported Ebert’s plan for the election of a National Assembly. They reached an agreement on 22 November on a new constitutional form for the transitional period before the constituent assembly would meet, vesting all executive and legislative power vested in the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of “the German Socialist Republic.” The government was to exercise power in the name of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, to which Ebert reluctantly agreement with the grave suspicion that these councils could compose a possible source of opposition to parliamentary government, while there was ongoing friction between the SPD and the USPD about whether the gains of the revolution were to be either consolidated or extended, as the SPD would not sanction the transition to complete socialism. Another agreement was the Hamburg points ratified on 16 December, which called for creating a popular militia that would elect its own officers, and would serve under the command of the cabinet and executive committee, along with the abolition of absolute discipline along with ranks and insignia, and suppressing the standing army. An overwhelming majority approved the government decision on 19 December to elect the constituent assembly on 19 January.
The USPD left the government on 29 December 1918 in protest against the SPD that would not sanction replacing the old military system with a popular militia, which the army leadership would not accept, and nor would Ebert who remained concerned about continued disorder in the form of mob violence, and therefore required army units to impose order. The Spartacists hereafter broke with the USPD to form the KPD on 1 January 1918, and denounced Ebert as “the enemy of the working class,” called for a government composed of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. The Shop Stewards and Berlin USPD joined the Communists in a call for mass protest demonstrations on 5 January, and a fifty-three member revolutionary committee of communists and Shop Stewards was set on the following day, which issued a proclamation deposing the establishment of a new revolutionary government led by Liebknecht.
Liebknecht and Luxemburg considered the timing to be too early, but they felt compelled to take this opportunity to take action out of loyalty to the workers who pillaged arsenals to arm bands of their radical supporters in a poorly planned attempt to seize political power on the Bolshevik model, occupied the newspaper building of the SPD and nearby press buildings, the Reich printing office, the railway headquarters, food warehouses, among other important buildings, including even briefly occupying the Reichstag, while calling for a socialist revolution, which was followed by similar uprisings in other cities, regardless of their limited power base. While the majority SPD now governed the state, Gustav Noske, the SPD Minister of War, depended on over a hundred Free Corps (Freikorps) as counterrevolutionary volunteer paramilitary militia forces to establish order and face threats from radical leftist elements through applying their discipline, motivation, competent leadership and military tactical experience. Captain (later General and future Chancellor) Kurt von Schleicher who worked with the political department of the Reichswehr, contributed to setting up these armed formations consisting of small self-contained units composed of military veterans and ardent nationalists, who were secretly equipped and paid by the Reichswehr with the support of the SPD, and financed by leading industrial and agrarian interests, in addition to possibly pilfering weapons and other supplies from former German army stocks that were supposed to have been destroyed under the terms of the Versailles treaty. These formations that engaged in political violence served as a form of informal law enforcement against perceived threats from leftist elements when the stability of the central authority remained tenuous during domestic turmoil.
The communist uprising was met with street fighting in Berlin beginning on 6 January, and was supressed by Freikorps militias by 12 January who fought against communists, while the SPD employed these armed groups in the interest of imposing the rule of the state through forcible means to establish the rule of law. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by Free Corps officers on 13 January. The forceful imposition of order caused deep resentment of the SPD among moderate workers who did not support the uprising, since the bloody intervention by the Free Corps were called and directed by the SPD that undermined working class support during the suppression of unrest through authoritarian means by the Free Corps that remained ongoing throughout Germany, including suppressing revolts in Brunswick, Saxony and Bavaria. National elections were held thereafter on 19 January, with results showing strong support for parties advocating democratic government and moderate reform, showing an increase for the SPD without a majority, which formed a coalition cabinet with the Centre Party and the Progressives, now called the German Democratic Party (DDP), with Ebert the SPD leader as President of the Republic. The population thus repudiated leftist extremism and conservative reaction. On 6 February 1919, this provisional government convened a constituent assembly in Weimar, away from the political unrest in Berlin where violence was widespread, and disassociation from the defeated Prussian militarism. This assembly met on 10 February and elected Ebert as the president of the republic.
This Weimar assembly largely composed of middle-class delegates were opposed to socialist experiments, while the authorities were already attempting to suppress the councils in the factories and Noske’s use of the Free Corps caused great bitterness among workers. The Communists organised widespread strikes in defence of workers’ councils, which led to sporadic street fighting in certain cities and attempts to proclaim Soviet Republics, and also called for a general strike as a a first step to a second revolution, which was endorsed by the USDP and the Berlin workers’ and soldiers’ council, and the USPD completely rejecting parliamentary democracy, and calling for a government of workers’ councils.
While the allies deliberated on the treatment of postwar Germany, without Germany being a party to the negotiations, there was further political violence that broke out throughout Germany. A reactionary military officer killed the Bavarian Minister-President, Kurt Eisner, a member of the USPD, on 21 February, as he was about to resign when his party only acquired two percent of the popular vote in the state election. Further violence broke out when Communists in Berlin called a general strike in March 1919, which led to fighting against the Free Corps until 16 March that left 1,200 killed. The USPD called for a general strike in Bavaria, which led to months of instability. On 7 April, some USPD members seized power in Munich and proclaimed a Bavarian Soviet Republic as a second attempt at revolution, which was further radicalized by local Communists proclaimed their own Soviet Republic on 9 April. Free Corps as both military adjunct mercenaries and regular army units brutally repressed this revolution on 1-2 May 1919, which was to have a conservative reactionary effect on regional political life in Bavaria thereafter.
The aims of the German revolution of 1918 beyond the overthrow of the monarchy remained unclear, while there was no resistance from the old monarchical interests that became replaced by a constitutional democracy, and left the socialists and democrats to deal with a hopeless situation. Moreover, apart from turning Germany into a democracy, the revolution did not change the social structure while the traditional parties in the government administration and the military remained in place, rather than being replaced with democrats, who continued identifying with the pre-revolutionary state and were opposed to the government that had signed the armistice. A socialist government composed of the SPD and USPD as a separate independent party drawn from the SPD members ruled for several weeks following the emperor’s abdication while the unity between the two socialist parties represented in the government was tenuous. The USPD wanted constitutionally institutionalised powers for the workers’ councils, whereas the SPD aimed at calling a National Assembly that would draft a democratic constitution and limit the power of the councils, which eventually faded out of existence. In spite of their differences regarding Germany’s future, the government agreed in December 1918 to schedule general elections to a National Assembly on 19 January 1919, which opened in Weimar, a distance away from the political unrest in Berlin on 6 February. Ebert was elected president on 11 February, and a cabinet under Scheidemann was formed from a coalition of SPD, the Centre, and the German Democratic Party on 13 February, marking the end of the revolutionary period.
As the spirit of imperial Germany continued in the unreformed civil service, the judiciary, the National Assembly promulgated an emergency constitution that was modeled on the imperial constitution. The president would be elected by the assembly in place of the emperor, and would have strong individual powers, as in the U.S., but would leave the conduct of everyday political matters to a Reich chancellor who would propose ministers to the president. The president nominated ministers, who were responsible to the assembly, which was sovereign, except for the rights of the states. The conduct of everyday political matters would be left to a Reich chancellor, who proposed ministers to the president. The federal principle was expressed in an upper house, whose assent was required for legislation. In case of disagreement between the two chambers, the issue was to be decided by a referendum. Germany now had a democratic government, and similar events happened in all German states, where most of them adopted equally democratic elections and elected democratic governments led by the SPD. However, order was not yet restored, as there still remained fighting between radical leftist workers and the Free Corps for several months, while the national assembly set out to making a new constitution on the pattern of western parliamentary democracy, which was later enacted on 11 August 1919. Nevertheless, the German political landscape remained chaotic, and would open the way for demagogue elements to express radical solutions.
The allies further jeopardised the postwar situation by formulating the draft of the highly punitive Versailles treaty on 7 May that would undermine the popularity of the new Weimar Republic. Its military terms would render Germany largely defenceless against foreign intervention by reducing the German army to a force of 100,000 volunteers, which would be limited to 4,000 officers serving for twenty-five years, and the enlisted troops for twelve. The military was deprived of aircraft, tanks and offensive weapons, and the general staff, war academy and cadet schools were to be dissolved. The Rhineland was to remain occupied until disarmament requirements were fulfilled, and was to be permanently demilitarised, along with fifty kilometres to the east. The navy was to be reduced to a token force without submarines.
Shortages of food and coal remained ongoing, and many industries that had supplied the military needed to close, which caused a rise in unemployment, adding to the masses of returning soldiers who did not have employment prospects, as well as being traumatized by the war experience in different ways. A final text was handed to the German delegation on 16 June, which the cabinet rejected by eight votes to six, whereas Hindenburg admitted that the outcome of further military operations was extremely doubtful, as Germany could not hold out against the Entente powers, with Gröner fully agreeing that this would also lead to continued internal disorders, along with the complete destruction of the country and the officer corps, in addition to the worsening economic conditions. The British blockade would remain in place until the German National Assembly voted to accept the allied peace terms on 23 June 1919, before the Versailles treaty was signed on 28 June, which possibly caused 750,000 civilian deaths from starvation by that time while also stifling international trade, when industrial production in 1919 was forty-two percent of what it had been in 1913 and grain was half of what it had been at prewar levels.
Costs for imported goods increased by sixty-five percent between November 1918 and July 1919, while domestic costs increased by forty-three percent. Meanwhile, currency in circulation increased along with public debts. Accepting this peace settlement was thus inevitable, before a postwar recovery could be made possible. The Versailles inevitably reduced export earnings while increasing the necessity to import goods following the loss of resource rich regions, which aggravated the weak balance of national payments that was in deficit, and was further worsened by paying reparations in foreign currency that constituted approximately 2.5% of the gross domestic product, which rapidly depleted the national bank reserves. Furthermore, the massive war debt resulting from having sold state bonds to the population further aggravated state debts.
Difficulties thus emanated from abroad that would further cause internal factors to undermine the Weimar Republic. The leading statesmen of the victorious national met in Paris on 18 January 1919, the anniversary of the creation of the German Empire in 1871 as a deliberate humiliation to Germany, to decide the future of the defeated Central Powers. They demonstrated a distinctively hostile attitude toward them, and while the turbulence continued within Germany, their decisions further undermined support for the Weimar republic. President Wilson’s most important goal was the establishment of a League of Nations that would mediate all future conflicts between nations and make war as a means of politics unnecessary, which was also prompted by the fear of Communism. He wanted to offer a pacifist vision to Europeans, and envisioned a European union of free, democratic nations, based on the principle of self-determination, and also to permanently weaken Germany’s military potential while enabling its restoration as a peaceful and prosperous nation. However, Germany was not allowed to join the newly founded League of Nations, thus expressing remaining animosity while imposing draconian demands in the peace settlement that conformed to French and British war aims.
The main priority for the French was establishing security against a future German invasion through shifting the balance of power by weakening Germany’s economic and demographic potential, at a time when Germany had a much more intensive industrial production than France, and sought to reduce German superiority, reconstruct the destroyed areas, and cover their own war debt. The French wanted high amounts of reparations, while also hoping to control Germany’s western industrial heartlands by separating the Rhineland and the Ruhr from Germany. As an additional safeguard against future German aggression, France also hoped to establish an alliance network among the newly independent nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Poland to threaten Germany with a second front. The British wanted to demilitarise Germany and to seize its battle fleet and merchant navy, claiming their share in German reparations and demanded control over most of Germany’s African possessions. They also believed, like the Americans, that Germany should eventually recover as a major trade partner without posing a military threat.
The peace terms (see Eurodocs, World War I Archive: Versailles) regarding Germany were especially severe, owing to the persistence of French and British war aims that extended beyond the American President Wilson’s Fourteen Point peace plan. The Allies acting with a high degree of severity on Germany in pursuing their national interests. The French delegation at the Versailles Conference sought national security interests in the face of compensating for its losses by weakening Germany, whereas British delegation sought a restoration of the balance of power in Europe, while also maintaining Germany as a free market for British commerce. In practice, the peace terms that were dictated to the German delegation that was received in early May 1919 were highly punitive, which largely disregarded German requests for alleviating its burdensome provisions on the basis of the Fourteen Points.
In terms of territorial compensation, Germany had to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France and accept an allied occupation of most of its western provinces. The French combined parts of Rhenish Prussia and the Bavarian Palatinate to create the Saarland, which was transferred to French control under a League of Nations Commission for fifteen years, and a plebiscite would determine its future thereafter, but Germany would have to buy back the rich coal mines there if there was going to be a pro-German majority. The border areas of Stavelot-Malmédy and Moresnet with a German-speaking minority were annexed by Belgium, and the Rhineland was occupied by French, British, American and Belgian troops. A plebiscite in northern Schleswig with its Danish minority resulted in splitting this province between Germany and Denmark. In the east, Germany ceded the provinces of West Prussia and Posen to Poland to provide it with access to the Baltic Sea, along with some of Upper Silesia. Danzig became a so-called free city under a League of Nations mandate, which split East Prussia from the rest of Germany. A small area in Silesia was given to Czechoslovakia and another strip of land, the Memel, in northern East Prussia was initially placed under the administration of a French high commissioner, and then later taken over by Lithuania in 1923 in accordance with the terms of the Versailles Treaty. This meant Germany losing thirteen percent of its territory and subjecting ethnic Germans to foreign governance, while losing 14.6 percent of its arable land, 74.5 percent of its iron ore, 68.1 percent of its zinc, and 26 percent of its coal resources, in addition to giving up all of the German colonies.
In terms of its military capacity, Germany had to disarm completely and its army was reduced to 100,000, down from 4.6 million in 1918, with service time for officers slated for twenty-five years, and twelve years for enlisted troops, and therefore prevented training reserve forces. This would be inferior even to the Polish army, with an army of 300,000 and 1.2 million in reserves. The German army was also prohibited from having an army general staff, as well as a general staff academy in which generals had undergone training for future commands. The German military was thus reduced to providing frontier defence and maintaining internal order. Restrictions on war production also had economic effects, since Germany was also prohibited from exporting weaponry, and only produce certain types of arms and ammunition for the Reichswehr, which undermined the operations of the local heavy, chemical, and manufacturing industries that could be considered either directly or indirectly supplying production for war materials. Germany also had to demilitarize a fifty-kilometre zone on the right bank of the Rhine by dismantling all fortifications, as well as on Heligoland, and was forbidden to have military aircraft, submarines, tanks, heavy artillery and poison gas. The navy was limited to coastal defence with a total of 15,000 personnel manning largely outdated warships. The existing battle fleet would have to be given to Britain along with all merchant ships. An Inter-Allied Military Control Commission was granted large powers to supervise and control German disarmament in each of the military branches until 1927. Meanwhile, the interwar Reichswehr composed entirely of volunteers retained the best and brightest of wartime personnel among its officer corps and non-commissioned officers that constituted the core of future rapid mobilisation of future enlistments. Every military rank was trained to assume the duties of the next higher ranks that would facilitate a rapid growth of a leadership cadre at separate levels, with more senior personnel being discharged early to allow for new enlistments, with the rate of enlisted discharges rising from twelve to twenty-five percent by 1926, and thereby creating a well-trained reserve force.
There were further conditions that added to Germany’s burdens. In financial terms, the Entente and the French in particular had always claimed that the Germans would have to pay for the damage in the occupied regions and also most of the Entente’s war expenses. To justify such an enormous claim, the Entente argued that Germany and its allies had started the war and were therefore responsible for all of their enemies’ costs and damages. Germany was thus to sign a blank check for a yet undetermined amount. In judicial terms, the Entente claimed that the Germany leaders had conducted the war partly in a criminal manner, mainly by opting for submarine warfare. The Kaiser and about two thousand German top officers and officials were to be put on trial.
Contemporary circumstances forced the German government to sign the peace treaty while being unable to make any substantial changes to its highly punitive provisions. The German public was incensed and horrified by the claim of German guilt for starting the war, and the universal consensus was that this extremely unjust treaty required modification. The trade conditions favouring the Allies would lapse after five years, the occupation would end after fifteen years, and according to the letter of the treaty, German disarmament was ultimately conditional upon worldwide disarmament after Germany had disarmed first.
Germany was weakened more than Wilson had intended, but he had been forced to negotiate of weakness and make far reaching concessions to the allies in order to secure the peace treaty at all, and this treaty also had a decisively negative effect on the German population. The fourteen points and Wilson’s assurances in October 1918 had suggested milder terms, but the biggest problem was that the Germans still refused to acknowledge that they had lost a world war. This gave rise to illusions that they had been duped into disarming by the alleged promise of a just peace by the American president, and it remained difficult to envisage how they had lost the war without losing a decisive battle and without an Allied invasion of Germany. As a result, the trauma of defeat and the harsh peace settlement made many Germans susceptible to distortions of the truth about why the war was lost. Nevertheless, the German government was forced to accept the Versailles Treaty on 28 June 1919 to avert an Allied invasion that could not be withstood, as well as the possibility of a communist insurrection, and begin establishing postwar stability.
During the same time, Allied troops occupied western Germany, while the Polish army moved into some of the eastern territories and fought with remainders of the German army, while some German units joined the Russian civil war. Free Corps were initially deployed to protect the country’s eastern borders where skirmishes broke out between the local populations, including a prolonged dispute over the boundary delineation in upper Silesia from 1919 to 1921, and also violently suppressing leftist workers’ uprisings to restore order throughout Germany to stem revolutionary demands that threatened the new democracy. Although the Weimar government ordered the Iron Division Freikorps taking part in the Russian Civil War in the newly independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to withdraw in August 1919 following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, they nevertheless remained fighting on the side of the local nationalists against the Bolsheviks as part of the West Russian Volunteer Army and the Rossback Freikorps, only retreating into Lithuania at the end of November, and then back to East Prussia by mid-December. Baltic ethnic German Landeswehr, or locally organised militias, troops fighting under British command continued fighting against the Bolsheviks in the Baltics until as long as 1 February 1920.
One of the worst detrimental effects on the newly-established German democracy was the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory that Hindenburg and Ludendorff propagated in August 1919 to cope with the humiliation of the military defeat to absolve themselves from the military taking responsibility for the military defeat. They claimed that democratic and socialist strivings for reforms on the home front that compromised the military as a result of politicians who exercised their influence over an undefeated German army by launching a revolution, and it was therefore unnecessary to accept a total defeat. They had already claimed before November 1918 that the democrats had undermined the war effort by diverting popular attention from ultimate support for the war in favour of concern about domestic gains. Hence, Socialists and Democrats who represented the new Weimar system were responsible for the German defeat. In fact, the revolution was triggered by the decisive admission of military defeat, and Ludendorff had ordered the constitutional government into existence. All of Germany’s allies in southeastern Europe had broken down in October 1918, and the western front was about to crumble due to the vast superiority of the Entente forces. As Ludendorff himself admitted before the revolution that the ultimate breakdown of the German army was only a matter of time due to the vast superiority of the Entente forces in the west and the southeast. Tens of thousands of lunatic conservative fringe groups in Germany nevertheless attempted to rationalise the sudden military defeat on elements on the home front who had undermined Germany from within by spreading the “stab in the back” theory, which would become consolidated among radical conservatives, to which Adolf Hitler would contribute, following his discharge from a military hospital on 19 November, and sought to delay his demobilisation from his battalion in Munich, while lacking any other employment prospects. Hitler remained in the military during this time, and was assigned the task of investigating radical elements as Munich was under military control until a civilian government was established, and first made contact with the then obscure German Workers’ Party, or DAP, with Anton Drexler at its leader, at one of their gatherings on 12 September 1919, which had formed a separate faction from the Fatherland Party, and supported nationalist and ant-Semitic views while it was characterised by the swastika as their representative emblem. He later began giving speeches at subsequent gatherings and gradually became its most popular and compelling speaker, and then co-authored a radical twenty-five point political programme in December 1919 that included elements of nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-Marxist, anti-liberal and some socialist principles. Their beliefs would appeal to like-minded disgruntled individuals who were dissatisfied with the country facing economic hardship, political polarisation and violence, and humiliating results of the military defeat, and therefore sought solace in radical political ideas.
Although it would be possible for Germany to recover from the Treaty of Versailles, this treaty was sure to make a significant section of the German public unforgiving and eager for revenge, which made it, in the words of the German writer Berthold Brecht, a truce in a European thirty-year war. This treaty also poisoned political life in the Weimar Republic by undermining its authority, as the extremely difficult adjustment period following the war was blamed primarily on the Weimar government’s compliance with the peace treaty rather than the war itself while there appeared to be no need to accept a total defeat. The Weimar government suffered from its acceptance of this treaty that was too harsh to reconcile Germany with its former war enemies and thereby Germany’s integration into a lasting peaceful postwar order, which contradicted Wilson’s intention that Germany could expect a settlement that would contribute to establishing postwar national stability, which was opposed by the French and British war aims.
The new Weimar Republic thus had to begin its life in the shadow of defeat in the First World War and hostility from both abroad and within the state while also had fundamental weaknesses. Its constitution was promulgated on 12 August 1919, and appeared at least on paper that it could bring about a stable democracy. One fundamental weakness of this new constitution was Article 48, which gave the president of the republic, who was to be directly elected by popular vote every seven years, the right to govern by decree in emergencies, or temporary dictatorial powers that he could confer on the defence minister or the army chief of staff. The purpose of this specific provision was never intended to be applied against parliamentary governance, but remained ill-defined in terms of what would define a national emergency in actual practice. There were also some modifications to parliamentary government, such as giving the president the right to dissolve the Reichstag and appoint the chancellor. The president also had the right to interfere with the legislation of the Reichstag and submit single laws to a plebiscite.
The Reichstag was the main legislative body that controlled the government, and if it lost confidence in a chancellor, the president had to dismiss him, and could secure the Reichstag’s approval to the chancellor after dissolving the Reichstag and calling new elections. The Reichstag was normally elected every fourth year by universal, equal and secret suffrage by all people older than the age of 20. Parliamentary seats were distributed roughly by percentage of the parties’ votes. Which allowed even very small splinter party minorities to occupy Reichstag seats that could be combined into coalitions of several parties that could determine the government composition with the president’s approval. However, this also allowed for parties that were hostile to the new state that could acquire an otherwise insignificant presence in the Reichstag and position themselves to join these coalitions that could be in a position to stymie parliamentary decision-making and undermine majority governments.
One of the most pressing problems that the new German republic had to face at the end of the First World War and the peace terms was being burdened with intractable economic problems. Germany’s finances were in a parlous state by 1919 as a result of largely financing its war effort through short term loans and inflating the currency that did not correspond to its valuation corresponding to a gold standard, while gold reserves had been increasingly considerably accumulated before the outbreak of the war, culminating in the Reichsbank president, Rudolf Havenstein, ultimately demanding on 18 June 1914 that the leading German commercial banks transfer their gold reserves to the state and form a banking cartel headed by the Reichsbank, and therefore mobilising the financial reserves in preparation for a wartime economy. The government repudiated the gold standard for quantifying the value of currency altogether after the outbreak of the war, while printing and spending currency without raising taxation, which would have been unpopular, which only took place in 1916, while only six percent of the total war costs were met through taxation, with the remaining costs covered through loans. There was also the firm anticipation that its enemies to pay for the war costs.
The German Reichsmark national currency was worth less than one-third of its prewar value due to the inflationary means that the imperial government had used to finance the war, along with reducing available gold that had been in circulation. The state revenues from taxation based on nominal values were hopelessly inadequate while running a trade deficit with a low probability of eliciting foreign investment when capital was in short supply. During the same time, governments hesitated to increase direct taxation or restrict credit to a considerable degree in the face of political instability, and therefore would not risk the possibility of alienating public support. The war effort was thus sustained through issuing bonds constituting state loans to the population, rather than through taxation, leading to exceedingly high amounts of currency that remained being put in circulation.
Weak economic conditions became further weakened to considerable degrees by the Treaty of Versailles that imposed crushing economic impacts on its industrial potential. Germany lost thirteen percent of its territory, ten percent of its population, fifteen percent of its arable land, seventy-five percent of iron and sixty-eight percent of zinc ore, twenty-six percent of its coal resources, the entire Alsatian potash and textile industries, and communications system built around Alsace-Lorraine and Upper Silesia, along with ninety percent of the merchant navy and a substantial amount of railway rolling-stock. This was in addition to reparations payments fixed in April and June 1921 on the basis of the so-called “war guilt” clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty that demanded that Germany and its allies take financial responsibility for the damage and losses they inflicted resulting from the war, which provided the underlying justification for imposing reparations while the German economy that was largely based on the core industries of iron and coal production was crippled by the postwar territorial annexations, while also sustaining welfare payments to sustain the population.
The poor economic situation was further aggravated by President Ebert’s decision to maintain social welfare for the German population. Further loans were made through printing additional currency, rather than allowing the free market to continue operating on the strength of sound currency, in order to guarantee wages and pay increases to public sector employees, who did not produce positive returns at a time when certain sectors, such as the post office and railways were running deficits, make pension payments to disabled military personnel and widows, and care for orphans, subsidising food supplies, and certain industries to maintain employment that produced surplus amounts of goods in order to placate public demands for social peace, which inevitably spurred inflation, while taxation levels were not raised for the same reason. Integrating the increasingly unionised workforce into the means of production only served as a temporary expedient to prevent staging aggressive revolutionary actions against employers to redistribute property by seizing the means of production. Business owners and trade unions cooperated with maintaining social peace by having concluded the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 15 November 1918. Trade unions were allowed to form workers’ councils in all businesses that had over fifty employees, and former military personnel could resume working in their previous occupations, whereas businesses recognised trade unions and their representatives in the workforce, along with the introduction of an eight hour workday and full compensation for reduced work hours. However, the underlying fundamental elements of the economy remained weak with rising inflation and correspondingly reduced currency value.
In addition to economic difficulties, another threat to the Weimar republic that attempted to establish Germany’s first democracy came from hostile political parties on the extreme right who resented the republic and sought to overthrow the government. The members of the Free Corps who had fought against the leftists were not only anti-democratic, but also passionately nationalist and opposed to every clause of the Versailles Treaty, and thereby became a serious threat to the Republic by seeking to repudiate the Versailles Treaty that came into force on 10 January 1920. A short-lived incident resulted in a coup attempt to overthrow the republic for this purpose and establish an authoritarian regime, which was triggered by the Allies demanding the Free Corps Marine Brigade, that had fought Bolsheviks in the Baltic States and had played a leading reactionary role in Munich, be disbanded. Wolfgang Kapp, the head of the former Fatherland Party created in 1917, and Captain Waldemar Pabst, who had ordered the murder Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht reacted on 13 March 1920 by attempting a putsch with military support from General Baron Walther von Lüttwitz, the commanding general of Army Group 1 in Berlin, and Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, the leader of the Marine Brigade, whose Freikorps troops were the first to paint a swastika on their helmets. Kapp’s supporters occupied Berlin and proclaimed him as the new chancellor while attempting to establish an autocratic regime.
When Germany’s Commander-in-Chief of the army under Colonel-General von Seeckt refused to fight them and declared itself “neutral,” rather than using armed force against other German soldiers, which would undermine the integrity of solidarity in the officer corps, along with the underlying realistic understanding that Germany could not withstand an allied military intervention to impose the Versailles Treaty requirements. The legitimate government under SPD leadership fled to Dresden and then Stuttgart where they were afforded military protection. One of the consequences of this coup attempt was the army and Freikorps units in Bavaria led by Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp taking action against the Social Democratic Bavarian government by forcing it to resign, and called on Ernst Röhm and Adolf Hitler to lend their support for the coup in Berlin.
However, the national civil service refused cooperate with the putschists who did not have any constructive programme whatsoever. Although leftists were divided as a result of the SPD having had suppressed Communist elements, the parties representing the working class, the KPD, USPD and SPD, became temporarily united by reinforcing this resistance by proclaiming a general strike. Twelve million striking workers paralysed life in Berlin and decisively ceased all industrial activity, as well as banking and civil service operations, in addition to the army refusing to provide support with various garrisons being in a state of confusion about which authorities were entitled to give orders, which brought down the short-lived self-appointed Kapp government on 17 March. While there were not any consequences for those who supported this coup attempt, the general strike led to further disturbances in Berlin and Münster, and also turned into communist uprisings in the Ruhr, where a Ruhr Red Army that had secretly stockpiled small arms was formed to defend against military repression. The Ruhr Communist party demanded that the reinstated SPD government to grant them greater control over the mining industry and extensive socialization of other economic sectors, and took control of the region by 18 March. 5,000 protest strikes took place, with these protesters dominating the entire area east of Düsseldorf and Mühlheim by 20 March. These developments brought further instability while the Reichswehr, local Free Corps troops, and the Prussian police bloodily suppressed the Ruhr Red Army and offered armed resistance on 2 April.
The Kapp putsch attempt had dramatically shown the paucity of loyalty the German army was prepared to provide to the Weimar republic, which had not intervened against a reactionary uprising, while the army took action against leftist uprisings in the Ruhr in mid-March 1920 by a communist “Ruhr Red Army” in reaction to the Kapp putsch, which fought against and defeated local Freikorps troops under Franz Ritter von Epp in late March, and chose to disband themselves thereafter after the earlier fighting in early April in an armed effort against the central government that could not be sustained against armed resistance from the state, which deployed army units to disperse scattered leftist elements in early April, in spite of the region being demilitarized according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, at the risk of French and Belgian armed intervention. This violation of treaty terms led to French forces advancing toward and occupying Frankfurt-am-Main and other nearby cities on 6 April. The police would later continue this intervention after 27 April to make arrests and collect weapons abandoned by the leftist insurgents, after the military advance was withdrawn. The French forces were withdrawn on 17 May, following the withdrawal of German troops from the demilitarised zone a few days earlier.
Further disturbances broke out in Saxony and Thuringia in April that were violently repressed along with the Free Corps that ended these final attempts to stage a “second revolution.” The Reichswehr suppressed disorders in the Mansfeld mining area on 16 March, which prompted the German Communist party to to proclaim an armed insurrection against the government on the following day, which ultimately collapsed on 31 March following clashes and the KPD calling for a general strike. Outbreaks of violence between German and Polish paramilitary forces in Upper Silesia that had broken out in August 1919, which resumed in August 1920 and thereafter in a so-called “shadow war” over determining the local postwar frontier there between Germany and Poland. The Free Corps carried on fighting against Polish insurgents there when the Polish government refused to accept the result of the March 1921 plebiscite in which sixty percent of the population voted to remain with Germany, with fighting continuing until the Allies accepted a report by the League of Nation that recommended granting eighty percent of Upper Silesia to Poland, including much of its industrial populations, in 1922. The opposition to the republic was also true for the administration of justice that imposed mild punishments on the putschists. In the aftermath of this failed putsch, radical rightists who interpret the hated republic fulfilling the Versailles Treaty as betraying the state turned to terrorist tactics. The murder of Kurt Eisner that set this precedent as a result of the “stab in the back” theory was followed by the politically motivated killings of any scapegoats who could be accused of contributing to the military defeat by colluding with the allies, rather than allowing for German military to sustain further resistance. Anti-republican nationalists killed an estimated 350 alleged traitors to the nation in 1920 and 1921 as a trend of right-wing terrorism that became commonplace. Matthias Erzberger who signed the Treaty of Versailles was killed in August 1921. Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was likewise murdered in June 1922 during worsening economic conditions marked by rising inflation by conservative Freikorps nationalists who staged these vigilante killings of these and several other high profile German politicians and officeholders. Nearly ninety percent of right wing political murders by Freikorps against leftist elements were not prosecuted by the German judiciary that demonstrated a pronounced conservative orientation, with commonly light sentences imposed when such cases were adjudicated, in contrast to more severe sentences imposed on leftist elements. Not more than five percent of judges in Prussia could be considered to be committed supporters of the Weimar republic, as the majority of the judiciary was not reconciled to administering justice in a full-fledged parliamentary democracy. There remained an underlying fear of communism, while the burgeoning threat of reactionary conservative elements was systematically underestimated.
A greater threat from the extreme right was being established at the grass roots level at the same time. Anton Drexler created a new discussion group on 5 January 1919 that was initially supported by railway workers who were motivated by calling for social change and nationalism, which called itself the German Workers’ Party (DAP). This low-key fringe group initially appeared in Munich in reaction to the revolutionary troubles in the winter of 1918-1919, which increased its influence under Adolf Hitler by using his extraordinary rhetorical and organisational talents. The DAP’s political views and the party’s decision to convey these views to a larger public through public rallies attracted the attention of the Bavarian Reichswehr authorities. Hitler remained with the military after the end of the First World War upon demobilisation, rather than returning to a personal life of poverty and aimlessness. While technically serving with the military and yet without any political or occupational connections, Captain Karl Mayr, a German General Staff and intelligence officer, enlisted Hitler as a political indoctrination official, and was commissioned by the army’s local political division to report on the threatening activities of radical political parties in the face of the contemporary revolutionary uprisings. Hitler’s postwar political activity began with serving as an elected representative in Eisner’s Bavarian People’s State, and was then re-elected into the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Upon receiving “anti-Bolshevik” training from his unit commanders from 5 June 1919, and then locating the DAP during this time during visiting beer halls as centres of political forums in southern Germany, he continued his political career by joining this party on 12 September 1919, having accepted it ideas about a specifically German type of socialism that was against capitalism and Marxism while being against Jews that would establish an “Aryan dictatorship” waging race rather than class warfare. (See The History Place: The Rise of Adolf Hitler.)
Hitler extended his influence in the DAP as its only effective public speaker, giving his first speech on 16 October 1919, and diluted the membership with an influx of new members, who would join primarily because of Hitler’s association with it and would be loyal to him personally. Hitler renamed the party the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi for short, on 24 April 1920, probably to give greater credibility to the “socialist” content of its propaganda to a wider audience base. Hitler hereafter formulated what would become the party’s ideology in the form of a twenty-five point manifesto in February 1920 in simplistic forms, railing against unfettered capitalism, Jews, anarchy, bolshevism as envisaged enemies, and setting foreign policy goals in terms of seizing lost German territories, and ending paying reparations. Drexler and Hitler drafted the party’s goals in December 1920 to lay the foundation for a new membership drive, and emphasised their interest in the lower and especially urban worker classes as a far-sighted manoeuvre to persuade the public that the DAP’s activities represented a significant contribution toward the effort to build a bulwark against further revolutionary attempts, and spread their message by acquiring the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper in December 1920 as a form of modern media dissemination to a wider public, just as each political party published its own newspaper, while Hitler also recognised the importance of drawing attention to the NSDAP on a far wider scale among the public. Along with drafting the party manifesto, Hitler also provided it with a new name, the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, and a new flag with a black twisted swastika emblem in a white circle on a red background to provide clear identification to this new political party. He designed this logo with colours taken from the flag of the German empire: a black swastika to represent the struggle of Aryan workers on a white circle to represent the national ideal on a red background to represent socialist ideology as a rallying brand. With his extraordinary talents as a public speaker, he rose quickly in the party’s organizational hierarchy, and by the end of the year, he was both chief of propaganda and a dominant figure in the seven member executive committee. After being discharged from the military altogether in March 1920, Hitler worked for the DAP full time as its chief propagandist. while also finding a great deal to criticise about the inefficient business procedures in the party, and the intra-party democracy in the internal administration of the DAP.
By the time the party assembled in Munich for its first national congress on 22 January 1921, it had roughly three thousand members and had become a respected and influential part of the extreme right in Bavaria, largely due to Hitler’s efforts. Hitler was appointed chairman of the NSDAP on 29 July 1921, on the strength of his being the party’s greatest propaganda asset, and was able to secure assistance from wealthy individuals, intellectuals and former army officers. Along with the party were its auxiliary formations, of which the most important were the Nazi paramilitary formations – the SA (Sturmabteilung, or storm troops, also known as “Brownshirts”), formed in September 1921, who were thugs, often mobs of disillusioned unemployed youth who were disaffected with the Weimar democracy, and trained by Ernst Röhm to stage shows of force while serving as an anti-intellectual wing of the party who engaged in street brawling toh intimidate political opposition, ejecting opposing voices at party meetings, following the SA being primarily engaging in threats, intimidation, assaults and street battles against political rivals and Jews as elements of society that the Nazi leadership considered to be in opposition to German nationalism. They were led by Hermann Göring from early 1923, who lent credibility to the NSDAP as a war hero and attempted to instill them with military discipline. The SS (Schutzstaffeln, or Protective Guards) that was established under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler as Hitler’s personal bodyguard who swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler at a time of prevailing political stability when the police could not be completely relied on to provide public security at political events. Röhm would later aspire for the SA to become closely allied with the German army.
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