The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class (8 page)

The Kaiser had declared at the onset of hostilities that he ‘no longer recognised parties, only Germans’. Ebert and the majority of German Social Democrats took him at his word. For more than four years, they loyally supported all of the government’s financial demands. They mediated conscientiously between restive war workers and their demanding employers, and though they nodded when required in favour of a peace more in accordance with their earlier internationalist convictions than with the keen annexationist demands of the right, and kept up the pressure for a full democratisation of the monarchical political system, they were now clearly part of the wartime establishment. As the war went on, and many on the left became disillusioned with Germany’s cause, considerable numbers of their political representatives, including fifteen Reichstag deputies, as well as large numbers of the original party’s most passionate activists, peeled off to form a breakaway Social Democrat party that called for an immediate peace. Ebert’s faction, still considerably the larger, became known as ‘Majority Social Democrats’, while the anti-war left took the name of ‘Independent Social Democrats’. That was how things remained until the autumn of 1918 arrived, and with it the sudden and, to many, surprising collapse in German hopes of victory.

Prince Max was forced to take on the chancellorship because in September the armed forces – more specifically Ludendorff – had looked at the military situation and decided that the army could not go on. On 29 September, Ludendorff marched into a meeting of the High Command and announced as much. The Macedonian and Italian fronts could no longer hold. With Bulgaria, Germany’s chief Balkan ally, suing for peace, Turkey on its knees and Austria-Hungary likewise on the brink of surrender, even if by some miracle Germany managed to hold on to what was left of her gains on the Western Front, she could not survive more than a matter of weeks before the enemy came roaring up from the south.

Not only had Ludendorff announced the imminence of defeat, but the general – hitherto a fiercely anti-democratic Pan-German nationalist – had also told the appalled commanders, including Wilhelm II, that they would have to concede real liberal reforms. Only in this way could they keep the support of the masses, and mollify the enemy with whom they would soon have to negotiate. Had not President Wilson of the United States, in whose rapidly expanding industrial power and limitless reserve of fighting men the Entente was placing its hopes of victory, not proclaimed as part of his ‘Fourteen Points’ a conviction that the coming peace should be based not on revenge and conquest but on the democratic self-determination of peoples? Then let Germany become the political creature that America desired!

Count Hertling, a Catholic Bavarian nobleman in his mid-seventies who had been a largely figurehead Chancellor for the past year or so, refused to serve a parliamentary regime. On Hertling’s recommendation, the Kaiser called on Maximilian Alexander Friedrich Wilhelm von Baden. Nephew and heir presumptive of the Grand Duke of Baden, in south-west Germany, Prince Max was known for his relatively liberal views. He had opposed unrestricted submarine warfare (the step, vigorously promoted by Ludendorff and the ultra-nationalists, which had finally brought America into the war against Germany), was prominent in the Red Cross, and until the end of American neutrality had chaired a German-American prisoner of war aid society set up under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association. He immediately invited Social Democrat, Catholic (Centre) Party and Liberal Reichstag deputies to join his government. The day after his appointment, as instructed by the High Command, the Prince formally submitted to the enemy powers his request for talks that would lead to an armistice and ultimately to a peace treaty based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points.

Whether it was a matter of the military recovering its nerve, or of there having been a plan all along aimed at shuffling off the blame for a humiliating peace on to democratic politicians, towards the end of October Prince Max and his ministers found that Ludendorff had reverted from peace campaigner back to his old, diehard, victory-or-death self. The military and political realities that had caused Ludendorff’s decision a month earlier to push for peace had not changed. However, although Prince Max’s government had agreed to abandon the submarine campaign and to withdraw the army from the remaining occupied areas, in a third and increasingly harsh exchange of communications President Wilson also demanded guarantees of changes in the German political system and of military measures that would make a resumption of the war impossible. Ludendorff promptly withdrew support for the peace negotiations upon which he had formerly been so insistent. Now, he demanded in an order to his soldiers, co-signed by Field Marshal Hindenburg, Germany must continue to ‘resist to the utmost of her power’.

Such defiance of government and Kaiser could not be permitted. On 26 October 1918 Ludendorff, for more than two years the real ruler of Germany, was dismissed, though to save embarrassment it was claimed that he had resigned of his own volition. He was replaced as Quartermaster-General and Deputy Chief of Staff by fifty-year-old General Wilhelm Groener, a transport and logistics expert who had been the High Command’s linkman with the Food Supply Office and, for some months after August 1916, Deputy Prussian Minister of War and head of the Reich War Production Office.

Two days later, a crucial change in the Reich constitution finally made the Chancellor and his ministers no longer responsible only to the Kaiser, as had been the case since 1871, but to the Reichstag. Germany was now formally a constitutional monarchy.
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Prince Max was from this point on theoretically free to conduct policy as he desired, or at least as events dictated, but in fact power had already begun to slip from his hands. This time, it was not the High Command that presented the threat, but the mood of the common people.

On 24 October, Admiral Scheer, commanding the German North Sea Fleet, issued secret orders for the fleet to prepare to put to sea once more. Senior naval commanders had decided, in defiance of the Berlin government, which was in the middle of delicate armistice negotiations, to take on the British fleet in a ‘decisive battle’ (
Entscheidungsschlacht
) – a final, suicidal attempt to salvage what they perceived to be the German navy’s honour.

Despite the secrecy surrounding Scheer’s order, word spread through the ships waiting at anchor off the North Sea naval port of Wilhelmshaven. The men below decks had been penned up in port in cramped conditions and under harsh discipline for more than two years since the inconclusive Battle of Jutland (known in Germany as the
Skagerrakschlacht
) in June 1916. Unsurprisingly, most were not keen on dying just as peace was about to break out, simply to satisfy the naval elite’s desire for a heroic seaborne
Götterdämmerung
. Open mutiny followed. During the night of 29-30 October, several warships in Wilhelmshaven were seized by their crews. One of the sailors would write in his diary attributing the cause: ‘Years and years of injustice have been converted into a dangerously explosive force that is now coming to a head.’
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The Imperial Navy stood on the brink of disintegration, but the naval command held its nerve. German submarines and torpedo boats took up position among the ships off Wilhelmshaven. The mutineers were given a deadline. If they did not return to their stations, these vessels would torpedo their ships. At the last minute, the crews gave in. The ships were handed back to their commanders. The mutiny was, for the moment, over.

Nonetheless, in a victory of sorts for the men, the plan for the ‘decisive battle’ was abandoned. The ordinary crew could clearly not be trusted to die ‘with honour’. The fleet was split up, with the 3rd Squadron – whose crews had been the most troublesome – ordered to enter the North Sea Canal and sail through to Kiel, the great German naval port on the Baltic. On the way through the canal, forty-seven naval ratings and stokers considered to have been ringleaders in the rebellion were picked out and placed under arrest. On arrival at Kiel, they were transported to a naval prison.

The uprising at sea might have been stifled, but on shore it was a different story. In Kiel, rumours about the arrested mutineers spread like a virus among the discontented naval personnel. On 1 November, several hundred gathered at the trades union building. They sent a petition to the local naval command, demanding that the prisoners be freed. It was ignored.

The next day, the sailors found the entrance to the trades union building barred by police. In response, an even larger group of protesters met a few streets to the south at the
Großer Exerzierplatz
, once a parade ground but now a broad public square in the centre of the city. Flyers were printed and circulated. On 3 November, another meeting on the square attracted several thousand protesters, now including both sailors and war workers of both sexes. This time they demanded not just the liberation of the imprisoned mutineers, but also an end to the war and an improvement in the food situation. As the demonstrators attempted to move out of the square towards the military prison to demand their comrades’ release, in the process ‘liberating’ some weapons from nearby military billets, they encountered an army unit. Fire was exchanged. Seven protesters were killed and twenty-nine wounded. The lieutenant commanding the army unit was seriously injured and taken to hospital.

By the next morning, 4 November, armed groups of sailors were roaming the streets. In a final attempt to restore discipline, the commander of the big naval base at Kiel-Wik, two miles or so to the north of the city centre, ordered all sailors and soldiers to form up for a roll call on the main parade ground. The commander’s appeal to the men’s loyalty failed to prevent spontaneous demonstrations against his authority. Soon the men from the base had joined up with those already active in the city. The soldiers of the city garrison likewise refused orders to resist the rebels. The city’s military governor received a delegation of workers and sailors and was forced to grant their demands, including an assurance not to call in military assistance from outside – at one point urged on by a threat by the mutineers to turn their ships’ guns on the quarter containing many officers’ private villas.
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According to a personal account by one of the leaders of the uprising, the military governor had, actually, broken his word:

That evening, we then got the news that despite the governor’s declaration four outside infantry units were marching in our direction. We immediately jumped into our automobile and drove straight towards them. We reached them just by the post office, and spoke with them . . . Then I requested that they either give up their weapons or join the revolutionaries. The infantrymen joined our revolutionary movement. The officers were disarmed.
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With that, there was no military unit prepared to support the status quo. At the end of the day, the city of Kiel was in the hands of the mutineers and their supporters. Within hours, ‘soldiers’ councils’ had been formed. ‘Workers’ councils’ would follow. The next morning, disturbances had also broken out in the ports of Wilhelmshaven, Lübeck and Cuxhaven. Workers’ groups were also readying themselves for protests in Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city.
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On 5 November the new masters of Kiel issued a list of demands:

The German revolution had begun.