Ring of Steel
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There was no way that sailors would participate in such an operation. Morale in the High Seas Fleet was at its nadir. Sailors were still bitter about the repression after the mutinies in the summer of 1917, relations with officers were at best distant and often hostile, and the best personnel had long ago been transferred to the U-boats.144 Those who remained were fractious and looking forward to peace. At the end of September 1918 a rumour had circulated that the men would leave their ships if no treaty were concluded by mid-October. When, on the evening of 29 October, word spread that the fleet’s squadron chiefs had been called to the High Sea Command in order to be briefed for an operation scheduled for the following day, the reaction was immediate. At 10 p.m., sailors on three of the Third Squadron’s five battleships announced that they would passively resist any operation. When insubordination spread to other ships, the mission was cancelled. Making a terrible error, the fleet’s commander decided to disperse his rebellious squadrons, and divided the battleships between the Elbe, Kiel and Wilhelmshaven.145
The final collapse of imperial Germany began in Kiel. The Third Squadron steamed into the port on 31 October. The city’s naval governor, Vice Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, had only just arrived at his post, and was totally unprepared for the arrival of thousands of mutinous sailors. The battleships’ officers did nothing to help him, for, anxious to rid their vessels of rebellious personnel, they granted generous shore leave. At first, the men protested solely for the release of arrested comrades. However, once the authorities attempted to stop them meeting and refused any compromise, defiance spread. The port’s dockyard workers and garrison went over to the sailors and Souchon suddenly found himself with hardly any reliable units to control ever larger crowds. On 3 November, 6,000 people demonstrated for the arrested sailors’ release. Some had broken into army barracks and, without resistance from the sentries, armed themselves and freed the sailors. When the crowd was fired upon by a patrol of NCOs and officers, there was a brief fire-fight, with seven dead and twenty-nine people wounded. The bloodshed triggered revolution. On the following night, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils were formed in all barracks and on all the ships docked at Kiel. The revolt now became explicitly political. The sailors, continuing to follow the script of the Russian revolution, addressed each other as ‘comrade Bolsheviks’. Demands for regime change were now loud. The revolutionaries wanted the abdication of the Hohenzollerns, universal suffrage for men and women, and a peace concluded on the basis of self-determination without annexations or indemnities.146
In the following days, the revolution spread as sailors left Kiel for other parts of Germany. The cities on the north coast were first to join. Five hundred red sailors took Lübeck bloodlessly on 5 November, and Hamburg, Bremen and Wilhelmshaven fell the next day. On 7 November the revolution moved inland, taking Hanover, Oldenburg and Cologne. In Munich, 50,000 people joined in a demonstration organized jointly by the SPD and USPD, which took the city’s public buildings and barracks. In the early hours of 8 November the USPD’s Kurt Eisner proclaimed a Socialist Republic of Bavaria.147 The real prize and the key to the success of the revolution was, however, Germany’s capital, Berlin. Prince Max’s government learned of how serious the revolt in Kiel had been on 5 November, when Gustav Noske, the SPD deputy sent to the port to restore order, reported. On the same day Wilson had sent his final note informing the Germans that Marshal Foch, the Supreme Commander of the Allies on the Western Front, had been authorized to communicate armistice terms to their representatives. As the revolution’s rapid spread became known, the new First Quartermaster General, Wilhelm Groener, advised that the Allies’ terms must now be accepted immediately. Peace appeared to offer the Reich’s sole chance of stopping the revolution.148
The government in the meantime attempted to slow the spread of the revolutionaries. The military did what it could to protect Berlin. The local military commander, General Alexander von Linsingen, banned USPD demonstrations and posted troops at the railway stations to catch revolutionary sailors.149 However, the pressure from Wilson and the desire of a large section of the population for far-reaching reform was overwhelming. Friedrich Ebert, the SPD chairman, feared Bolshevik revolution no less than Prince Max, and was prepared to continue the party’s wartime work of reining in the masses. However, as radicalization and anger had grown, the moderate Social Democrats could maintain credibility and appeal only by voicing popular demands. On 7 November, Ebert warned the Chancellor that ‘if the Kaiser does not abdicate, the social revolution is inevitable’. Later that day, the SPD issued an ultimatum to the government stating that the Kaiser and Crown Prince must abdicate by noon on the morrow. The publication of the ultimatum helped win the SPD support in Berlin, stopping workers turning to more revolutionary groups to vent their discontent. Yet even on 8 November the Kaiser, who was at military headquarters at Spa, refused. In an evening telephone conversation with Max, he informed his frustrated Chancellor that he intended to restore order at the head of his armies.150
Time ran out for the Kaiser, Max and Imperial Germany on 9 November. The decisive pressure came from the two rival centres of power that had developed during the war: the army and the SPD. On the Western Front, Groener had called in thirty-nine middle-ranking commanders to canvass their views on the troops’ readiness to fight for the Kaiser and against Bolshevism.151 Just one thought that his men would follow their monarch, a damning indication of the disappearance of the regime’s legitimacy among soldiers as well as civilians. The news jolted the Kaiser into tentatively accepting abdication, although he still tried to hang on, proposing that evening to relinquish the German but not the Prussian throne. By that time events had left him far behind. In Berlin, the Independent Socialists had called a mass demonstration for 9 a.m. in the morning. The SPD could now not afford to appear as a part of the old regime and abandoned the government. Max, believing that procrastination merely increased the danger, announced the Kaiser’s abdication on his own authority at noon. He then passed his chancellorship to Ebert. On the streets were tens of thousands of factory workers urged on by the revolutionary shop stewards. Military units across the capital had mutinied. A soldiers’ council occupied the War Ministry.152 Pre-empting the Independent Socialists, at 2 p.m. the SPD leader Philipp Scheidemann stepped out onto the Reichstag’s reading room balcony and proclaimed the creation of a republic. He assured the crowd that Wilhelm II had abdicated and that the new government would be made up of both the Reich’s Socialist parties. With an eye to limiting popular radicalism, he made clear that this should be a very German revolution: ‘Calm, order and security, that is what we now need!’ Most poignantly, seeking to find some achievement from four years of horror, he presented the break between Germans and their defeated and delegitimized leaders as a victory of sorts. ‘The German people has triumphed everywhere. The old rotten regime has collapsed. Militarism is finished!’153
An armistice delegation headed by the Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger had crossed the Western Front on the evening of 7 November 1918. On 11 November, at 5.20 a.m., its four members, together with the Allied Supreme Commander, Ferdinand Foch, and the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, signed an armistice agreement, which went into effect just under six hours later, at 11 a.m., at last ending the fighting. Perhaps justly, given the spirit in which the German military had started its move to peace, the conditions were hard. The German army was obliged to give up large stocks of weaponry, materiel and rail equipment, and was to undertake an immediate evacuation of all western invaded territory. The fleet would be interned. German territory on the left bank of the Rhine would be occupied and Alsace-Lorraine surrendered. Less fair, and certainly the harshest blow for the German delegates, was the continuation of the British naval blockade. Although some grudging help with provisioning was promised, the Reich was to be kept hungry and helpless. A formal protest read out by Erzberger at the signing warned that the terms would drive Germans into anarchy and famine. Although humiliate
d, he ended defiantly: ‘A nation of seventy millions of people suffers, but it does not die.’154
For Germans, and indeed for most central Europeans, the armistice was not quite the caesura that is remembered further west. There was no return to ‘peace’ as in France or Britain. ‘Normality’ had become a permanent casualty of the war. True, the mass slaughter of the Materialschlacht was over, but misery, deprivation and shortages continued until, and even beyond, the summer of 1919 when the blockade was lifted. The violence was also not ended. Although smaller in scale, it had transferred into the homelands that men had sought to protect. The political and ethnic fault lines deepened by war were the new ‘fronts’ of the post-armistice period. Radical leftist revolutions and right-wing putsches would shake the weakened German state in the coming years. In the east, the Polish minority would rise up and fight for cession. Among the victims of this post-war bloodshed would be Erzberger himself, who was murdered while out for a walk in August 1921 by right-wing extremists – for signing the armistice agreement. The First World War had ended. Its legacy of suffering and violence proved far longer lasting.155
Epilogue
The brave new world that formed in the dying embers of the war was fixed and formalized in the months after the armistices of the autumn of 1918. While the leaders of the victorious Allied powers earnestly debated the continent’s future in Paris, the new nation states of central Europe cemented control over their territory and secured with force contested land, most often at the expense of the German, Austrian and Hungarian republics. A treaty ending the war in the west was signed with Germany on 28 June 1919. To underline their enemy’s humiliation, the French selected the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles as the venue – the place where nearly half a century earlier a unified Germany had been proclaimed. Almost as an afterthought, a treaty with the new Austria was signed at Saint-Germain in September 1919. Due to Bolshevik revolution, and then a brutal counter-revolution, only in June 1920 was the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary sealed.1
The old order had long disappeared by this point. Most of its members did not suffer greatly. Kaiser Wilhelm II had crossed into Holland on 10 November 1918. He formally abdicated on 28 November. For sure the first eighteen months of exile were anxious. Money was tight, and his future uncertain. He grew a beard to make himself less recognizable and at the turn of 1918–19 was reduced to feigning madness in the hope of avoiding extradition. All ended happily, however. The Dutch reluctantly protected him. The international determination to try him for what Article 227 of the Versailles Treaty described vaguely as ‘a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’ eventually waned. Wilhelm bought a lovely moated villa outside the Dutch village of Doorn, from which he terrorized the neighbours with his imperial ways. His wife died in April 1921, but a year later, at the age of sixty-three, he married thirty-five-year-old Princess Hermine of Schönaich-Carolath. He passed away disgruntled but not discontented on 4 June 1941.2 Emperor Karl’s fate was stranger. Having dodged putting his name to the armistice with Italy by relinquishing control of his armies, he gave up all right to involvement in the governance of the Austrian state on 11 November 1918. However, he never formally abdicated. After he attempted twice in 1921 to reclaim the Hungarian Crown of St Stephen, the Allies decided he was a threat to European stability and moved him with his family from exile in Switzerland to distant Madeira. There on 1 April 1922, aged thirty-four, he died of influenza. Alone of the Central Powers’ leaders, this weak and uncourageous man is remembered with some fondness – possibly helped by the fact that unlike most he never put pen to paper to give a painfully self-exculpating account of his war. Although he was incapable of working miracles during hostilities to release his peoples from misery and bloodshed, some claim that he managed one after the conflict: the lesser feat of curing after his death a Brazilian nun suffering from varicose veins. In October 2004, Pope John Paul II beatified this last Habsburg Emperor.3
The Central Powers’ other wartime leaders did not suffer, despite the Allies’ declared intention to punish those whom they regarded as responsible for the horrors of the conflict. Several of the men who had led them into hostilities were already dead by 1918. The Austrian and Hungarian Minister Presidents in 1914, Stürgkh and Tisza, had both been assassinated during the war. The Chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, had died a broken man in 1916. Bethmann Hollweg, the former German Chancellor, survived and was unique among the leaders of any power in his readiness to answer for and defend his actions. On learning in June 1919 that the Allies intended to try the Kaiser, he honourably wrote to the French Premier Georges Clemenceau to ask that he stand trial in his imperial master’s stead. ‘According to the constitutional laws of the empire,’ he had argued, ‘I bear entire responsibility for the emperor’s political actions during my tenure of office as Chancellor.’ His offer went unanswered.4 The Allies’ conveniently simplistic understanding of the conflict as a German crime meant that surviving Habsburg leaders were ignored. Count Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister in 1914, a man who bore more guilt than most for the conflagration, was permitted to retire unmolested to his estates at Csepreg in Hungary, where he died in 1942. Leon Biliński, the Finance Minister who was far less culpable but had attended the conspiratorial Common Ministerial Councils in July 1914 where war with Serbia was planned, served in the same post in 1919 for France’s new ally, independent Poland.5
Most importantly, no senior military figures ever stood trial. The Chief of the Habsburg General Staff until 1917, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, would today be a prime defendant at any war crimes tribunal, both for his part in starting the conflict and as the commander of an army that massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in 1914. Yet the Allies had little interest in the Habsburg regime and still less in dead eastern European peasants. He was left to make a fortune on his memoirs and died at the pleasant south German spa of Bad Mergentheim in August 1925.6 Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff were very briefly placed on a list of suspected war criminals, before the Allies thought better of it. The military duo who had led Germany through the last two years of war had very different futures. Ludendorff cut a pathetic figure after his failure. In mid-November 1918 he had fled Berlin, fearing that if he stayed he would be lynched or tried. He lay low in Sweden, writing a set of self-pitying memoirs until the revolution abated. After his return to Germany, his paranoia grew and he settled on Jews as the scapegoat for his downfall. He participated in far-right politics and was a co-conspirator in the Nazis’ 1923 Munich Putsch, but a run at the presidency in 1925 was an embarrassing failure.7 By contrast, Hindenburg ended the war with his reputation intact. He marched back at the head of the German army in November 1918, successfully contriving to lay the blame for the Third OHL’s military defeat on civilians and a government that supposedly had ‘stabbed’ the loyal soldiers ‘in the back’. He was able to capitalize on his wartime popularity in order to return as Germany’s figurehead. In 1925, after the death of its first incumbent, Friedrich Ebert, he ran for and won the presidency of the German republic. He was in his second term when in 1933, during acute economic and political crisis, he appointed as his Chancellor Adolf Hitler.8
The German and Austro-Hungarian states, it should by now be clear, had no monopoly on brutal and illegal conduct during the First World War. Nonetheless, even by the still poorly developed standards of contemporary international law, they had committed some heinous crimes. The German invasion of neutral Belgium and unrestricted submarine warfare, the ruthless exploitation of civilians as slave labour, above all in Ober Ost and with the 1916 Belgian deportations, and the killing of non-combatants in 1914, all constituted violations. However, the men responsible for these actions and for the far greater atrocity perpetrated by the Central Powers’ ally Ottoman Turkey, the Armenian genocide, went largely unpunished. To be fair, after the Ottoman armistice of 30 October, the Sultanate installed by the British did investigat
e, at the urging of the Allies. Special Military Tribunals uncovered copious evidence of the intention to wipe out the Armenians and sentenced the Empire’s wartime leaders to death, but as all were tried in absentia the rulings lacked impact.9 The trials that the German state was forced by the Allies to hold at the High Court in Leipzig in 1921, after it refused to extradite war crimes suspects, were far less diligently pursued or inspiring. Forty-five cases were submitted, but just seventeen actually tried. The accused were small fry: army personnel, mostly officers, who had ordered military prisoners to be shot or had neglected them in camps, others who had attacked civilians, and submarine commanders accused of sinking hospital ships. Only four trials ended with convictions.10 International law, which had already been undermined by both sides’ naval blockades and brutal behaviour towards occupied enemy subjects, was further discredited by the failure to prosecute and punish major violations, if only those committed by the defeated. This mattered dreadfully. Hitler drew the appropriate lesson when in August 1939 he prepared to launch racial war against Poland. Urging his generals to undertake ‘the physical destruction of the enemy’, he quashed scruples with a nod to the past: ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’11