like the blind enthusiasm for war had done in 1914. One person would ensure that this hate became the doctrine of the state. A person, who as a simple corporal had been temporarily blinded after an British gas attack and therefore had to spend a few weeks in a military hospital in Pasewalk in Pomerania. In the interminable ranks of the injured, maimed and dead he would not have been worth a mention. Neither for what he had done, nor for what he had omitted to do. However, his name was Adolf Hitler. Nobody would then have guessed that this somewhat eccentric and introverted man of simple origins would go on to cause a worldwide conflagration, which in Europe alone cost 40 million people their lives.
This guiding spirit – in a few years he would be a role model for millions – in Munich initially stood on the “wrong” side, namely that of the communists. A newspaper photograph34 shows him together with other soldier councillors at the funeral of Kurt Eisner. His uniform cap drawn down deep over his face, the uniform greatcoat wide and baggy, but there was the dark moustache, later to become his identifying feature: this is the Reichswehr soldier Adolf Hitler. In spring 1919 he even gets himself elected to the reserve battalion council of the demobilisation battalion in his barracks during the socialist Munich Soviet Republic (Räterepublik). As he had already done as a soldier at the front, he also pursued the tactic of manoeuvring and conducting himself as inconspicuously as possible in the troubled times of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. After its violent defeat in May 1919, Hitler would continue with the opportunism tried and tested on the Front and denounce representatives from the battalion council in front of a summary court martial of the Munich Reichswehr administration in order to save his own neck. As an ambitious politician of a right-wing party in the future, he would keep quiet about his collaboration with the leftist soldier councils. Only a blurred black and white photograph today still provides testimony of his “aberration”.
Pact and putch: in November I was a red, but now it’s January...35
“Workers and soldiers! The four war years were dreadful. The sacrifices were awful that the people had to make of their property and blood. The unfortunate war is at an end; the killing is in the past. The consequences of the war, want and poverty, will still be a burden to us for many years. The defeat, which we wanted to prevent under all circumstances, has not been spared us. Our proposals for rapprochement were sabotaged; we ourselves were insulted and defamed.
The enemies of the working people, the true inner enemies, who are responsible for Germany’s collapse, have fallen silent and become invisible. These were the stay-at-home warriors, who maintained their demands for conquest right up to yesterday just as they pursued their dogged battle against any reform of the constitution and, in particular, the scandalous Prussian electoral system. Hopefully these enemies of the people are done with forever. The Kaiser has abdicated and his friends have disappeared. The people have been victorious over them all right along the line!
Prince Max of Baden has handed over his office as Reich chancellor to member of parliament Ebert. Our friend will form a workers’ government, to which all socialist parties will belong. The new government may not be disturbed in its work for peace and taking care of work and bread.
Workers and soldiers! Be aware of the historical significance of this day. The impossible has happened! Great and incalculable work awaits us.
Everything for the people, everything by the people! Nothing may happen that serves to dishonour the workers’ movement. Be united, loyal and conscientious! The old and rotten, the monarchy has collapsed. Long live the New; long live the German Republic!36
With these words the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann declared the Weimar Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag on 9 November 1918. He was acting unilaterally.
November Revolution 1918: Scheidemann holds an address from a Reich Chancellery window. Friedrich Ebert becomes Reich Chancellor, after the resignation of Max von Baden, on 9. 11. 1918. (meeting of Ebert, Scheidemann and others with Max von Baden in the Reich Chancellery, approx. 1 pm).
The first German republic was a product of indecisiveness and failure in the form of the lost war and a revolution, which initially came from soldiers weary of war. For this reason no one had seen it coming, let alone planned it. Even its own government did want it to succeed in anchoring this form of an “improvised democracy”37 with its new constitutional rights and freedoms never before conceded in the authority-loving people. In addition, people feared that democracy inherently also basically concealed “a Bolshevistic risk”. This danger however was wildly exaggerated as the mass movement mainly consisted of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Thus the protest was carried on against prevailing wrongs by somewhat diffuse political desires for change or design. In it were collected the most varied of political currents from extreme left to extreme right. Furthermore, the protest was fed by mass unemployment, war damage and anxiety about the future. In the tumult of the events of 1919 these different currents would soon break apart again. Anyone who had hoped that, after the war and the tumultuous events with the founding of the first democratic republic, a mental change would take place in the minds of the people was bitterly disappointed. Since it was the old military elite, who had also pulled the strings in the Kaiser’s Empire, who continued to have the say so and now also determined the destiny of the young republic. This meant the old leadership was the new one. Its figureheads were Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the heroes of the victoriously fought “Battle of Tannenberg” 1914, which was so cannibalised for propaganda purposes that it was even given credit for the ending of the war with Russia, which had been shaken to its core by a revolution.
“Soldiers of the 8th army! The many days of fierce battles on the fields between Allenstein and Neidenburg have come to an end. You have gained a devastating victory over 5 army corps and 3 cavalry divisions. More than 90,000 prisoners, countless artillery and machine guns, multiple flags and many other items, which are the spoils of war, have fallen into our hands. […] I hope to be able to let you have a few days of well-earned rest. But then we’ll move on again with fresh strength with God for our Emperor, King and Fatherland until the last Russian has left our dear, stricken province of the homeland and we have carried our victory-accustomed flags right into the enemy’s home territory. Long live His Majesty, the Emperor and King. Hurrah!”38 is what Paul von Hindenburg had drummed into his soldiers after the battle of Tannenberg at the time.
Kaiser Wilhelm II (centre) during the discussion of the situation with Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg (left) and First General Quartermaster Erich Ludendorff on 8 January 1917.
In the manner of Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice it could have been said: The spirits we called up ... we couldn’t get rid of them. They now obtained support from the ranks of conservatively minded editors and business leaders, right-wing Freikorps teams and the now spiritually rootless soldiers back from the Front, who were no longer able to settle to anything in civilian life. Nearly all layers of the German population were affected by the deep mistrust of democracy. Not a few wanted the Kaiser back because they were attached to a long outworn authoritarian idea of a leader and they missed a clear cut hierarchical order, in which everyone had his set place. Freedom and democracy could not be imposed upon this. Decades of imprinting with traditional convictions could not just simply be shrugged off like an old coat.
Someone, who was part of the influential military establishment and who made plenty of profit from it, was Waldemar Pabst. He came from an arts-loving family and as a graduate of the main Prussian officer cadet institution in Berlin, he had without further ado and without questioning, pursued a military career and fought at the bloodbath of Verdun. After the November revolution he made himself useful in fighting the Communist opposition and notably played a part as First General Staff Officer of the Guard-Cavalry- Rifles-Division, a free corps, in the defeat of the Spartacist uprising and the murder of its leaders, Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg.