The Sacred Union Shatters: Germany, 1917
Excerpt from the Alternatehistory.com thread “Successful October Uprising?
collegedude154 said:
I’ve been taking a course on the Great War for uni, and I’ve been pretty shocked at how close Germany already was to revolution in 1917. How would things have changed things if Germany went red two years earlier? Is this even possible?
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ladfromthenorth said:
It probably would have completely changed the 20s, given that the internal situation in the rest of Europe was a lot more stable. You might be able to massage another Entente-wank out of it. I’m actually not quite sure the revolution survives in this scenario, though I’m pretty certain that a defeated Germany will be going red eventually.
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Petrushka said:
It won’t happen. Germany wasn’t in a revolutionary state in 1917, and the Social Democratic leadership was mostly in the dark about the plan, whatever Kaiserboos say. In plenty of places the protests of 1917 weren’t even particularly political.
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ladfromthenorth said:
Well, what if the Reichstag offered a bit more resistance to Ludendorff? We know that the vote wasn’t unanimous.
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Petrushka said:
The Reichstag was powerless by the end of 1917 anyways. The vote really symbolic, and had the parliamentarians wanted it to go the other way, Ludendorff would have simply shut it down with his goons.
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Helmuth Von Moltke said:
The German people were still patriotic at this point. The much more interesting question is what may have happened if the authorities had tracked down the treasonous Luxemburg crew before they escaped. Without her poison seeping into Germany for the next two years, the German people would have likely stayed loyal to their legitimate government.
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ladfromthenorth said:
“Uh oh…”
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Thalmannian said:
You know it’s a Chicago boy when his name is Helmuth von Moltke.
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ladfromthenorth said:
“Chicago Boy?”
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Thalmannian said:
A fourth generation German-American who doesn’t speak German.
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Excerpts from Dietrich Goldstein,Prelude to Revolution: Germany in the Great War(University of Berlin Press, 1972)*
For two and a half years, burgfriedenpolitik bound together the conservatives, national liberals, progressive bourgeoisie, and socialist labor movement, temporarily subsuming class antagonisms in national solidarity. In 1917, this uneasy peace imploded under the weight of its own contradictions. It is a wonder the social truce lasted as long as it did, especially given the reactionary proclivities of the German leadership. Ebert and Scheidemann deserve most of the credit for the success of the policy; each did their utmost to convince the German worker that he was well served by the imperialist war.
Any discussion of the politics of 1917 must begin with the labor mobilization bill. Introduced at the end of 1916, the law required all men between the ages of 17 and 60 to register with a draft board. Those who were unemployed would be assigned a workplace; those already employed would typically not be re-assigned, but absenteeism, strikes, and other workplace infractions would be punished as military offenses. Ludendorff and Hindenburg believed that militarizing the workforce was necessary to rationalize the German economy for the purposes of war production.
The bill quickly galvanized the social democrats. Bernstein, Kautsky, Luxembourg, and Liebknecht all denounced the proposed legislation. The right wing of the party attempted to gain concessions to secure Social-Democratic support for the bill. Working with Bethmann Hollweg, Ebert and Scheidemann did manage to ensure there would be some union representation on factory boards, but this was not nearly enough for many of the trade unionists. The right wing of the party split, with around half of the prominent trade union officials joining with the left-centrists and left-radicals to vote against the bill. It narrowly passed with the unanimous support of the National Liberals and DkP, as well as a substantial majority of the Catholic Centre party. Ebert and Scheidemann’s support for the bill placed them in the minority of the Social Democrats.
The right wing sensed the party slipping away from them. In February they attempted to use the executive committee to purge the left-radicals from the party, a motion which was voted down first by the Reichstag delegation, and then, more decisively, by regional party executives. A press campaign in left-wing newspapers called for an early party congress. The current one was slated to be held in August.
In March, the Trier caucus had a clandestine meeting to formalize their program and strategize on the best means for seizing control of the party. Rosa Luxemburg and Clare Zetkin, two luminaries of the left-radicals, were absent, both rotting in German prisons. Of the 193 delegates to the meeting, only 46 were left-radicals, and 33 were right-wing trade unionists previously aligned with Ebert. Plans were made to draft propaganda to workers, informing them of the reality of the intra-party struggle.
There were signs of increasing unrest in the German working class. The intensification of the British blockade had caused a precipitous rise in the price of food; Germany, long dependent on transatlantic imports to feed its population, had little means to quickly make up the deficit in the supply of grain and animal feed. 1917 also witnessed a sharp uptick in inflation as the government printed new treasury notes unbacked by gold specie to pay for the ballooning costs of munitions procurement.
On April 29th, 40,000 workers in Stuttgart went on strike after they were informed of a reduction in bread rations. Though the action was technically illegal, the deputy district commander had the sense to negotiate with the workers, and managed to end the strike in just a few days. Next week in Leipzig and Dresden, workers struck once again; this time, the more overtly political nature of the strikes led to swift repression from authorities.
The wave of strike action emboldened the opposition. Regional party executives began calling for the resignation of the Social Democratic leadership. First came Dresden, Leipzig, Bremen, and Wurttemberg; then most of Berlin, Frankfurt, Chemnitz, and Breslau.The real coup came on May 14th, when Otto Wels, a trade unionist and sitting member of the party executive, declared he had no confidence in Ebert to run the party. On the 16th, Ebert, Scheidemann, and their allies resigned from the executive, paving the way for new leadership in the party. Holding on until the Party Congress in August would have accomplished little besides dividing the party; attempting to indefinitely delay it would likely have led to its splintering.
Otto Wels, Reluctant Revolutionary
The new executive committee consisted of the left-centrists Haase and Kautsky, the left-revisionist Bernstein, and two trade-unionists, Otto Wels and Gustav Bauer. Although the left-radicals were displeased with being once again iced out of the party leadership, they did secure a number of key concessions, the most important of which was a weakening of the party executive. The previous two years of persecution convinced the left-centrists of the need for a more decentralized party structure with more formal protections for dissenters. When the left-radicals insisted on firm limits on the executive as a prerequisite for their assent to the new government, the left-centrists agreed to support them.
The position of the left-radicals was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, most of them felt a great deal of relief that Ebert and Scheidemann had been ousted from the party. Few of them wanted a party split. Yet the left-radicals stood at odds with the stated policy of the new leadership. At the meeting of the trier caucus in March, only a resolution calling for a strictly parliamentary campaign of peace without annexations was agreed upon; a more radical one advocating for the use of strike action to bring down the war machine was voted down by a coalition of left-revisionists and trade unionists. The party’s new leadership was willing to employ extra-parliamentary measures to aid in the renegotiation of the labor mobilization bill, but would not employ these same means to target the war effort, ostensibly because a favorable peace would only be possible with the front in good order.
Of course, the leadership shakeup represented an unalloyed victory for the coalitional strategy of the left-radicals. But it is not clear that it improved their position in the party. While they now had a more direct influence on the parliamentary delegation, they were still iced out of leadership decisions, and now lacked the bogeymen of Ebert and Scheidemann. There was a very real prospect that the parliamentary victory could enervate revolutionary activism.
A new wave of strike action began in July. It started with Richard Muller, a socialist activist and Berlin metalworker, who led a walkout demanding an end to the war and worker’s representation on the boards which distributed food. Within a week, strikes involving over 350,000 workers in Berlin, Saxony, and southwestern Germany had broken out. Haase and Kautsky would later claim that the strike action was orchestrated by the party executive, but recent historical research has revealed that it occurred without the direction of national trade union officials or politicians.
This was the first real test of the new leadership. The left-radicals issued an internal resolution calling for the party to endorse a general strike; the left-revisionists, left-centrists, and trade-unionists unanimously rejected such a plan, but the latter two also refused to act to quiet the strikes until the government was willing to enter into negotiations over the labor mobilization bill. The German army was in the midst of the summer counteroffensive, and could not afford for the flow of supplies to the font to be delayed any further. After cracking down on the most radical and overtly political strikes, Bethmann Hollweg (now largely a puppet of Ludendorff) entered negotiations with the Social Democrats. A series of revisions to the labor mobilization bill were passed through the Reichstag later that month; trade union officials were to be afforded representation on all the main planning boards of German industry, and arbitration courts empowered to mediate wage disputes.
One week later, all of the left-radicals and around half of the left-centrists co-signed an open letter in Vorwarts condemning the triangulation of the leadership. Regional party executives in Leipzig, Wurttemberg, Bremen, and four Berlin districts openly denounced the “class conciliation”; their most prominent members were arrested in short order. Haase replied to the dissenters with an editorial of his own, where he argued that the agreement did not represent an abandonment of the party’s pro-peace policy. The quick re-emergence of warring internal factions in the new government was a sign of things to come.
Meanwhile, the German middle-class press was in the midst of its own acrimonious debate. The advocates of unrestricted submarine warfare were emboldened by widespread outrage over the British blockade. Newspapers charged Bethmann Hollweg with needlessly restraining the military forces of the German Empire. The navy, defeated in a crushing blow at the Battle of the North Sea in 1916, desperately wanted some way to make a larger contribution to the war effort. Of course, the German government itself had already secretly resolved to begin unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter, and had been marshaling its resources for this purpose. But it was decided to keep the public in the dark about the matter, mostly because it was believed that the element of surprise would be crucial.
In Bavaria, Wurttemburg, Baden, and Alsace-Lorraine, middle-class opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare began to crystallize. Many liberals believed that William Jennings Bryan would soon force the British to roll back their harsh blockade policy; sinking American merchant shipping would simply antagonize a potential friend. Liberal discontent was exacerbated by the emergence of more details about the German Army’s atrocities in Belgium, which managed to slip their way past military censors despite their best efforts. Many likened the actions of the German Army in Belgium to the repression of minorities in Alsace-Lorraine and Posen.
The national-social movement achieved one of its first victories in 1917 when they lobbied sizable minorities of the Catholic Centre and Progressive Liberal parties to oppose the labor mobilization bill. Particular attention was paid to the clauses of the bill permitting women to be drafted, which galvanized grassroots catholic resistance.
Membership in the organization skyrocketed from 65,000 to 255,000 in the first nine months of 1917, alarming the German government. In late July, the government arrested several prominent journalists on its board, including Theodor Barth and Theodor Wolff. The enormous expansion of the group raised questions about the organization’s finances, which had allowed it to cultivate an extensive set of connections in the Reichstag. An investigation into the movement’s revenue revealed a sharp discrepancy between the income it claimed from dues and the quantity of members in local chapters. Attempts to locate the true source of the funding turned dry, prompting police units to refer the issue to military intelligence; most suspected British involvement in providing revenue for the subversive organization.
In truth, the British had little money for foreign intelligence operations. The vast majority of the secret funding for the group came from Walter Rathenau, a German-Jewish industrialist who was beyond suspicion as a member of several war planning boards. German Intelligence would take not months but years to discover this, a testament to its extraordinary incompetence.
Walter Rathenau, the key financier of the National-Social Movement
The next and more radical wave of protest happened in October. For months, the left-radicals had organized workers in preparation for a general strike at some time in the indefinite future. Trade union officials either dismissed the agitators without informing authorities or simply ignored them, believing that they could use the strikes to press for additional concessions. The leadership itself had been in contact with revolutionary sailors aboard German cruisers and battleships, though they discouraged them from engaging in mutiny unless and until instructed by the party. Yet the sailors had other ideas. Inspired by the events in Russia and fearful of being sent to another massacre with the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, they mutinied at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven on October 16th. Both cities were under the control of the sailors by the end of the day.
The left-radicals did not have knowledge of the network of revolutionary sailors. They also had no immediate plans to seize power, despite the preparations being made for a general strike. But they also believed that one must strike while the iron is hot. Already, workers in Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Dresden had begun to occupy factories; with the assistance of the left-radical network, workers in Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt joined in. Stuttgart and the large cities in Saxony fell almost bloodlessly to the revolutionary workers, while in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Rhineland workers fought with police. In Munich, Karlsruhe, and Mannheim tens of thousands of citizens filled the streets, demanding a “peace without annexations”. Hindenburg and Ludendorff addressed the Reichstag the next day, demanding that emergency powers be granted to the military and the Reichstag dissolved. The panicked bourgeois deputies assented. With dozens of Social Democratic Parliementarians already arrested by the government, the measure easily passed.
Then the hammer fell. Loyal troops stationed in Alsace-Lorraine crushed large protests in Metz before being rushed to the other insurrectionary western cities; they laid siege to the Stuttgart commune and brutally suppressed the mostly middle-class protestors of Munich. In the Rhineland, police and ad hoc military formations managed to secure order within a week. Rosa Luxembourg, Clare Zetkin, and Franz Mehring, who had managed to successfully escape military captivity during the revolutionary chaos, fled to Russia with the assistance of sympathetic sailors; Karl Liebknecht, the key politician behind the plot, was not so lucky. The final holdout were the worker’s strongholds in Saxony. On October 24th, soldiers from the eastern front arrived in Dresden and Leipzig, where they discovered that the demoralized workers had already returned to their factories.
Erich Ludendorff and Paul Von Hindenburg addressed cheering crowds in Potsdam on the 26th, triumphantly declaring that the “bolshevik revolt” had been crushed. They publicly declared that the Reichstag would remain dissolved for the time being, since seditious elements remained dispersed throughout the population. A period of indefinite military rule was necessary to excise Germany of these internal fifth columnists. Although it was curiously absent from most of the main events of the October uprising, the entire board of the German Social Movement was placed under house arrest and the organization dissolved. A new wave of crackdowns began on prominent liberal journalists and newspapers.
The Ludendorff dictatorship had some sense of its own limitations. It did not declare the Social Democratic Party illegal, let alone ban the parties of the progressive bourgeois. Instead, it liberally employed informal house arrest and military intimidation to cow the opposition. The entire executive committee of the Social Democrats received the former treatment. A new leadership election under de facto military control placed the right-wing social nationalists Paul Lensch, Heinrich Cunow, and Konrad Haenisch in control of the party. To the surprise of the government, Ebert and Scheidemann both refused overtures to serve on the executive committee, though the right-wing trade union leader Carl Legien happily obliged.
Why did the October uprising fail? For one, because the objective conditions were not present for revolution. The German laborer had actually seen their working conditions improve through the second half of 1917 as trade unionists employed their leverage on the war planning boards to push up the wages of industrial workers. Secondly, the principal organizers of the uprising, a coalition of left-centrists and left-radicals, disagreed about what it aimed to accomplish. Some hoped to establish a Soviet republic; others simply understood the rising as a mechanism to pressure the government into renewing peace negotiations. Consequently, whereas in some places workers seized power, in others they merely engaged in protest and strike action. Finally, there was little attempt to actually link up the different centers of revolutionary activity, allowing for them to be isolated and crushed piecemeal. These were lessons that would not soon be forgotten.
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