7/2/2023 0 Comments Weimar moment definitionThe Communists might not have been the most powerful element in the revolution in November 1918 that felled the Kaiser, but they were very powerful and in strategic locations, too: Communist battalions tried to seize the institutions of the central government in Berlin and to take power in Munich, the provincial capital of the crucially-placed Bavaria. The authority of the new republic was immediately, violently contested, and would continue to be challenged in repeated rebellions, most by Moscow-run Communists, who saw in the disorder their chance to expand the Revolution that had begun in Russia: 1919-25), wanted to abolish the monarchy, but felt that without this step Germany would collapse into socialist revolution and/or civil war. Not even the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader who would be the first President of what became the “Weimar Republic”, Friedrich Ebert (r. The Kaiser’s abdication was announced without informing him on 9 November 1918 and a German Republic proclaimed. Unfortunately, the Allied decision was, even on its own terms, exactly the wrong one, contributing to the political instability in Germany after the war that gave the Communists room to operate. The Soviet menace would shape German politics in important ways ever-afterwards. Meanwhile, Lenin was offering-however quixotically-to send a million Russian troops and unlimited aid to support revolution in Germany. Bulgaria had been forced out of the war partly by Bolshevik agitation within the military in September 1918, and its King overthrown by revolutionaries soon afterwards. It was hardly an unreasonable fear: Russia had been knocked out of the war by the Bolshevik coup in November 1917 and the leader of the nascent Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, had begun trying to export Revolution immediately. The spectre of the Communists-who had tried to take over the government in Berlin as the monarchy fell-convinced the Allies to stop short of pressing into Germany itself and demanding unconditional surrender: “it was important to get Germany on her legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism”, then-Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill told the British Cabinet the day before the Armistice. The British and French turned back the offensive and shattered the German army in the field, while the German home front collapsed.Ī sailors’ mutiny in Kiel that certainly involved Communists, though would later be falsely cast by the German Right as a Communists-only event, ignited a general uprising at the beginning of November 1918: within a week the Kaiser was gone. With American troops arriving in vast numbers, the outcome was not in doubt, though it never came to the U.S. Even the initial success of the 1918 Spring Offensive redounded against them: the German soldiers who broke through the lines were thoroughly demoralised by seeing how well-stocked Allied trenches were. The Germans made a reckless gamble: mauled by the British and French on the Somme, and nearly defeated when this combined with the Russian Brusilov Offensive, Berlin was determined never to fight such a direct land confrontation again, switching instead in early 1917 to unrestricted submarine warfare (and political subversion ), knowing full well this would bring the United States into the war, but betting they could starve Britain and France into submission before the U.S. The German High Command had won the First World War in the East in early 1918, formalised in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, but rather than look for a settlement that traded away the occupation in the West for the holdings in the former Russian Empire, the de facto rulers of Germany, Chief of the General Staff Paul von Hindenburg and his nominal subordinate Erich Ludendorff, refused to move from the maximalist ambitions that had led Germany to starting the war, and conducting it with such atrocious means.
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