Free The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor Page B

ranks.
    11.
Each man to be permitted complete personal freedom between one period of duty and the next.
    12.
Officers who declared themselves in agreement with the measures of the now established soldiers’ council to be welcomed into their midst. All the others to quit the service immediately without claim of compensation.
    13.
Every member of the soldiers’ council to be freed of all duties.
    14.
All measures arrived at in future to be implemented only with the agreement of the soldiers’ council.
     
    The German revolution had begun.
     
    By 9 November, the Kiel mutiny had spread to most of the country.
    The sailors had set off for other parts of Germany, on the way successfully calling on local people to set up their own revolutionary councils. In Munich on 7 November, the revolutionary movement toppled its first crowned head. Before a crowd of some 60,000 assembled on the Theresienwiese, site of the modern Oktoberfest, the left socialist leader Kurt Eisner demanded an end to the war, an eight-hour working day and improved unemployment benefits, the creation of soldiers’ and workers’ councils, and the abdication of Ludwig III of Bavaria. The seventy-two-year-old king quickly disappeared into exile.
    There was scarcely a town or city of any size in Germany, during these dramatic and, to many, exhilarating few days in November, where the old authorities had not been pushed aside and the local government assumed by revolutionary councils. The exception, curiously enough, was Berlin. All the same, on 8 November, the breakaway Independent Socialists (USPD), who had split from the main party because of its leadership’s continuing support for the war, had declared a general strike and day of demonstrations for Saturday 9 November. It was a direct challenge to Max of Baden’s government, which had banned all public gatherings.
    Calls for the abolition of the monarchy were becoming louder by the hour. Prince Max, nervous that the capital would dissolve into what he viewed as anarchy, decided to take action. He summoned from its base south of Leipzig the 4th Rifle Regiment, which had fought against the Bolsheviks in German-occupied Russia and was seen as a particularly loyal pillar of the Prussian royal house. These reinforcements arrived on 8 November. Early on the following morning, 9 November, the regiment’s officers began to distribute grenades to their men, with the obvious intent of suppressing any demonstrations by force. But the riflemen, or at least the lower ranks, were not quite the obedient tools of the palace the Chancellor had believed them to be. Few, it turned out, were prepared to massacre their fellow Germans for the sake of . . . what?
    To the astonishment of their superiors, the men of the 4th Rifles insisted on engaging them in discussion. Not satisfied with the officers’ answers, they voted to send a delegation to the Social Democratic Party requesting political clarity. They were duly addressed by the Social Democratic Reichstag Deputy and party central committee member Otto Wels, who in an eloquent speech appealed to them to take the side of the people and of his party. His appeal succeeded. So convinced were the riflemen that they voted to send an armed unit to the offices of Vorwärts (‘Forward’), the Social Democratic Party’s official newspaper, charged with protecting its production.
    When it became clear to Prince Max that even such elite troops could not be relied on, he realised that the game was up. Having secured the Kaiser’s somewhat ambiguous assent to abdication over the telephone line from Spa, the Chancellor did not wait for a formal written announcement before releasing the news to the press.
    Then, at around midday, Friedrich Ebert appeared in the Reich Chancellery with a delegation of Social Democrats. Prince Max admitted that without any loyal troops at his disposal he could no longer control the masses. The government should be in the hands of a man of the people.