Introduction

The November revolution of 1918 was the culmination of a series of struggles protesting against the political and social conditions brought about by the world's first war of industrialised mass slaughter. Strikes, mass desertions and mutinies led to the collapse of the discredited Wilhelmine political system and thwarted the plans of generals, admirals and politicians to prolong the war. Thus the Weimar Republic was born during a revolution to end the First World War.

The main feature of the foundation of the Republic was the disintegration of the entire armed services, together with the powers of the officer corps, the army High Command and its civil service offshoots, that formed the central pillars of the authority of the state. In this chapter, the servicemen's revolts and the interventions by the social democrats are examined from contemporary reports, proclamations and press accounts and from subsequent memoirs and debates. They reveal the widespread advance of the revolution in the army when the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD) and the left-wing Independent Socialist Party (USPD) took office, initially with the general approval of the revolutionaries. After the removal of the Kaiser, however, the social democrats maintained the structures of the central state that the revolutionaries sought to abolish.